Funny Folks, Those Compsons

Note: Ralph Ellison, writing in 1946, suggested that Faulkner "explored perhaps more successfully than anyone else, either white or black, certain forms of Negro humanity," and then went on to suggest that Faulkner might be "the example for our writers to follow, for in his work technique has been put once more to the task of creating value." I'm loathe to  provide here substantial framing or a content advisory relative to this novel. But as we apparently live in a society where the needless to say increasingly needs to be said, that rotten racist epithet is all over this novel, which ought not be a shock because the novel is set in racist society. 

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Funny folks, those Compsons. Father an awful cynic that you feel sick about the world after listening to him as he will get down to the bottom of that bottle again. Mother a Compton-Burnett despot tyrannizing her family with hypochondria and helplessness, maddeningly pushing her will but never taking responsibility for the aftermath of her willfulness.

With such parents, sure the children are bound to be fine, just fine. Poor brother Benjamin afflicted with severe cognitive disability, an OCD that demands order, and perhaps epilepsy, they thought mutilating him would calm his behavior, and they changed his name to change his luck, but neither modern medicine nor ancient solution took. Brother Quentin liable to obsess over the past and his sense of honor, remembering too much of his father empty fatalism. Brother Jason, cold-blooded with almost comic pessimism, utterly without bravery or fairness or wisdom or moderation, holding himself apart from everybody and thinking that money is going to build a shielding pen in a dog eat dog universe. And sister Candace aka Caddie, observed by each of her three intense and complex brothers, she's voiceless and enigmatic and doomed. And her teenaged daughter driven to distraction by Uncle Jason’s relentless bullying and physical abuse, driven defenseless right out of the house to who knows what kind of fate.

Funny folks, Ben’s minder Luster observes, glad I’m not one of them.

This family novel tells the story of the fall of a family of the Southern aristocracy, who once owned slaves but now faces financial ruin and moral dissolution, in the land of the vanquished after the civil war. Socio-economic grievance is nursed over outside uncontrollable forces some imaginary some not, emotional ties are overwhelmed by fear of social disgrace and hostility, aggression and nastiness pose as honor, face, and dignity. 

Time is the key word in this novel. Watches, chimes, church bells, factory whistles and people’s shadows as pointers on a sundial; “Life's but a walking shadow … told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” from Macbeth.  Everything remains the same. It’s hard for people to imagine life being any different from what it is right now, people being any better impossible, silly, unthinkable. It's time to break the clocks, as Quentin shatters his grandfather’s watch as he gets stuff in order to go through what the Stoics called The Open Door.

What bold choices of technique by Faulkner: regional words like ‘calculant,’ rendered dialect, sudden changes in points of view, blurry hazy focuses, unsignalled time shifts, stream of consciousness. So many issues for one group of people – a family and its servants – to deal with. Living in an economic backwater and cultural wasteland in the 1920s is not enough, unfortunate genetic luck in the family is not enough, and personality and class conflicts that make harmony between relatives difficult are not enough. How can people tough it out with so many problems? How can people breathe? History is so heavy, imposes so many burdens and inequities, how can people live, or hope to be content, ridden by fear, grievance, and cruelty? So the language boggles the mind and so do the issues raised.

Like the problem of the two worlds, those of whites and blacks, together and apart. People face the impossibility of being themselves and suffer the fatality of not being able to be themselves. Wonderful characters, black and white - inept, incapable, inert, unwise, defeated, bent, aching, some undone, others looking for their piece of cake, others seeking redemption. Perhaps there is only one real positive character - Dilsey, the black housekeeper - a glimmer of order and peace and fortitude where every interaction seems to be stained with bellyaching, swearing, bellowing, half-truths half-lies and ain’t nobody here but us chickens.

For Faulkner, plot and incident – creative and compelling as they are - don’t seem to be nearly as central as characterization. White or black, the characters are like characters in D.H. Lawrence. That is, they are so tormented, hopelessly uneasy, with a distress and desperation that lead them to disaster, that  I wonder if we are supposed to take them, like, literally. Or just conclude, well, that's what Lawrentian people do, that's how they roll in Yoknapatawpha county. 

Literature needs our A-game. It must be read twice. Reading it again - especially the first section - I experienced various ‘Eureka’ moments, because the first time the language is too bewildering for the who’s who and other crucial information to be taken in. “Books are to be called for," said Walt Whitman, "and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.”