I have never been able to like Faulkner. I admire much about the books I have been able to struggle through, but I always finish them feeling raw and dirty.

This time it is The Sound and the Fury. In part I reread him because he is a very important American writer, in part because because not knowing Faulkner is to miss something vital about the growth of the American psyche and intellect, but really I decided to reread The Sound and the Fury because I still can’t figure out what it is about his books that causes me such distress.

I belong to a online book club and although I have not participated much, especially of late, I like the idea of talking about books with others from the comfort of my living room. When I checked in recently, feeling a bit better and more able to take part, I saw that they have decided to read The Sound and the Fury together. There are other books as well, both fiction and non-fiction, but Faulkner jumped out at me and I decided to try, yet again, to get into his world and try to figure out what about it grates.

There is so much to admire about Faulkner’s books. Given the time, the audacity of form was brilliant. It certainly explicates the times and social concerns in a way other forms cannot. In The Sound and the Fury the idiot’s (Benjy’s) introduction to the created world is an example. It is like that, coming into the world. We are all born without clarity, without the social and environmental rubric we need to get any distance from ourselves. Just like Benjy we reference the world based on the absolute criteria of our individual senses and needs. Time is nothing really against that; the world is merely and extension of self and others are the same. We are, initially, all but incapable of making distinctions and others have no real objective existence. It is an important verity to start his book this way.

Still, despite the truth of Benjy, is the world Faulkner creates from this recognition of our idiot nature something true in a larger sense?

As I am sure you all know, the book’s idea is taken from MacBeth scene V. Upon hearing of his wife’s death, and realizing he is to die, Macbeth says:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So Faulkner generated The Sound and the Fury from the seed that is Macbeth’s speech. But the thing is, in Shakespeare, Macbeth is the thing not to be. He ends mad and bad. What Faulkner does is take the world of a man driven mad by excess and makes of it the whole world. What makes Shakespeare’s play a pleasure to read over and over is the larger balance. Macbeth is a part of a larger world. The Compsons are not. I am not going to say that Faulkner, the person, misses the point that Shakespeare’s story was told by an idiot and that idiot is Macbeth and that there was a larger world postulated by which to assess and understand the life Macbeth and his wife chose; I have no idea who Faulkner was as a person. I have no idea if he understood this or not. I have only what he writes (and what of it I have read) to go by. I can only assess his books by how those writings make me feel.

The irony of Macbeth’s tale of his life and decisions is that it does come to signify something – by virtue of the story told. I think the focus on the sound and fury signifying nothing and its misrepresentation of the function of idiots is what, ultimately, drives me away from Faulkner’s writing.

And of course there is Caddy and her daughter – those muddy underpants – Faulkner’s blood that will not out. There are no characters with which I can empathize, not even Dilsey. They are all constructed as aspects of the mad and bad world of the American Macbeth. Is Southern culture really like this? Perhaps to some extent. Certainly the sense of personal certainty that underlies the motivations of people like MacBeth and his wife are present in Faulkner characters and appear to be present in Southern political decision making (for example).

What do I mean by that? It’s as if each character assumed that there had to be a single correct way of being – of doing – and was born with the evangelizing force that makes it impossible not to try and enforce what is ultimately a personal need onto others. Each character has a single vector along which the trajectory of his or her life inevitably follows. Benjy’s inability to stop waiting at the gate for Caddy can be forgiven, given his disability but Quentin’s obsession with Caddy’s virginity, that’s something else.  His personal need, his sexual vector, his “idiot” nature, was written out as if it were a moral requirement that others must abide by.  Of course such a requirement caused no end of grief for all involved.  A suicidal way to be for sure, but the American south does seem prone to such “idiot” requirements.

I can only imagine the weight such expectations would inflict on another. I imagine what Caddy’s life might have been like without an incestuous brother and yet for Faulkner’s world, the Caddys and female Quentins are not so much its victims as its instigators. Much as Macbeth’s wife was. Dirty underpants and bloody hands.

I understand that Faulkner had little patience for the modern world. Certainly Jason is a most unlikeable character, and since he is the only one of the Compsons that seems remotely able to negotiate the new ways, it does seem to suggest the truth of Faulkner’s reputed distaste of modernity. But given the tilted nature of the world Faulkner has created what does that really say about the world in which we actually reside? Not much I think. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land it seems to speak more to the insecurities of single vector personalities in a multi-vector world. Forgive my flippancy but it is a bit like a male Hasidic Jew judging the qualities of menstrual products. It’s not a world with which he has much intimate contact, and additionally, there is a rather tendentious belief system built in about what menstruation means, and I think, therefore, his assessment should probably be suspect.

Or a pedophile’s assessment of childhood sexuality…

Or a Rand-brand libertarian’s assessment of the effectiveness of socialized medicine…

See. This is how much Faulkner irritates me.

It’s the misrepresentation that makes me feel queasy when I read Faulkner. The world he writes is not the world I know, but a shadow of it made to seem so big that the shadow seems to encompass the world’s entirety. It takes a brilliant writer to do that, and he was that. But it also takes someone as damaged as Eliot was and as Faulkner’s characters were. There is not a single person in The Sound and The Fury I would want to know. None of them seem sane enough to sit with for an hour in a coffee house let alone take with me into my head.

But then again, Faulkner was brilliant, and he provokes thought, which I consider a good thing. So I struggle to read him and come to grips with the resultant bad taste. I still don’t know if it is worth it.