Abstract
On the wall above the cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamplight and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times.
‘Eight o’clock,’ Dilsey said.1
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Notes
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987 [1929]) pp. 243–4. Page references will be given after quotations in text from henceforth.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 2, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellaver (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1984]) p. 125. Where appropriate, page references will be given after quotations in text from henceforth.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983) p. 44. Page references to follow quotations from henceforth.
Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterization in Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) p. 144. Docherty, writing here about Proust, associates such ‘cyclical views of time and history’ (p. 145) with early modernist writing generally.
Jean Verrier, ‘Temporal Structuring in the Novel’, Renaissance and Modern Studies Vol. 27 (1983) p. 30. Page references to follow quotations from henceforth.
Eric Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) pp. 14, 9.
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (eds), Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958 (New York: Vintage Books, 1965 [1959]) p. 95.
Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 ) p. 81.
George R. Stewart and Joseph M. Backus, ’ “Each in Its Ordered Place”: Structure and Narrative in “Benjy’s Section” of The Sound and the Fury’, American Literature 29 (1957–8) pp. 440–56. This dating is not entirely accurate. Mr Compson’s funeral, for example, does not occur on April 26, 1912, as Stewart and Backus claim, p. 453. See The Sound and the Fury p. 178. Edmond L. Volpe, in A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1964) Appendix pp. 353–77, also matches dates to events. He, though, wrongly dates Caddy’s wedding, April 24, 1910: see The Sound and the Fury p. 87.
David Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work ( Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 ) p. 96.
Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986 ) p. 124.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976 [1881]) pp. 226–7.
Myra Jehlen, Class and Character in Faulkner’s South (Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1978 [1976]) p. 43. Jehlen describes this relationship in Bergsonian terms.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘The Paradoxical Status of Repetition’, Poetics Today Vol. 1 (Summer 1980) No. 4, pp. 152–3:
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film ( Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978 ) p. 78.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘From Representation to Production: The Status of Narration in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!’, Degrés, Vol. 16 (1978) p. 1.
See Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction p. 58. Also, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1987 [1885]) pp. 49–50.
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© 1990 Peter Messent
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Messent, P. (1990). Time and Narrative: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In: New Readings of the American Novel. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21117-3_3
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