The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

June 17, 2007

Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury is a book demanding a particular kind of empathy, an entering into the subjectivities of the Compson family in Mississippi between 1910 and 1928. Pondering "the lives of others" in our own time, thinking about "multiple perspectives," we cannot but feel our lives expanding as we come to know beautiful, rebellious Candace; Benjy the idiot; Quentin obsessed by guilt and suicide; Jason, by a chill cynicism - and, most significantly, Dilsey and her African-American family, who "will endure".

In his Nobel speech, Faulkner, hurt by talk of human worthlessness, said man will not merely endure. "He will prevail...because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props and pillars to help him endure and prevail. "Not a "truth" certainly; not contemporary in emphasis. But a clue, perhaps, to what it signifies to seek value and endure.

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."
–William Faulkner

Portrait of William Faulkner by photographer Carl Van Vechten

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