I consider myself an Intelligent person, but I do not understand the purpose of "The Sound and the Fury"

>misinterpreting Faulkner this fucking badly
>"I consider myself an Intelligent person"

Back to Hemingway, pal

It's a confusing book man. I absolutely love "As I Lay Dying." Probably one of my favorite books.

This one....not so much.

The South clings to old values that need to die

Hi there. It's actually an allegory to the fall of the South through the lens of the different characters featured. The South featured idiots (Ben), emasculated geniuses (Quentin), and assholes (Jason). All these is the result of the South's defeat during the Civil War. These grotesques (the South itself) result from the South's inability to endure like the black people. All of them pine for the innocence once lost (Caddy's) and all of them make half-hearted attempts toward change. That is why by the end of the novel, the Compson family is moribund yet despite that it's Jason who knew why Benjy cried while going back home.

This.
Also, some of the best modernist stream of consciousness ever written.

Good discourse begins with a good question.
"i don't get it, tell me what to think Veeky Forums" is not a good post, no matter how you dress it up. Your random capitalization was attacked because it was the one thing that differentiated your post from the piles of other threads asking Veeky Forums to think for the OP.

wow, this is a great explanation, thank you very much. This makes a ton of sense now. I see the imagery in the characters.

I'm not asking anyone to think for me, I was more asking for something along the lines of
This book is so all over the place it's very difficult to take away a message.

These three are very god posts. Well done you guys

Books don't have messages

fucking corncobber

books are entirely comprised of messages

>It is beautifully written
Ay. Then that's enough. Only took you one line.

If you didn't pick up on the disdain for the south's racism and classism then you need to read more closely

Human condition is the message user.

>le human condition meme

I need to come to Veeky Forums more because I wasn't even trying to make a meme.

Why does there have to be a "message" or a "purpose"? It's beautiful. Why is that not enough?

Do you look at a spectacular mountain view and think "but where is its purpose"?

I always thought Quentin and his father's conversations were pretty nihilistic. At least the fathers answers to Quentin's idealism were nihilistic. And Quentin's idealism couldn't really handle it.
But Dilsey just kept on enduring and keeping the house together.
But that preacher of hers was just some con man.
Her faith kept her going but was she just another sucker?

No, I guess I've just been taught to seek deeper meaning in art. A book that bloody complicated better have a purpose though.

I thought it was interesting that Quentin considered himself a Southern gentleman, when his father sure didn't. Basically his father was okay with his daughter being sexual, which is almost unheard of in the South.

message in op context no they aren't pleb bush

...why

I guess I'm with you. As much as I'm maligned here for reading for the plot, I do it because I believe that one important aspect in a novel is the story it tells. Although some authors, like Faulkner, attain that exquisite balance between stylistic creativity and masterful storytelling, it's usually a rarity in most novels. Between hollow creativity and great storytelling, however, I'll choose storytelling all the time.

From how I understood the novel, his father was a lapsed idealist. His father was also an intellectual, but because he could not reconcile his ideals with reality, turned into drink.

Quentin was an even more extreme idealist. He decried the fall of the South, having heard it told to him in Absalom, Absalom!, and he never expected that to happen to his family. Because all he could do were faint rebellions, he opted to end his life.

So was Mr. Compson always a drunk? Or was it that his drinking got out of hand after Quentin went for a swim with some flatirons?

He also ended his life because of Caddy....but I definitely agree with your point.

It was never explained, but I believe he had been drinking a long time....hence it killed him.

Why do tripfags here in Veeky Forums actually have something meaningful to say?

In /a/ all we have are fanbois and hikki shit.

>but I do not understand the purpose of "The Sound and the Fury".

I think the point is that white women are nothing but trouble, either sluts - Caddy and Quentin II, or useless hysterics - Mrs. Compson
you're better off with an old negress
they accomplish more in one day than most white women do in their entire lives.

i love it when a good thread gets meme'd

i could just imagine op firing up Veeky Forums with a sly grin on his face, subconsciously congratulating himself for being above plebeian redditors and then clicking on Veeky Forums, for some naive reasoning, expecting to embark on a challenging and insightful discussion full of critical thought on The Sound and the Fury - he could have gone elsewhere, but NO, he chose the literature board on Veeky Forums, the place for true patricians.

He even used proper punctuation! My God!

I think he started drinking way before Quentin's suicide. He had a mentally deficient son, a slut of a daughter, and a useless, hypochondriac wife. I'd probably start drinking myself.

Wrote my undergrad thesis on SF and AA (Quentin).

If you're interested:

Faulkner called it his biggest failure. It began as a short story named Twilight (now another short story), with the central scene concerning a young girl climbing up a tree, seeing something that ruined her innocence, while her brothers looked on from below. She had muddy drawers.

Fall of the South, loss of innocence, classical tragedy, it was all there in that image, for Faulkner. But he wanted to be totally objective about it. Totally. That was the modernist enterprise, anyway. So he tried to take subjectivity out of it.

So he wrote Benjy's section, narrated from the perspective of someone without an "I." Then he read it and hated it. Because it didn't tell the full story. He needed something less hectic. And besides, it was still vaguely subjective, as Benjy does have narrative biases.

So he took it the other direction, and wrote Quentin as the most subjective character as possible. And then he read that. And he hated it. Quentin was too romantic. We only see the romance, the beauty of Caddy.

So he wrote Jason. Pure subjectivity, like Quentin, but the polar opposite. Visceral realism rather than romanticism. But then he read it and hated it.

So he wrote Dilsey's section from the third person, focalized on what he thought was a minor character. And that pulled the thing together well enough for him to stop writing.

Some fifteen years later, when his editor was compiling the Portable Faulkner (AILD and SF), Faulkner was asked to write an introduction. Instead, in typical Faulkner fashion, he wrote the Compson Appendix, which he intended to "explain the whole thing." It was intended to go first.

After the first print with the Appendix before Benfy's section, Faulkner requested it be put at the end, because he hated it.

That's why he called it his biggest failure.

I'd love to answer questions. Like I said, I wrote a ~150 page thesis on the man. Won some money for it too.

This is accurate, but I think it over-simplifies the novel. Or, at least, it's just one lense to see it through.

You might consider that modernity, especially literary modernity, was essentially a group of authors seriously attempting to reconcile the apparent paradox of romanticism and realism. Faulkner saw the South as emblematic of this. Honor, duty, love, pride, these classical concepts formed the heart of romanticism. And they were great. Or so we all thought.

But things changed with industrialization. We started to recognize that our love was self-serving, our duty predicated on the subjugation of lower classes, our honor a product of our own ego. Realism broke in. That's the South. Antebellum beauty built on a much darker reality. That's what Faulkner was trying to get at. That there was something really tragic about our memory, the way it convinced us of our own rectitude, even though we were never all that honorable or loving.

I think you guys are right here. A lot of critics claim it was all Caddy that killed Quentin. In reality, it was never really Caddy. Quentin never saw Caddy. Quentin saw the idealized version of Caddy that he wanted to see. He saw Judith Sutpen.

Quentin spends his entire section straddled between past and present. They blend. He desperately wants to exist in the past tense. In the world he was taught was real, but discovered was fantasy. But what really horrifies him is that, given what he knows from AA, even the past isn't sanctuary to him. He recognizes the fallacy of the "good ol' days."

Quentin's suicide has a lot more to due with this issue regarding time than it does with anything else. It's no accident he opens his section talking about his grandfather's watch. It all comes down to time. How to rationalize it, how to trick it, how to convince himself that it doesn't matter.

Killing himself is just his eternal stasis. It's the only way he can achieve a temporal full-stop.

Mr. Compson was always an alcoholic. It was the same story Faulkner himself saw everywhere in Mississippi. Great men fought and died for the South, only to lose. And their lesser children inherited far less than they expected. Coping with that reality drove a great many of them to alcohol. Faulkner himself fell into this category, and Mr. Compson certainly does.

One of the interesting things that no one ever points out is that Quentin's memory isn't exactly perfect. In fact, he purposely misremembers events. You might consider that Quentin's "conversations" with his father are nothing other than Quentin talking to himself. As someone who talks to himself frequently, I do not think that most people talk to themselves so much as they talk to a mental projection of someone. This, I think, is what Quentin is doing. And it's no wonder that it's nihilistic. And it's no wonder that his "father" does not dissuade him from suicide. He's only confirming his own decision.

Try Absalom! Absalom! It's easier to read, but significantly more difficult to see what the "point" is.

One thing that helped me enjoy SF was a ton of annotations. It also helps to have a good idea what modernism is and what it's trying to achieve. Trying to see it as four separate tellings of the same narrative also helps.

As for AILD, Darl and Quentin have quite a bit in common. Darl just doesn't have the words to describe it as adequately as Quentin. For those of us reading, however, the lack of eloquence makes the general idea easier to understand, but the finer details more obscure.

It just isn't that simple. Faulkner loved the South. And so do his characters. The less intelligent ones blindly follow the dogma of the South. The educated ones question it. And some of them (Quentin, Darl, Charles Bon, a couple in the Hamlet and GDM) can see through the dogma for the dark underbelly.

That's how Faulkner was. He loved and hated the South. More than that, he loved it for exactly the same ways that he hated it. He loved the duty but hated what it entailed. He loved the honor but hate how it was earned.

You're right. I didn't write a thesis on the novel, however. It's just what I got after re-reading the novel a few times.

I had no idea that modernism was also something Faulkner addressed. Thank you for raising this point.

I enjoyed Absalom, Absalom! a lot more than S and F, because it had a more coalescent story and I enjoyed the onion-peel revelations that it had. I still have three Faulkner in my top 5.

I think AILD is the worst among Faulkner's masterpieces. Light in August is probably the best Southern GOTHIC novel I've read, Absalom, Absalom!'s my favorite, and SF is near there.

It's actually fun how Faulkner was so ahead of other Southern writers in that he humanized African-Americans. Some of them were even better human beings than their human counterparts.

In TSATF, for example, Dilsey is placed in contrast with the dissolute Compson family. If I recall correctly, even the Appendix merely spoke of Dilsey and her family as enduring: 'They endured.'

Faulkner was so ahead of his time as a man of American letters that I honestly think Great American Author is between him and Melville. There could be no one else.

*white counterparts

That onion-peeling is very much at the heart of Faulkner's modernist agenda. For Faulkner, the story wasn't just in how you told it (like most modernist writers), but in how how you told the story dictated what the story was, how it was perceived, and what that meant for concepts like knowledge, perception, and the possibility of true objectivity.

This is why he told the story of Caddy's muddy drawers five times total, and why AA is told as a story about building a narrative.

As an aside, one of the things that drives me nuts about Faulkner criticism is that he tends to be seen as a regional author. This sort of thing is lost on most people, including the people who wrote about it for a living. I'm not particularly conservative, but the liberal bias in academia has done a lot of damage to Faulkner in this regard. Too many people see his work as "WASP Males do bad things and are bad," rather than as the complex and difficult works that they actually are.

You're extremely right. But here's the rub: Faulkner himself wasn't exactly a saint in this regard. I'm not sure where Veeky Forums stands on authorial intent at this moment (it tends to fluctuate), but it is worth mentioning that this is the man who told desegregationists to "slow down."

But you're absolutely correct. Faulkner's black characters, and maybe even more so his Native American characters, display the kind of humanity that he rarely affords his standard white characters. Look at Jason and Mrs. Compson if you need any proof.

I've heard it said, and I don't think it is far off the mark, that Faulkner's fiction essential boils down the South to this: the South was rotten from the outset because it committed two original sins. It was founded stolen land and developed by slaves. The fall of Sutpen is perhaps the best example of this: the man was a plantation owner who got his land from a shady deal with a Native. And the seeds of his design, built on that, brought him to ruin,

I need to read more Faulkner, I read As I Lay Dying a few months ago and was blown away by him switching back and forth between so many different internal dialogues and doing it so damn well.

I was planning on getting Absalom! Absalom! before The Sound and The Fury since I've heard it's basically his magnum opus, any other essential Faulkner novels?

>wasn't a saint in this regard
>but it is worth mentioning that this is the man who told desegregationists to "slow down."
you're a fucking mong

As a final point before I knock off to bed: I realize that this is a SF thread, but I encourage anyone interested to read more Faulkner if they want to understand SF. Quentin Compson isn't a fully fledged character unless you read him across SF and AA (and, I'd argue, That Evening Sun and A Justice, two short stories he figures prominently in).

The interesting thing about this point is that Faulkner was notoriously hard to pin down on specifics in his fiction. Quentin narrates That Evening Sun at age 24, but dies at either 19 or 20 in SF. His roommate Shreve has two different last names in SF and AA.

These sorts of "errors" are all over the place in Faulkner. Most people attribute it to his notoriously-heavy drinking. Although funny to consider, that assertion isn't altogether to the point, I don't think, even if it's true. Faulkner once said "Facts and truth don't really have much to do with each other." For Faulkner, I think, the "facts" of the fiction were malleable. (In fact, they were malleable in his life; this is the man who said he flew for the Royal Canadian Airforce in WWI, but never made it out of basic. That didn't stop him from walking with a limp most of his life, the result of a "flying accident" during the war.) Those inconsistencies just made the text richer for Faulkner. They added depth and intrigue in a way that made Yoknapatawpha a far richer, a far more truthful place.

According to the Internet, that means that I have Down-syndrome and that you are British. You learn something new every day.

I'm from the Philippines, and I internally rage whenever someone educated tells me that Faulkner is 'regional.' The themes he deals with are universal, and I loved Light in August because Joe Christmas is one of the most complex characters in literature and Faulkner utilizes psychology so damn well in creating the monstrous adult that he was. Of course, there was also the allegory of the South behind all that, but LiA was the best Southern Gothic novel I've read especially because the monster was within. While it does still tangentially tackle the idea of miscegenation, as Joe Christmas thought of himself as part-nigger, LiA was also great because it highlighted the fractured identity, not only of the South, but of postbellum America.

I have As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, The Unvanquished, and the Snopes Trilogy. I didn't think The Hamlet was that good, but The Town and The Mansion are awesome.

I wouldn't say that Faulkner is regional meaning that non-southerners "can't get him", but he is very heavily entrenched in the South in everything he does.

wtf, why is there a smart thread here on Veeky Forums? thought we were all about DFW and maymays

kys laddie

I think the problem is that people tend to think of the American South as another dimension, separated by insurmountable space and time from reality. It isn't. It's a diverse region with a lot of different moving parts, and one that shifts and changes with the rest of the world. The difference is that, in the American South, everything seems so much larger, more grandiose, as if it were a caricature of itself. All the trials and tribulations get blown into heroic and tragic proportions.

But that's part of what makes it such a good venue for Faulkner. It allowed him to take nuanced issues and place them under a magnifying class. And although your standard dirty Yankee will assume that the observations in Faulkner's fiction are confined to the South, a discerning reader can see that they're emblematic of the world at large.

Full disclosure: I'm a hick from small-town Texas transplanted to the Northeast U.S. to attend an uppity law school, so this sort of regional pigeonholing happens to me on a regular basis by rich people from Connecticut who find the whole Southern thing to be a cheap novelty. Which, unfortunately, is how they generally see Faulkner.

I honestly think Faulkner was being humorously self-deprecating when he said that and holding himself to far higher standards than anyone else should.

Probably. But I think it's illuminating to see the process for him. It makes the argument that he's one of a handful of Ur-modernists that much easier, at least if we believe that modernism is interested in epistemology and question of objectivity.

Yes, of course.

When you pertain to ur-modernist, what do you mean? I admit, that's my first time encountering the term.

I'm just coining a phrase. I mean that he's a prime example of the modernist enterprise, in the same vein as Lawrence or Joyce or Woolf In academia, he doesn't tend to get studied alongside these types. He gets studied with Sherwood Anderson and O'Connor and Zora Neal Hurston. And although I have nothing against those authors, their appeal is very different from Faulkner's. Faulkner's a modernist writer that wrote about the South, not a southern writer that wrote about modernism. At least, that's what I think. Maybe I'm wrong. It just seems to me that this aspect of Faulkner gets overlooked in academia, especially recently with the rise of new historicism, post-colonialism, and the like, which lend themselves to Faulkner easily, but say little of interest that isn't obvious from the outset.

listen up budy i understnad just fine that youre a shithead

It really is the geography of the place that lends itself to it. Whenever I'm reading Faulkner I can't help but picture a dark cloudy sky stretching out over endless, empty plains.

Wait, why is Faulkner placed beside Sherwood Anderson? The only Southern writer I could place proximate to him, to my mind, is O'Connor. Our academia here study him vis-a-vis with Joyce and Woolf, though, so I guess we have that over yours.

Anyway - I agree with you.

Sherwood Anderson was sort of a mentor to Faulkner. They were good friends at the beginning of his career. They fell out afterwards, although I can't recall what right now. In any case, his and Anderson's writing is similar in the sense that it is localized predominately on place rather than narrative or character.

I don't want to over-generalize; he is taught alongside those types as well. I guess it just seems that he's usually known as a southern writer instead. My opinion here is probably tainted by research though; I'm don't think I'm lying when I say that in the past five years, at least 95% of the academic articles I've read on the man never once mentioned the modernist angle. That might be more of an indictment of the direction of contemporary academia, though.

Fun aside: Faulkner wanted the original print of SF to be in color, for Benjy's section. He thought it would streamline the narrative. I believe some were printed like this, although cost was seriously prohibitive at the time, and Faulkner wasn't all that well-regarded at the time of the original print. I believe some copies do exist though, and last I checked they were a couple thousand US dollars a piece.

I read this. I think there's a premium publisher (Folio Society?) who published The Sound and the Fury in color, just as what Faulkner had intended. These copies still remain very expensive.

they did a limited edition publishing that goes for like $150 but the are soon republishing it as a standard edition for "only" $90

I'm going to get that $90 one if it ever comes out. Money well spent.