sound and the fury

Question 1

Malcolm Bradbury- modernist ideas

Answer 1

‘The coalescence, the fusion - if reason and unreason, intellect and emotion, subjective and objective’

Question 2

What did Faulkner call the Sound & the Fury?

Answer 2

His most magnificent failure

Question 3

When was TSATF published

Answer 3

1929

Question 4

Where is it set

Answer 4

Fictional Yoknalatawpha

Question 5

Faulkner to his friend Ben Wasson on the book

Answer 5

‘Read this, Bud. It’s a real son-of-a-bitch… this one’s the greatest I’ll ever write’

Question 6

Quentin’s muddying caddy

Answer 6

Overtly sexual overtones
‘Quentin wiped mud from his legs smeared it on her wet hard turning body hearing her fingers going into his face’

• muddy drawers
• branch scene where Quentin suggests invest or double suicide

Question 7

Sartre

Answer 7

‘In the sound and the fury, everything occurs in the wigs; nothing happens, everything has happened’

‘There is never any progression… to be present is to appear without reason and he suspended’

Question 8

Semantic field of paralysis and stasis in the sound and the fury

Answer 8

1. ‘Static serenity’
2. ‘breathlessness like a gull motionless in mid-air, like on an invisible wire’
3. ‘caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustained
4. ‘Still violent fecundity’

Question 9

Even worse than things ending is the fact that they recur continually ‘again’ and ‘again’

Answer 9

‘Was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world it’s not despair even time until it was’

‘Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again’

Question 10

Static circularity of Streetcar

Answer 10

Resounding final line ‘this game is a seven-card stud’ + new born child

Question 11

Ronald Bush in Modern/Post Modern

Answer 11

‘State of continuous becoming’

Question 12

Benjy Compson

Answer 12

Unbelievable crescendo of sound and fury, his bellow containing the sound of the spheres, a tale pronounced vehemently out of the cracked mind of an ‘idiot’ - all signifying nothing

Question 13

Why chronological disorder in the sound and the fury?

Answer 13

‘The order of the past is the order of the heart’ - Sartre

Fury follows impulses and emotions around themes of caddy’s pregnancy, Benjy’s castration and quentin’s suicide - these impulses are the only truly viable means of coming to new understandings.

Question 14

Cavalier identity is obsolete for Quentin : decay - shift from property owning to middle classes

Answer 14

‘Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books, nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned’

Question 15

The handing down of Quentin’s grandfathers watch (symbol of repetition as well as continual movement)

Answer 15

‘It was Grandfather’s, and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s’

Question 16

The civil war according to mr Compson (reminder if individual defeat)

Answer 16

‘Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools’

Question 17

Living time as outside of temporality - mr Compson impossible existence for Quentin

Answer 17

‘Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life’

Question 18

Endless monotony & repetition Faulkner

Answer 18

‘Again. Sadder than was. Again. saddest of all. Again.’

Question 19

Quentin break down

Answer 19

‘A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest. Non fui. Sum. Non sum. Somewhere I heard bells once. Mississippi or Massachussetts.’

Question 20

Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.

Answer 20

I was not. I am. I was. I am not.

Latin epicurean epigram saying all sensation ends at the point of death. Usually ends with ‘non curo’ (I don’t care) - in omitting these words Q shows lack of reconciliation with the fate he can’t accept

Question 21

Dilsey quote

Answer 21

‘I’ve seed de first en de last… I seed de beginnin, en now indeed da endin’

Question 22

Quentin continual complaint

Answer 22

‘If things just finished themselves’

Question 23

Lack of finality for Quentin

Answer 23

• drowning as consummating his sexual love for Caddy in her guise as a water nymph
• ritual of purification (like his jump into hog wallow upon being caught w Natalie)
• cyclical return to his mother’s womb (body heals to caverns and grottoes of sea - uterine harmony that evaded him in life’
• transcendence into ‘drowning infinity’

Question 24

Shvey on Blanche’s death

Answer 24

‘Williams clearly suggests an identification between the tragic fall of one and the birth of another.. blanche’s symbolic death has resulted in a new life’

Question 25

Blanche’s purgation as well as rebirth is implied…

Answer 25

Blanche’s confrontation with the death figure of the Mexican flower seller is deliberately placed on her birthday, the day of her rape, and the day Stella gives birth

Question 26

How does Williams use the colour blue?

Answer 26

To link ideas of death to birth and purification-
‘Della robia’ blue dress (day after last purifying bath)
New born baby’s ‘pale blue blanket’

Question 27

Williams on Blanche

Answer 27

‘Blanche was the most rational of all the characters… and in almost all ways, she was the strongest’

Question 28

Common theme of Fury & streetcar

Answer 28

Grasping and ‘clinging’ to their ‘tenderer feelings’ - nostalgia towards southern culture: potency of these desires give it an ascendancy

Question 29

How does Blanche leave with an aesthetic dignity

Answer 29

Results the matron at the end until the doctor offers his arm to her like a real gentleman. Cries ‘Fire! fire! Fire?m when Mitch touches her sexually.

Question 30

Faulkner Nobel peace prize 1950

Answer 30

‘The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail’

Question 31

When was the Awakening published

Answer 31

1899

Question 32

When was Light in August published

Answer 32

1932

Question 33

Sex as emancipating in streetcar

Answer 33

‘The things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that sort of make everything else seem - unimportant’

Question 34

Caddy sex & death

Answer 34

‘When they touched me I died’

Question 35

Virginity in fury

Answer 35

‘Men invented virginity not women’ a negative state ‘like death: only a state in which the others are left’

Question 36

Quentin on connection between femininity & purity - idea of sexuality as primal & transcendental can’t be integrated

Answer 36

‘Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced (…) liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odour of honeysuckle all mixed up’

Question 37

Blanche’s contradictory & incoherent sexuality

Answer 37

As incoherent as Freud’s accounts of hysterical patients, fuelled by an irreconcilable lust for her gay husband who she ‘failed in some mysterious way’

Question 38

What’s the best text on Faulkner

Answer 38

Daniel J Singal - the making of a modernist

Question 39

Bleikasten on Quentin’s monologue

Answer 39

Record of a ‘process of derealization’ during which ‘the entire fabric of a self is unraveled and comes apart’