sound and the fury Flashcards
Malcolm Bradbury- modernist ideas
‘The coalescence, the fusion - if reason and unreason, intellect and emotion, subjective and objective’
What did Faulkner call the Sound & the Fury?
His most magnificent failure
When was TSATF published
1929
Where is it set
Fictional Yoknalatawpha
Faulkner to his friend Ben Wasson on the book
‘Read this, Bud. It’s a real son-of-a-bitch… this one’s the greatest I’ll ever write’
Quentin’s muddying caddy
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
Sartre
‘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’
Semantic field of paralysis and stasis in the sound and the fury
- ‘Static serenity’
- ‘breathlessness like a gull motionless in mid-air, like on an invisible wire’
- ‘caught by a spell just under crescendo and sustained
- ‘Still violent fecundity’
Even worse than things ending is the fact that they recur continually ‘again’ and ‘again’
‘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’
Static circularity of Streetcar
Resounding final line ‘this game is a seven-card stud’ + new born child
Ronald Bush in Modern/Post Modern
‘State of continuous becoming’
Benjy Compson
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
Why chronological disorder in the sound and the fury?
‘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.
Cavalier identity is obsolete for Quentin : decay - shift from property owning to middle classes
‘Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books, nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned’
The handing down of Quentin’s grandfathers watch (symbol of repetition as well as continual movement)
‘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’
The civil war according to mr Compson (reminder if individual defeat)
‘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’
Living time as outside of temporality - mr Compson impossible existence for Quentin
‘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’
Endless monotony & repetition Faulkner
‘Again. Sadder than was. Again. saddest of all. Again.’
Quentin break down
‘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.’
Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.
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
Dilsey quote
‘I’ve seed de first en de last… I seed de beginnin, en now indeed da endin’
Quentin continual complaint
‘If things just finished themselves’
Lack of finality for Quentin
- 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’
Shvey on Blanche’s death
‘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’
