SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

handout eight

R. Bontila

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Soldiers Pay (1925); Mosquitoes (1927); Sartoris (1929, the halfmythicalYoknapatwapha Country appeared); The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); Sanctuary (1931); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); The Hamlet (1940); Go Down, Moses (1942, short stories revolving around the novella The Bear); Requiem for a Nun (1951); The Town (1957); The Mansion (1959); received the Nobel in 1950. Key words/ideas and useful quotes: A regionalist aiming at universal, eternal verities. A modernist writing in the modes of: - pure phenomenological pathos as to reveal a characters immediacy of perception and response to the world of desire, rage and grief. - pure irony, when playing with and against literary and moral conventions. - conjunctive novel> re-cycling the same fictional characters (the Compsons; the Sartorises old aristocratic families of the South; the Snopes- landless, newly enriched families, beneficiaries from the changes in the social hierarchy), same events in many novels. His inimitable technique: use of stream-of-consciousness; interior monologue; the cinematic montage; the free, lyric punning language; fractured consciousness; jagged point of view; reiteration of ideas; reduction and abandonment of punctuation; strange associative links allowing theme and image multiplication; time as memory and subjective reaction to real happenings > force and vitality of experience; function of oral tradition, i.e. the mouth-tomouth tales (e.g. Absalom, Absalom!- an exercise in oral history); sublimating the actual into the apocryphal > attuning himself to the rhythms of experience. Thematics: fragmentation; confusion; disintegration of an ethos, a culture: the South. Shaping influences: Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Dark Laughter (1925); Dos Passoss USA trilogy (The 42nd Parallel; 1919; The Big Money); the non-Emersonian tradition (Hawthorne, Melville); naturalistic novel > tragic fate subsequent to heredity and environment; Marx; Freud; Dostoevski; Joyces Ulysses (1922). The Sound and the Fury (1929) Narrative relating the disintegration of a family, a culture: a comment on the state of modern mans emotional sterility contrasted to the simple, primitive, deeply felt faith within a profoundly ethical community. The most splendid failure (Faulkner called it) born out of the shock of the transition of a traditional, ritualistic, agrarian society into a modern industrial order, secular and materialistic, where the Compsons, McCaslins and Sartorises are replaced by moneygrubbing Snopeses. Title from Shakespeares Macbeth:
Out, out, brief candle! Lifes 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. (Act V, Sc.5)

Plot, almost inexistent (tribulations of the last generation of the Compson family over more than a 20-year period) Characters, strongly, dramatically constructed (mainly the 4 children: Quentin, Candace/Caddy, Benjamin/Benjy, Jason IV; and Dilsey, the Negro servant). Quentin (Stephen Daedaluss double) is alienated from, yet feels dramatically attached to his homeland; is preoccupied by time and historys meaning; is

SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

handout eight

R. Bontila

haunted by guilt (to have committed imaginary incest with his sister); commits suicide, unable to defeat time and overcome nature embodied in Caddy. NB In his refusal of life and motion Quentin reflects the attitudes of Southern aristocracy after military defeat in the Civil War. Candace/Caddy >an Earth Goddess, always associated with images of nature (trees, water, fire, twilight and honeysuckle) stands for the inevitable natural fallen state, You, Satan (Sound and the Fury) Dilsey cries when noticing Caddy in the tree, peeping through the window; embodiment of the old verities and truths of the heart she is all love, pity, compassion and sacrifice, she will deliberately turn against herself by growing promiscuous, a near equivalent of suicide. Benjamin/Benjy tragically enacts Quentin Compsons yearn for a state of innocence undisturbed by the complexities of life; a childlike existence escaping the menace of time and adult sexuality; he too, in his idiocy and sterility, becomes symbolic of the final decay of the Compson dynasty. Jason is a memorable example of a live character (shown in action, thinking, feeling, and suffering); assumes all the bad traits of the Snopes but he has humour and a great capacity for self-pity. Caroline Compson > a satire of the long-suffering Southern gentlewoman: her inability to provide her children with the love and understanding they need turns her into the centre of evil pervading the Compson waste land. Mr. Compson is an enigmatic, weak, ineffective law-giving father, undercutting all established traditions by his nihilism: the philosophy of a defeated man. His fate anticipates Quentin Compsons tragic fate. Dilsey is very authentic too (minute physical portrait graphical and verbal); acts both as an individual voice and the tragic chorus of the piece, due to her overwhelming tragic awareness; epitomizes the simple verities of human life (courage, generosity, gentleness, honesty), but unlike Caddy, who is destroyed, Dilsey endures In the first 2 sections (Benjy April 7, 1928; Quentin June 2, 1910), the unconventional technique becomes action, meaning, revelation (e.g. Faulkner capitalizes on the timeless mind of Benjys idiocy so as to evoke past events with vivid freshness while giving a powerful sense of the passing, as well as the pathos, of time; and on Quentins super-sophisticated, obsessive mind, returning, time and again, on a few images: meaning of time; the marriage of Caddy; preoccupation with death; his approaching suicide; incest). There is a happy fusion between American colour (significance, as a literary idea, of Yoknapatwapha country) and European Genius (Joyces Ulysses). The 4 Sections (Benjy; Quentin; Jason; Dilsey) are 4 ways of perceiving experience and are arranged so as to dramatize the passage from a private to a public world (Olga Vickery, Worlds in Counterpoint. Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Sound and the Fury. 1968). W. Faulkner declared in an interview in 1950:
With the Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes I wrote for the sake of writing, because it was fun. Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mile of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own.