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Cavalier identity is obsolete for Quentin : decay - shift from property owning to middle classes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