The Sound and the Fury: A Chaotic Experience
I found myself feeling a bit lost in my third year of university. However, I decided to focus my efforts on the revisitation of my writing. I remember writing a ‘book’ when I was three on red and purple construction paper with neon green glow in the dark gel pens. Littered with stickers that were Blues Clues themed and animal stickers from my children’s national geographic magazine. When I was seven, I wrote a ‘book’ called ‘The Orange Girl’, which was the catalyst for my peers to present me with fan art and beg me to write the next installment. At such a young age, it only seemed natural for me to see my own life itself as a book. Not in a way that was distorted to fit a schema of the ideal and romanticized childhood novel, but in a way that turned a new yellowed and ripped page each day. That somewhere, in a parallel existence lay a novel containing my very existence.
As I grew older, I gravitated towards Jane Austen, then Ishiguro, then Roald Dahl, and most consistently Murakami. But even so, my inclination to read and my passion for writing could never find what I had pretended was tangible in my childhood. I had yet to find a book or any sort of writing that truly exhibited what it felt like to live and experience. Not simply a story, but the way it was told. The intrusion of memories, feelings, music, and emotions into what may seem like a contained and impenetrable present. The synthesis of sight, smell, sound, and recollection. A word or phrase evoking a filmic memory down to every minute detail. The smell of vanilla always reminded me of my time in third year, and whenever I smelled it I remembered things I wished I didn’t as if they were occurring right before me. Perhaps it is a grave generalization to say that everyone experiences life like this, and perhaps it is my own subjective experience. But it was an experience I had not been able to find solace in, as no tangible account existed.
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As I had yet to see a raw account of perception executed, and I had strayed far from my own writing pursuits, I decided to enroll in the Creative Writing module. My first pursuit was a story loosely based on one of my own experiences, on which I received less than favorable marks. It was labeled confusing and chaotic --I hadn’t used any names, time jumped back and forth from sentence to sentence etc. Subsequently, I left the piece behind.
A few days later I brought myself to my American Fiction seminar. In fact, that day, I was particularly unprepared. I had planned to be at the secret garden party with my friends, but at the last minute decided against it in favor of the responsible option of going to class. I thought to myself what if I missed something invaluable? I remember I had grossly miscalculated the temperature that day, and arrived to class wishing I hadn’t worn velvet, wool, or leather. I had nothing to contribute to the discussion, and drank my iced green tea and prepared myself to take thorough notes. The book that day was The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. It was not my usual taste in genre, and if I had read the back of the book like everyone else had, I’m certain I would have discounted it as a contender for my exam. But the first thing my tutor said when she sat down and faced us all assembled in a circle after she went to open the window with the cracked white window pane was ‘This is not a normal novel. It is a chaotic experience.’ I had never heard of a novel described that way. I came to find that Faulkner’s novel was exactly what I had been deprived of until this point in time.
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A dark southern gothic, The Sound and the Fury follows the story of the convoluted and fallen Compson family that was once regarded as socially superior. The family now faces social and economic turmoil as it attempts to clear its name and overcome societal and psychological circumstances. Narrated by the three Compson sons, and finally an omniscient third party, its distinct and experimental stream of consciousness narrative style caused a great degree of controversy during the time of its publication. Often incohesive and told by unreliable narrators in a stream of consciousness narrative, the unusual portrayal of the events paradoxically integrates uncontrollable elements of life and psychology to paint a realistic yet chaotic account of life and mental turmoil. The narrative synthesizes the past and the present as well as memory and perception. Faulkner encapsulates the dynamic and enigmatic concepts of the mind, and does so through the emphasis and distortion of time, the significance of sensory, and the fragmented and liquid self.
I was personally happy to find that his treatment of names, or lack thereof was not regarded as confusing and unpolished, rather a revolutionary means in which to examine the malleability of identity. The first two narrators, Benjy and Quentin face constant intrusions of memory, emotion, and sensory. It is the reader’s task to weave together fragments of their psyche to understand the story. It was and is the greatest account of psychological verisimilitude that I had encountered. Masterfully crafted, not only does the novel jump in temporality, but Faulkner implements italics or lack of quotation marks to illustrate human experience as hardly having temporality at all. Quentin is constantly haunted by the smell of honeysuckle, which hounds his present day and grows stronger as his account moves forth.
For example, the most jarring scene for Quentin in his memory is when he tries to kill his sister Caddy in his childhood. Honeysuckle usurps the scene, as he frantically tries to communicate his frustration. Faulkner depicts this scene without punctuation or quotation marks, strengthening the portrayal of Quentin’s disturbed mentality. The scene is fraught with the interjection of honeysuckle synthesized with the gray atmosphere. He recalls this memory, saying “I stood on the bank I could smell the honeysuckle on the water gap the air seemed to drizzle with honeysuckle and with the rasping of crickets a substance you could fell on the flesh” (126). It is important to note that in this scene, Faulkner eliminates the use of punctuation, leaving it the task of the reader to differentiate between Quentin’s thoughts and Caddy’s words. This is an indication of an extremely emotional scene for Quentin, as exemplified by the honeysuckle. He projects this scent onto all of his surroundings, conflating the types of sensory into an account of not only olfactory, but tactile and auditory. Faulkner uses the smell of honeysuckle to illustrate pain and nostalgia, but also signifies to the reader that we are in the past. His obsession with never knowing the time, as well as his marriage of recalled dialogue and present appraisal conveying consciousness’s metamorphosis. I had never read anything to so flawlessly execute anything of the sort.
I henceforth dedicated myself to reading and researching The Sound and the Fury not only for my upcoming exam that year, but then the next fall and winter for my dissertation. And now, in the present, I have always turned to it as a great inspiration and aspiration. I found a certain critic, Lawrence Edward Bowling, to insist that “Life does not narrate, but makes impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions.” Another critic compared The Sound and the Fury to a dance, saying to ask what it is about would be synonymous to asking a dancer to explain their dance. It is an experience, an art, a mind itself – and a chaotic one at that. Without The Sound and the Fury, I would have abandoned my pursuit of writing to achieve verisimilitude. I would have cemented in my mind that linearity is a priority, and that characters need names. That I had to explain every jump – presenting a neatly severed account of perception rather than a cacophony or mélange. I often think back to that spring day and wonder if I would have somehow found my way to The Sound and the Fury without my American Fiction class. In truth, my scholastic pursuits of the novel drastically improved the remainder of my third year as I finally was enthralled in research for something that evoked a feeling of solace and drove me to finally approach writing in the way that was the most natural to me. Whenever I return to the novel, it feels as if I am returning home. A story quite alien to my own, quite opposite to me, but told in a form that is quite familiar.
Image credit
Thumbnail: Dagny Tepper — Image 1: @fashcion on instagram — Image 2: “The Sound and the Fury” First Edition Cover — Image 3: Garden & Forest (Via Library of Congress collection)