Abstract
Critics have long been troubled to reconcile Faulkner’s personal belief that man will ‘endure and prevail’, as he expressed it in accepting the Nobel Prize, with the darkness of his fictional world, where he often seems to be writing ‘as though he stood among and watched the end of man’.1 Because the novels seem greater and more believable than Faulkner’s personal optimism, many readers have been tempted to conclude that his heart saw deeper and embodied in his works a truth darker than his mind was able to accept. His persistent claims that the novels are all failures, and The Sound and the Fury his ‘most splendid failure’, often seem to reflect the man’s unwillingness to acknowledge the artist’s profound success in envisioning the defeat of man by men.2 But I believe that the form and closure of The Sound and the Fury contradict both Faulkner’s view that the book fails in affirming man’s potential triumph, and the persistent critical view that it succeeds in affirming man’s defeat.3 Although the novel is about characters who fail or merely endure, it defines out of their suffering — as does all tragedy — the missing values which would make it possible for them to prevail.
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Notes
Essays, Speeches and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965) pp. 119–20.
Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959) p. 77. Gary Lee Stonum argues, for example, that the Nobel Prize Speech reveals a Faulkner unable to grasp the ‘daring and complexity of his own best work’ (Faulkner’s Career [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979] p. 64).
Critical response to The Sound and the Fury ranges from Cleanth Brooks’s assertion that it ‘has to do with the discovery that life has no meaning’ to Lyall H. Powers’s insistence that its final statement is ‘boldly and affirmatively hopeful’ (Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963] p. 347
Powers, (Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Comedy [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980] p. 49). Few literary works of such widely acknowledged stature have provoked such divergent views.
see, for example, Walter Slatoff, Quest for Failure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960) pp. 136–7, 149, 157
John V. Hagopian, ‘Nihilism in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury’, Modern Fiction Studies, 13 (Spring 1967) p. 53
Beverly Gross, ‘Form and Fulfillment in The Sound and the Fury’, Modern Language Quarterly, 29 (Dec. 1968) pp. 444–9
Donald M. Kartiganer, ‘The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner’s Quest for Form’, ELH, 37 (Dec. 1970) pp. 619, 636.
For more positive views, see Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner (University of Kentucky Press, 1959) pp. 59–60
Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978) p. 101
Lawrence Thompson, William Faulkner (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967) p. 47.
Faulkner mentions Lawrence’s ‘tortured sex’ in a 1925 review, but this obviously need not imply a first-hand knowledge of his novels (William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins [Boston: Little Brown, 1962] p. 115).
Adams, ‘The Apprenticeship of William Faulkner’, rpt. in Linda Wagner, ed. William Faulkner: Four Decades of Criticism (Michigan State University Press, 1973) pp. 9–25.
Blotner, Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1974) p. 352.
Groden, ‘Criticism in New Composition: Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury’, Twentieth-Century Literature 21 (Oct. 1975) p. 265. Groden observes that Joyce would have been difficult for Faulkner to avoid, since Stone and Sherwood Anderson, perhaps his most influential friends in the 1920s, were both Joyce enthusiasts (p. 266).
Groden finds echoes of Penelope in Soldier’s Pay (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926) pp. 277–8; Mosquitoes (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927) pp.47, 128; and The Sound and the Fury, pp.154, 126–7 (pp. 265–8). He observes that ‘Molly’s final “yes” attracted Faulkner considerably’, finding six instances of it in Faulkner’s early poems and fictions (p. 277).
Baum, ‘The Beautiful One: Caddy Compson as Heroine’, Modern Fiction Studies, 13 (Spring 1967) pp. 33–43. Powers also argues that Caddy is the only Compson capable of unselfish love, seeing her problem as a ‘superabundance of love’ and her sin as an excess of ‘the chiefest virtue’ (pp. 24–5).
‘Introduction to The Sound and the Fury’, ed. James B. Meriwether, Southern Review 8 (Autumn 1972) p. 710.
See Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) pp. 17–18, 44–7.
Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn Solotaroff (New York: Basic, 1968) pp. 31–2, 63. Luria’s subject resembles Benjy in other ways; cf. pp. 34, 58, 76–7, 83, 96, 152, 157, 159.
Macbeth V.viii.71–3, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. Hugh MacLean (New York: Norton, 1968) 11. 433–4, p. 445; The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1768.
Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 38, 157.
Richard Adams (p. 13) finds another passage from the first of these letters echoed in Go Down, Moses, which suggests that Faulkner had read it at least by 1942.
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© 1988 William R. Thickstun
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Thickstun, W.R. (1988). Tragic Vision in The Sound and the Fury. In: Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19163-5_6
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