2 Faulkner’s First Great Novel: Anguish in the Genes
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s first great fiction and one of his and the century’s great novels.5 The work is testimony to how early a genius locates and works from within his own true center and inwardness. The title, in its derivation from Macbeth, relates the fiction to what one of my students, in a moment of true vatic discourse, described as the true tragic nexus of the universe. The irritating, futile buzzing of the Mosquitoes now becomes The Sound and the Fury of the idiot’s tale, and the irony of Soldiers’ Pay is universalized, and extended. Even the coherent and decorous realms of art (sculpture and painting) from which Faulkner drew the earlier titles of his two books of poems are negated in the title passage from Macbeth because the very nature and function of art (order, decorum, pleasure, instruction) are inverted, canceled by the progressive reduction of “life” to art and art to a tale told by an idiot and to the characteristics of that tale as being full of sound and fury, “signifying nothing”—that is, not a zero sign, but the exact opposite, a form with no meaning at all, a total incoherence, an absolute emptiness or absence of articulate meaning. This progressive reduction of life to art to madness to inarticulate cries of suffering and helpless furious outrage, to the failure to find articulate meaning (coherence, cause-and-effect relationships; just rewards; fairness) in anything is one of the—not the only—characteristic movements of imagination in Faulkner’s fictions through the 1930s.
This title has many applications to the specific fiction which it essentializes, none more terribly moving and resonant than the magnificent closing image: Luster, to show off, has taken Ben the wrong way around the square on their way to visit the graveyard and in so doing has violated one of the few fundamental, inviolate principles of order (meaning, coherence) in Ben’s life:
For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster’s eyes back-rolling for a white instant. “Gret God,” he said, “Hush! Hush! Gret God!” (SF 400)
One wants to quote and meditate at length on this whole scene. So much of Faulkner is in it. “Ben’s voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo” howls through most of it; even after Jason comes out and turns the surrey around, “Ben’s hoarse agony” roars on. Finally, with the surrey going around to the right,
Ben hushed. [. . .] The broken flower dropped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place. (SF, 401)
But it would never be possible to comment adequately on this composite closing image because it concentrates so much of the fiction and Faulkner in its movements, details, and characters, particularly the figure of Ben. Like any powerful symbolic figure, Ben transcends himself and functions as a representative figure to link reader, writer, and fictional being. Like all great fictional characters, Ben mediates between realms to join reader and writer in a common human action—here, helpless suffering, untainted by irony, expressible only as agonized, horrified, perplexed, inarticulate, undifferentiated sound. The cause of Ben’s suffering is clear enough; as a character, he is reduced to a point where, like a child, he is able to function only within a very limited range of possibilities. He has not gone insane, but is limited forever to the nearly helpless condition of the small child for whom the world, as William James said, is a great buzz. His condition is what drives the reader crazy with grief. Always at the limit of his perceptual resources, he collapses into the “horror; shock; agony eyeless, and tongueless,” and bellows hoarse roaring agony whenever his minimal structures of value are altered in any way. There is the alteration outside the self in the basic structures of perceived reality; then there is what Faulkner describes so beautifully as the brief but “utter hiatus,” as the orderly, expected flow of perceptions is broken, interrupted. The sudden effects of this disorientation of the self are described above; anybody can recognize these effects and substitute his own specific cause or causes. Then the expression of the interior reaction; in Ben’s case, he has no other way to express the sudden intrusion into and negative transformation of his private interior space into disorder and counter-flow—as if inside there everything was suddenly, violently and uncontrollably set going the wrong way. It is a withdrawal, a sudden drop into the self and an inability on the part of the self to either shut off, accept, or accommodate itself to this altered flow. So Ben bellows because it is the only way he has of dealing with this situation and he keeps on roaring and bellowing until the perceptions begin again to flow into him in the expected, properly ordered way. Then he “hushed.” For the time being. But he will hear the golfers shouting, “caddy, caddy” and that will start him up again; or Luster will tease him, whispering “Caddy! Beller now. Caddy! Caddy! Caddy!” and Ben will bellow again, “[. . .] abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun.” Dilsey will comfort him, taking him to the bed, holding him, rocking him back and forth like a baby, wiping his drooling mouth with the hem of her skirt. Luster will bring Caddy’s yellowed slipper. Ben will hush again, “for a while” (SF 394-95).
I do not mean to exploit this situation for cheap effects. Ben bellows throughout this fiction, is hushed and hushes periodically. The bellowing and hushing give one the rhythm of the fiction and one of the recurrent patterns in Faulkner’s fictions for years to come. Within this same fiction, there are other characters who howl and bellow, but much more articulately and elaborately; Quentin, for example, who is Ben raised to a much higher level of human possibilities and who howls and roars at his sister’s inevitable loss of “purity.” Experience and biology and Caddy’s own lust flow against her symbolic name and this drives Quentin crazy with grief and finally to suicide. Like Benjy being taken the wrong way around the square, Quentin is continuously suddenly outraged, violated at the center of his being by what happened to Caddy, but here is nothing he can do about it in this world. Time—history—is flowing against his expectations and Quentin can only discover one way to stop time. The futility of taking the hands off the watch only aggravates the agonizing counterflow of time upon and within the self. What is happening to his family, what has happened to the South are other wrong ways around the square for Quentin, creating within him the same shock, horror, eyeless and tongueless agony. But of course, it is more complex and sophisticated than what happens inside Ben because Quentin perceives more, has available to him the whole range of abstractions denied to Ben. Quentin’s long stream of interior grief is only brought to an end when he kills himself and takes himself out of time, out of the counterflow he cannot accept, control, alter, or accommodate himself to.
The Sound and the Fury begins—with Ben—at the most inarticulate level and moves upward and outward through realms and levels of articulation and re-articulation (verbalization) of what is essentialized in the title and condensed in the closing image. This book comes to us in waves and torrents of grief in a kind of orgasm of suffering; from the deepest inwardness of Faulkner’s own “horror, shock, agony eyeless and tongueless” caused by the way in which he perceived the counterflow of history and reality in his own time; it comes outward, roaring and bellowing in “hoarse agony” until, arriving at Dilsey (one of Faulkner’s magnificent compassionate black figures, humane, family centered, tender and loving—all values contained in that marvelous image where she lies down with Ben, rocking him, soothing him with her voice, stroking his head) Faulkner comes to a place and person where he can stop, a figure he can flow with. Faulkner must come out from Benjy through Quentin, and Jason to Dilsey, ending not only outside the Compson family, but with a completely nonsexual and nonwhite female, a long way from himself.
That so profound a work could come so soon after he began writing fictions is extraordinary. Once at this center, this native land of his imagination, Faulkner did not really develop for a while; he explored the new territory. He had a large vision, a protean verbal and technical talent, a restless, free-spinning imagination. He was seldom still or silent; like some of his own characters, he was addicted to words, language, and had a powerful sense of how his inner life was ordered by words” (SF 352). His need to verbalize, to invent, to listen to and talk with his own fictional beings was so