The Sound & The Fury by William Faulkner is an exercise in descriptive phenomenology. By descriptive phenomenology I mean something like: a detailed description of actual experience, as it is actually lived, in all its richness. This is as opposed to the kind of faculty psychology that carves up the operations of the mind into perception, imagination, and memory. This psychology, while useful and to some extent true, deals in idealisations. Experience, as it is actually lived, is a rich and chaotic flux of perturbations that only roughly gesture in the direction of these operations, to differing extents at different times. The book is an attempt to convey what that experience is actually like. It is a phenomenological depiction of life.
It is important here that I call it a depiction, rather than a translation of experience. Something being translated implies that it has been rendered into some other, different mode of expression, so that the original can be made sense of, through it. This is what someone like Tolstoy does, with remarkable dexterity, when he writes about his character’s thoughts and motivations. Faulker attempts something wholly more difficult.