I bring this up because for a couple of years now--I can't even remember how long, but I'm going to say three or four--I have been intermittently forcing my way through The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. At no point has it ever been assigned reading for me, and as far as I can tell no one has put a curse on the book to force completion. I had checked it out of the library at least four times, and returned unfinished each time, never getting more than halfway through. What compels me to keep trying then?
Now, it's not as if I've abandoned books temporarily only to return to them later. One such case was Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. During the summer before my junior year of high school, I purchased an old copy of Jane Eyre at a used book sale for $0.25. I have referred to it as the worst quarter I ever spent, not because what I read was bad, but because the pages of the book started coming out until the whole thing fell to pieces. And this all happened while running around Newark Liberty International Airport.
I didn't hate the book then, but I was content with keeping it as a footnote in my reading career. Unfortunately for that plan, that year in high school, one of the required readings was Jane Eyre. Now there was no escaping it, and that time around I loathed every sentence of it. Had it been on my own terms, I'd have chucked it out the window. But in that case, I was essentially compelled to read through it. Such is not the case for The Sound and the Fury.
Perhaps a better analogue for the current situation is my experience with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It's a bit harder for me to determine how long it took me to finish that book. I know that received it around the time that I turned 13, which would mean late 2005. However, I have no idea when I first tried to read it. I figure that I must have tried on three separate occasions, but the details are more fuzzy.
As with The Sound and the Fury, I was not assigned to read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich at any point, so I was not externally compelled. But I may have felt internally compelled. See, for my thirteenth birthday, my dad gave me a bunch of books he had to read in high school, and Solzhenitsyn's was one of them. He obviously put some thought into that, and I probably felt the need to finish it. So, sometime during my senior year of high school, I did.
So, really, neither of those experiences give me a satisfactory explanation for why I have constantly tried and failed to finish The Sound and the Fury. It was never assigned, it was never gifted, and it was never purchased. And since I don't feel the need to finish every book I read, I'm plum out of external causes. But there is something there that repeatedly draws me back. So, the obvious solution is to take a brief look at the text itself.
First, a little introductory material is in order. The Sound and the Fury is about the Compson family, a group of former Southern aristocrats who have fallen from on high. The book primarily focuses on the Compson children; from oldest to youngest, they are Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy, though their parents, Caddy's daughter, and their longtime household servant Dilsey also play important roles. Put simply, The Sound in the Fury captures the Compson clan in ruins.
I'll tell you, the first time I tried to read The Sound and the Fury, I quit before I got to page 10. It was a case where I honestly did not know what I was getting into. I had simply heard that William Faulkner was one of the great American authors, and that The Sound and the Fury was his best work. That was all I knew about the book before diving in. What followed in that short first time with the text was pure, unadulterated confusion.
Here's the thing to keep in mind about The Sound and the Fury: the book is divided into four parts, each set on a different day and each with a different narrator. the first part, told from Benjy's perspective, takes place on April 7, 1928. The next is from Quentin's point of view on June 2, 1910. Jason gets the third part (April 6, 1928), while an omniscient third person narrator, who tends to focus on Dilsey, recounts the events of April 8, 1928.
This doesn't seem all that confusing; indeed, one might expect that the multiple points of view given in the next would make comprehending the events of the book easier. Alas, Faulkner was an early pioneer of stream-of-consciousness writing, and the first two parts of the book are notoriously difficult to comprehend. Neither flows linearly and both Benjy and Quentin tend towards extended, out-of-nowhere digressions.
In Benjy's case, this is because the character has a severe mental disability. He has no understanding of time; everything that has ever happened to Benjy exists in the present tense. As a result, Benjy may be narrating about something happening on April 7, 1928, and then seamlessly will start talking about another event from ten, twenty, even thirty years ago. An early example of this--there are too many to count--occurs at a fence on the Compson property as Benjy and Luster walk about:
"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."Ignoring the lack of proper punctuation, another feature of the text, note how the two paragraphs, which describe two different events at two different points in time, seem to flow directly into each other. Benjy gets caught on the fence in 1928, which causes him to think of another time in the past where a similar thing happened. And this keeps happening, frequently within other memories. The italicized text is the only indicator that the scene changed, and Faulkner doesn't always use that device.
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted. (4)
On my second attempt, I did a little research before diving in, found out what was going on, and managed to get through Benjy's section. After that, I put the book down. Reading through Benjy's narration was easier after I figured out what Faulkner was doing, but it was still a tiring experience. Still, I figured that when I made my third attempted read through, I could get through Benjy's section again and breeze through the rest of the book.
Well, that was dead wrong. Quentin's section follows Benjy's, as Quentin narrates the events of the day he commits suicide in 1910. Unlike Benjy, thank God, Quentin mentally fit and can tell past from present. On the other hand, Quentin is clearly in a damaged mental state, as he flashes back repeatedly--and without any italics whatsoever. On top of that, Quentin keeps repeating things which aren't true, such as an incestuous relationship with Caddy.
But what makes Quentin's section even more frustrating than Benjy's is that Quentin is clearly a Harvard man. If you go back and read the Benjy excerpt, you'll note that Benjy's language is very simple and choppy. Quentin's narration, on the other hand is sophisticated and eloquent; at least, it would be if he weren't out of his mind. Further, as his mind deteriorates more and more, Faulkner stops uses punctuation and capital letters, until the text starts to resemble a free association nightmare.
On read-through #3, I got through Quentin's section, but was similarly drained and had to put it down. As for the fourth attempt...the same exact thing happened. "June 2, 1910" represented a wall that just could not be surpassed, even though my further research indicated that the last two sections were actually in the Queen's English. I just could not press on, no matter how much I grew to love the first half of the book.
In fact, now that I think of it, it could be that, because I knew that the last two sections of the book were "normal", it felt as if I were entering an anticlimax. As disorienting and confusing as Benjy and Quentin's sections were, they were among the most fascinating things that I had ever read. You could say that I was content to pretend that The Sound and the Fury ended after 180 pages, that the rest of the book was sequel I was comfortable skipping.
Except, well, that wasn't true. This one, I had to finish. I had tried four time previously, and even the sunk cost fallacy probably applies here, I had put too much into it, spent too much time reading, to let it go at that. So, after a stop at the local library (and week of putting it off by reading American Gods), I set off on attempt number 5. Six days later, at exactly 11:00 p.m. EDT on June 29, 2012, I finally won. I finally got to the end of the book. Yay.
And if only for Jason Compson being the most evil, horrible, spiteful and pathetic character I've ever encountered in literature, it was worth the struggle.
Works cited:
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Vintage-Random
House, 1990. Print.
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