These fragmented memories are told in nonlinear fashion that can make reading the novel incredibly difficult. Carolyn Porter asserts that “The opening section of the novel, in fact, is not a story at all, but a pastiche of moments as experienced by Benjy at various points in his life. Instead, a dense array of images is established, centered around Benjy’s anguished loss of his sister.” (p. 40). Porter’s use of the word “dense” to describe Benjy’s portion of the novel is accurate considering he is a character that can’t express his emotions verbally but rather we can understand that Benjy’s form of communication is his “howling” that is made known through the actions of the other characters he surrounds himself with (i.e. Dilsey, Caddy, T.P., Luster, etc.). Due to his inability to communicate verbally, Benjy’s account of his own memories provides the reader with a sense of mystery and confusion. The fragments of Benjy’s memories and his past are scattered and triggered by events that happen to him in the present. For example, when Luster notes that Benjy is caught on the nail, this triggered a memory of Caddy helping him get uncaught from that very same nail (TSAF, 4). It is evident that for Benjy many of his current events are often times in conjunction with his past memories of Caddy.

This method of writing allows the reader to concentrate on what is being revealed or not revealed through Benjy’s account and it forces the reader to try to piece the story or narrative together. The narrative is unconventional and, “…Faulkner teaches us a new way of reading narrative, and this creates a new kind of narrative. Benjy’s section is not, strictly speaking, a stream of consciousness because Benjy’s mind does not move like a stream, at least not a smooth running one. It moves in jerks, stalls at certain sights and sounds, resumes speed in response to others.” (Porter, 42).  I would agree with what Porter asserts in her article that Benjy’s account is not a “stream” of consciousness, it’s not smooth or linear. It’s interrupted and jagged and I think this type of narrative on consciousness is more reliable or truthful in terms of the way we think and assess our surroundings. Our thoughts are not linear or consistent and they are evoked through certain triggers and thoughts often become tangled with our present circumstances. Benjy’s “stream of consciousness” is a conundrum, one that we need to decipher and figure out, lest we miss something important.

Although Benjy’s story is wrapped around  his love and emotional connection to Caddy, we can perhaps take Benjy’s narrative as a way for him to process the loss; the loss of Caddy’s physical body and most importantly, her scent. It is assumed that Benjy doesn’t understand that Caddy is no longer around but I think that his narrative would argue differently. Like any loss we have to mourn, and often times when we are encountered with the loss of loved one (death or just the absence of that person being around all the time) we are flooded with memories. Memories of that person can be triggered by what we as individuals deal with in the present. Benjy, I believe, is trying to make sense of Caddy’s absence )even though other characters in the book would assume Benjy has no idea) and this is told and retold through his fragmented memories of her. Porter comments on how the story’s present moment is already determined through the act of events that already took place. She states, “The novel’s present consists, in other words, of events conceived not as acts with as-yet-undetermined future consequences, but as consequences already determined by as-yet-unrevealed previous events.” (43). This statement sounds like a paradox but what Porter is trying to emphasize is the idea that the narrative is told in a backwards sequence. We are experiencing the present moment as it appears to the characters but we are also given the gift of experiencing their past simultaneously  while trying to understand their present circumstances.

The frustrations I experienced reading Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury brought me back to a critical essay that addresses this struggle in modernist texts. In his essay “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty” Richard Poirier explores the relationship between reading and writing in American Modernism. Poirier determines that modernist texts “make grim readers of us all” making the reader feel “inadequate to them” yet inducing the reader “to tidy things up, to locate principles of order and structure beneath a fragmentary surface” that frustrates that urge (108). The onslaught of impressions communicated to the reader by a mentally impaired mute and the need to create the missing context drive the story.

Feeling as fenced in as Benjy and as stuck as Quentin, I attempted to make sense of the disjointed moments Faulkner gives us through Benjy’s heightened senses and Quentin’s tortured consciousness. The story of the breakdown of the Compson family is in Benjy’s impressions and Quentin’s obsessions, but the reader must act as her own interpreter. Benjy’s section is especially challenging, though the printed text does help with some visual clues by italicizing some sections as time moves to the past. Constructing a rough timeline becomes possible by rearranging the events that take place with each of the caretakers of Benjy (first Versh, then T.P., then Luster) and determining the physical state of the Compson house and grounds: has Benjy’s pasture become the golf course (where is Benjy taken to keep him calm and quiet), are there animals in the barn or is it in disrepair, etc. Carolyn Porter refers to this effort of composition as playing “a kind of game, a poker game” where the reader makes bets (William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies 41). Porter finds the reader’s guessing game central to Faulkner’s strategy as he “teaches us a new way of reading narrative, and thus creates a new kind of narrative” (42). This type of reading demands an intense focus and multiple readings layering in connections.

Faulkner said in his unpublished “Introduction” to TSAF that writing the Benjy section taught him how to write and how to read (231). This breakthrough for Faulkner relates to Poirier’s argument that through difficulty, modernism tries to “reinvoke the connections, severed more or less by the growth of mass culture, between the artist and the audience” (Poirier 105). Faulkner requires the reader to create the story with him through the multiple tellings and the reader must take in the symbols, the language, the breaks in grammar, and emotions of the moments. The poker game becomes a creative effort focused on meaning-making without seeing all the cards. Faulkner biographer Jay Parini concludes his chapter on the accomplishments of TSAF and Faulkner’s genius in knowing that “fiction that is worth anything necessarily fails to embody what cannot be embodied, to tell a story and reflect a consciousness that cannot be told or reflected except partially, by hints and guesses” (One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner 115). Faulkner tells a modern story by leaving out parts that the reader must create.

Poirier concludes that difficult modernist texts “empower us by the strenuous demands made upon our capacities for attention, to make our own commentaries” giving us a “unique schooling in the workings of structures, techniques, codes, stylizations that shape the structured world around us” so that we develop a “habit of analysis” and learn to face the failure of these forms to encompass the human experience in modernity (114). Can TSAF help us understand the loss at the center?

Work Cited

Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

Poirier, Richard. “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty.” Critical Essays on American Modernism. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992. 104-114.

Porter, Carolyn. William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Throughout Benjy’s perspective in TSAF I found myself on a ride. A ride where time was not linear, but more like a patchwork of particular moments/memories. While reading Benjy’s chapter I thought about Woolf and her use of stream of consciousness. Particularly with To The Lighthouse and that famous dinner scene. I remember I was floating rather easily down this stream and was in awe of how Woolf crafted her sentences and was able to move through multiple bodies. Faulkner on the other hand…  I’m struggling to keep up and to know where I am, and it feels jarring, aggressive (like Benjy’s moaning), and confusing.

Benjy is struggling as well.

Benjy is an observer in this chapter. He is taking in what other people are doing and saying, but he can’t really interact with the other characters. Since he is just an observer, a fly on the wall he would likely be a reliable narrator. Faulkner flips this and makes the person who would most likely be a reliable narrator, incredibly unreliable. Benjy is stuck in his own stream of consciousness. Just as the reader is confused as to what is going on, Benjy is also supremely confused. Faulkner’s use of a character who has severe disabilities challenges the idea of stream of consciousness and what it means for someone who doesn’t have complete control of their mind.

Benjy tries to stay afloat in the chapter. “Caddy smelled like trees” seems to be the reader’s totem (IE: Leonardo Dicaprio’s top in Inception). It shows up plenty of times and is there to ground the reader and remind them that this is a series of memories.  This statement at first can be read right before Benjy gets jolted into a new memory. On the other hand, on pg 44, Benjy says this line multiple times and is thwarted between multiple memories and incidents. The passage starts with “I listened to the water. I couldn’t hear the water,” a possible inception-y type of allusion to the stream of consciousness or to the river of time. “Caddy smelled like trees” is used numerous times, and Benjy jumps between multiple time periods with Caddy. I would argue that this is his way of falling into memory after memory with no clear way of getting out. He continually repeats it, but he seems to fall into reliving multiple memories. While on the other hand the reader is noticing what is happening, and paying attention to details.

Overall, I’m not sure if Caddy is an anchor or a totem, just as I am not sure about the events I have read in the Benjy chapter. I feel as if I am riding the waves with Benjy and trying to grasp anything to stay afloat and navigate the narrative to a linear timeline. In the end, it seems as if Benjy understood that time is a Western concept.

Time plays a major role throughout this novel from the narrators’ constant jumping though time to the symbolism of Quentin’s watch. While reading the first half of this book I found the jumping through time to be incredibly confusing and wondered how in the world I was even going to get through this reading let alone write about it. I was quite relieved to find that Quentin’s chapter was not as sporadic as Benji’s and I could actually understand what was going on (I think). Moving forward I hope the rest of the book is easier to read but I won’t get my hopes up on that.

One of the more interesting things I found about Quentin’s chapter is his obsession with time and the symbolism of the watch in the beginning of the chapter. By opening up Quentin’s chapter with the image of the watch Faulkner is introducing us to a fundamental part of Quentin’s character. He is obsessed with time, in more ways than one.

The watch is given to him by his father, who has very interesting things to say about the watch as he is giving it to his son. He says, “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire;” –What an odd thing to say when passing on a family heirloom, to tell your son essentially that the watch is where hope and desire goes to rest eternally– He then continues and says, “it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s” (76). After having to look up what “recucto absurdum” is I can see how his father views Quentin. His father is worried about his obsession with time and trying to control life when life is a random mess of absurdities that changes for no one. He furthers this idea in his next line when he says, “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (76).

Despite his fathers wishes for Quentin to not be so obsessed with trying to control time, Quentin becomes a ticking time bomb trying to maintain his family legacy that only he seems to be concerned with. In his description of the sound of the watch I was reminded of the ticking of the heart in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Quentin tries to look away from the watch to stop thinking about it (out of site out of mind) but that only makes him think about it more. He talks about the shadows of the sash and the ticking in a way that it seems that the watch is haunting him. He drives himself to the point that he tries to destroy the watch.

He tells us that he “tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray” (80). The entire thing is pretty violet. First he breaks the glass and when that is not enough he pulls out the hands and puts all of it in an ashtray. I think there is definitely some significance of the ashtray. The ash is yet another connection to death presented in these first few pages. Perhaps foreshadowing Quentin’s own death?

Having finished TSAF, I found myself thinking about Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932), which to today’s readers feels most like a parody of Wuthering Heights but was, at the time, more directly directed at a series of early twentieth-century rural novels by D.H. Lawrence and other less prominent writers—angst-ridden, melodramatic pastorals full of miserable, hapless, and sometimes pseudo-romantic characters, set amid overblown descriptions of rural landscapes. In response, an impatient Gibbons palpably wonders why is everyone so miserable; why don’t they help themselves, and wrote a parody in which the brisk Flora Poste walks in with a modern, practical sensibility and takes control, transforming Cold Comfort Farm. For the hapless Adam Lambsbreath, who spends hours ineffectually “cletterin’ the dishes” with a twig, she buys a scrub brush. In an example only slightly more immediately relevant to TSAF, to the housebound hypochondriac matriarch, Aunt Ada Doom, Flora takes issues of Vogue, remakes her, and sends her, dressed in stylish clothes and with a new haircut, off on a European tour. If only someone would do the same for Mrs. Compson.

I understand the whole literary thing – TSAF as a sort of metaphor for the entire history of the south, from its prehistory through slavery through Faulkner’s present; its geography, natural history, and ecology; how it wraps all this up in a sort of stream-of-consciousness narrative that, in the way it invites the reader to piece together a traumatic history as experienced by individuals, mirrors the larger traumas of history and the impossibilities of making sense of them, etc.

But isn’t there a bit of wallowing going on here? Isn’t there some pleasure being taken in all this misery? What’s the ethics of that? Doesn’t it make this sort of wallowing seem vaguely romantic—or, if that’s too much, at some level inevitable? Further, the stream of consciousness approach in the first part—along with the misery—gives the whole thing a frisson of realism, which rather compounds the question of the misery and its ethics. Does portraying this whole world as inevitable imply an acceptance of the way things are, even a sort of permission…? (My implication: yes.)

(by Roz Chast)

To flip this on its side – is there an alternative presented? What does goodness look like in these passages? The last passage – most commonly described as the Dilsey section – apparently cannot really conceive of what that sort of goodness would look like; it’s neither first person, like the first three, nor does it particularly follow Dilsey’s consciousness in any close way. Is Dilsey good? Certainly her care and attention to Ben suggest characteristics of goodness – she advocates for him attending church (290), for example. She is also patient with Mrs. Compson and does some of Luster’s work of building a fire after he had a late night at a show (268). But there is no inner monologue, no internal dialogue or experience for her, as there was (to varying degrees) with Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Madness, misery, and meanness can apparently be documented and closely examined in Faulkner’s world, but whatever Dilsey is – Patient? Good? Long-suffering? Tolerant? Supportive? There is no sense of depth or richness to this. Both Dilsey and her motivations remain a mystery, inaccessible to the reader. One cannot believe that after having written a stream-of-consciousness experience from the perspective of a man who is severely intellectually disabled, Faulkner balked at writing from the point of view of a black woman and servant. But there is nothing here that, as far as I can tell, seeks to understand Dilsey or her potential goodness and how this produces her experience; goodness is inexplicable, whereas misery apparently takes many forms and is worthy of extensive examination. (Of course there’s something to interpret and examine there – there usually is – but it’s not on the same level.)

And it’s not like Faulkner did something sooo unprecedented with the whole novel that he gets a pass: the character of Mrs. Compson is, judging by her reappearance in Cold Comfort, something of a cliché. So while it is most recognized as a stream-of-consciousness novel, TSAF also pulls from a particular genre of rural melodrama, which has apparently largely been confined to the dustbin of literary history. That no one reads those novels probably helps Faulkner’s reputation, all things considered; he appears to be in a league entirely of his own. But he was not inventing from scratch.

Of Cold Comfort, Gibbons noted that “I think, quite without meaning to, I presented a kind of weapon to people, against melodrama and the over-emphasising of disorder and disharmony, and especially the people who rather enjoy it. I think the book could teach other people not to take them seriously, and to avoid being hurt by them.” What’s the hurt in TSAF? I’d suggest that it is the naturalization if not romanticization of a certain kind of misery and abuse, which Gibbons recognized (and experienced as a child). And I think that it’s easy to dismiss this sort of complaint as being soft-hearted, or missing the point, or lacking in rigor. But I think that the ways in which Faulkner is hailed as a genius are connected to a highly masculine set of literary values – one in which misery implies distinction, everything is sort of solitary, and there is no possibility of redemption through things like empathy or goodness. (Small wonder that he didn’t attempt a more profound understanding of Dilsey.) And this is something that Gibbons was quite right to criticize.

Unlike the first section of the novel, the influence of outside beverages was not a requisite in my finishing the novel; in fact, just yesterday, I powered through 230 pages!

Still, as I look at the back of the book and read “Faulkner’s masterpiece” in the description, I have to reflect on why this is the emblematic Faulkner text.

Although this is only the first text of his I have read, TSAF is replete with the definitive features that make it a real stand out title. First and foremost, the vignette structure of the novel complements the dysfunctional nature of the Compson family beautifully.

Part I is told through the eyes of a “newborn” and acquaints readers with their surroundings in the same hazy way that said newborns experience the world. Part II proves equally fragmented and challenging to read due to Quentin (Sr.) ‘s chaotic memories and thoughts preserved in italics but at least gives us a character with a remarkable backstory to latch onto. Part III puts us behind the lens of our first comparatively sane character, Jason, but reveals much about how his circumstances lead him to become one of the most detached personalities in the novel. Finally, Part IV takes a more omniscient approach switching back and forth between Jason, Dilsey and Luster to provide a world view of Jason’s defamation that he worked so  hard to prevent in relation to the Compson family and society around them.

What TSAF accomplishes in adopting this format is that it allows readers to perceive “the sound and fury” that mentally dysfunctional and incompetent individuals experience from within and around the minds of individuals with varying degrees of ineptitude and then compare them to other members of society such as the household servants or Jason’s coworkers.

While progressing through the novel, my reading provided me a commentary on how socio-economic-religious conformity creates false expectations for success. For instance, the mother is a central figure in sustaining pure Christian ethics in the Compson family unit by booting the incestuous Caddy from the family and preventing Quentin (Jr.) from learning of her existence. This, however, only creates more problems because Quentin resists the authoritarian nature of her substitute father Jason while Jason is afraid that Quentin’s scandalous nature will ruin his standing in the community whereas his own incompetence as a substitute father and obsession with money is what actually tarnishes said standing.

Conceptually, TSAF boasts a very engaging plot line and character roster both of which speak to many themes about the human condition mentally and socially while the challenging nature of the writing causes readers to retrain their brain to read the text. The difficulty is a testament to readers’ aptitude and flexibility as well as the daunting nature of the subject, insanity and irregularity and the impetuses behind them.

On these fronts, I would argue that Faulkner has achieved mastery and although the road to getting there is slow and daunting and seems to be filled with much filler, I can’t say I would have the author write it any other way (although I think it would be a neat project to read the text back in a different order). The sheer potential and invitation for multiple readthroughs definitely constitutes the artistic nature of the book and while I am hesitant to call it “Faulkner’s masterpiece,” — especially so early into his literary works — I gladly reminisce on the fact that I was able to endure “the sound and fury” of The Sound and the Fury and recommend other aspiring literati do the same.

Throughout part 2 of TSAF, Quentin obsesses over time, trying to make sense of his father’s words, “Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85). His first interpretation is literal and he breaks his watch – only to find that he is unable to physically stop time from ticking forward. Interestingly, Quentin doesn’t need a watch to tell the time as he has learned to tell time by the sun, looking at where shadows fall on the ground. When he tries to ignore the time, he literally turns away from the window because based on where the shadow of the sash falls he would unwittingly know the time. He has almost completely internalized it and marks every moment by it. In a way, Quentin feels time, he has become time. Once we realize where his day will lead, his father’s words take on new meaning. Does time represent Quentin, and the clock is life beating him down? Is this why he is planning suicide? So that he (time) may “come to life” when the clock (life) stops?

A moment at the jeweler’s shop provides Quentin with a new revelation “There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one another. I could hear mine, ticking away inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could tell nothing if anyone could” (85).  All along, Quentin has been thinking that time is universal, but really time is individual. Every person has his own clock/life and they are rarely in sync. Instead, people just make noise over each other, contradicting each other. The removal of the watch hands foreshadows Quentin’s ceasing his physical life. Will this stop the gears from clicking forward? Is Quentin sill a force, even if he cannot be seen or heard?

I think that Quentin is questioning this, as is evidenced by his contradiction of sound and silence. Silence, to Quentin, is as much of a force as sound is. “’Do you like fishing better than swimming?’ I said. The sound of the bees diminished, sustained yet, as though instead of sinking into silence, silence merely increased between us, as water rises” (123).  And again, “When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking” (125). Silence becomes something that moves, it rises and expands. Silence takes up space. How should we interpret this?

Sound, being actual frequency waves, is easier to picture as a tangible force. Quentin feels sound as an active force many times, such as “…his voice hammering back and forth” (124). But silence hits harder. “The bird whistled again, invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife” (136). This violence of silence persists as a motif throughout Quentin’s chapter. Faulkner develops this through his stream of consciousness writing. There is no such thing as pure silence for Faulkner’s characters and his reader. Silence is a barrage of memories and fantasy; random words and remembered phrases. There is fury in silence.

This helps us make the connection between Faulkner’s title and its inspiration, a speech by Macbeth.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
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, Act 5, Sc 5)

Quentin knows that you cannot stop the creeping “to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” as time will always continue to click ahead. But there is a “recorded time.” In modern times, this is marked by watches and clocks and the sun. If we read “recorded time” as time in a person’s life, then each person would have a “last syllable” – a last living moment. Quentin is slowly marching toward this. He literally walks on his shadow throughout the passage. “The chimes began as I stepped on my shadow” (96). And he is haunted by all of his yesterdays, those thoughts that fill the spaces left by absent sound – that silent fury.

I am interested in the visible fragmented memory forms in Quentin’s section, “June Second, 1910” of William Faulkner’s TSAF and the way they weave along simultaneously with the present. As I parsed through the voices and time-frame distinctions early on in this chapter, (of course somewhat less extreme than the previous chapter, albeit no less complex) I became fascinated with the formal elements that signaled change in a way that was somehow as fragmented as it was seamless.

Frequently throughout chapter two, we encounter fragmented italicized bursts of memory and conversation that are, often but not always, entrenched deeply with stress, anxiety, and other strong emotions. The italics vary in their placement in relation to the non-italicized text: they appear abruptly in the middle of sentences, “I carried the books into the sitting-room and stacked them on the table, the ones I had brought from home and the ones  Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known but he ones he has not returned  and locked the trunk and addressed it” (81), and they appear as stand alone paragraphs, “She didn’t mean that that’s the way women do things it’s because she loves Caddy” (96). Both of these examples can generally be characterized as coherent thoughts, with the first italicized passage going so far as to directly relate to the non-italic text is is encompassed by. Of course, however, the coherence of the italicized bursts vary, sometimes even seeming to be discontinuous with surrounding italicized text: “Seen the doctor yet     have you seen     Caddy [new line] I dont have to I cant ask now afterward it will be all right it wont matter” (128). The exaggerated spacing in the first part of this passage suggests perhaps a memory detail containing heightened trauma, which could explain its inconsistency with the following italics. A similar depiction of this kind of heightened-trauma-displayed-via-italics is when we encounter sprinklings of repeated phrases, such as “Sold the pasture” two times at the start and end of a paragraph on page 124, and “He smell hit.” right after one another on page 90 (which also contains a rare instance of punctuation within the italics). The italic fragments offer a visible indication of an alteration in narrative; we know we are usually in the past when we see them, and that they are detailing a thought, dialogue, or mental anxiety that deviates from the rest of the text. Although the italics are reliable signposts in this way, the chapter does not rely exclusively on them as indicators of strife or moments from the past. There are instances of non-italicized fragments that appear within and alongside the narrative that are representative of strife, such as the repetition of “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames.” (80), for example. In Carolyn Porter’s description of each character’s central characteristics in her text William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies, she notes that “despair and confusion descend on us with Quentin” (48), encapsulating this feverish back and forth within the chapter, and perhaps giving reason behind its frenzied state, in addition to the fact that he is already in a heightened state due to it being the day of his suicide.

Although not finite in its employment, the use of italics to signify a change in chapter two of TSAF is a formal tool that is organizational and playful. I found myself frequently giving in to the temptation of reading only the sentence strands in italics within a paragraph, and then beginning the paragraph again to read the subsequent non-italic strands for its separate content. While this probably takes away from some of its intended disorientation, I enjoyed engaging in the separate-but-simultaneous structure form that Faulkner crafted via visible word emphasis that seems to be (usually) reliable and playful.