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.
He attempts not, like Tolstoy, to translate his character’s experience into a mode that allows us to understand them from the comfortable third-person point of view we understand most of the rest of humanity, most of the time. Falkner wants to depict it for us directly, more directly than we even often understand ourselves (which we also tend to explain through simple third-person psychological rationalisations). He wants to shed light on the rich and vivid living process of experience. It is no surprise then, that those moments where there is dialogue form some of the clearest passages in the book. Talking requires focused attention, active thought, and tact, requirements that sharpen our experience to a focused point. Conversely, in the moments of solitude, murkier passages emerge. In these moments, the mind is left to wander, and time comes to play; the past encroaches, desires manifest themselves.
This is clearly a difficult operation, from the artist’s point of view, on multiple levels. After all, these characters do not actually exist for Faulkner to base his depictions of their experience off. And even if they did, he doesn’t have direct access to what it is to experience something the way these people do. It requires two difficult steps to pull off:
First, it requires many heroic acts of empathy. Empathy not in the emotional sense that we feel empathy for others when they share circumstances with us. Rather, empathy in a phenomenological sense, where you put yourself in a state where you can see the way another person’s world is constituted for them. In plainer language, it is to imagine, really imagine, what it is like to live in another’s shoes. It is heroic because these people do not exist for him to have begun from. Though of course, such an exercise must take queues from one’s own experience, as well as other’s lives.
Second, it requires an observant literary stenography. It must be observant because you must take into account the chaotic perturbations of the mind, the habits, memory, and anticipation that constitute lived experience. Most of these complexities, even as we live them, go unnoticed in our own experience, and it takes serious reflection on our experience to bring these structures to the fore. For example, we might ponder regrets from years ago as we walk to and along the beach, almost never realizing the impressive concatenation of experiential phenomena at play. We successfully walk down a path avoiding traffic, absorbing the sights and sounds, greeting passersby, all while being haunted by details of events at great temporal distance from us. It is a stenographic operation because even though the book is a depiction of experience, it cannot but be a shorthand recording of it. There ultimately can be no depiction of experience in the most direct sense that it is felt through the pages of a novel. But it is still a beat for beat account of exactly what is happening in the experience of the person. The better this account is, the more we, as readers, are able to bring ourselves into a state of empathy with the characters, such that their world is manifest for us. This technically need not be literary for the experiment to be interesting, or to ‘work.’ However, it needs to be literary if it is to work as a novel. And it must be admitted that The Sound and the Fury does not always do this. But when it does, and it often does, its depictive power is all the more piercing.
The book is broken down into four chapters. The first three chapters each take place from the first-person point of view of three brothers in the Compson family. Of course, as I’ve just said, it is more than merely a point of view, it is a depiction of each of these characters’ experience as specific events unfold. Once it is understood that each of these chapters are an exercise in descriptive phenomenology – an untranslated, raw depiction of a character’s experience – its enigmatic style, structure, and prose starts to make a lot more sense, at least in its conceit, if not at the level of the sentence. Asking that it make sense at the level of the sentence is to ask it to shirk from the task that it sets out to achieve.
This being said, each of the three characters has a distinct phenomenology, and each calls for comment. Some of their differences simply have to do with their relations and the events they are a part of. But the most profound way in which they differ is in their relation to the lived temporality of their own lives.
The book begins by depicting the experience of Benji, who is severely intellectually disabled. He cannot speak, he needs to be dressed and fed. This chapter is well described by the title of the book, it is a cacophonic sound and fury of experience. It technically takes place over one day according to the book, but as Benji goes about it, his recollective memories mix seamlessly with his present perception, in a way that is entirely free associative in character. But these memories are so well integrated that he does not seem to experience them as the past, as something that has happened already and which he has subsequently brought forward. Rather, everything is experienced as happening now, rather than as having happened. He, in some sense, ‘relives’ the experience every time he recalls it.
Hence, Benji experiences the world not as a present leaving behind a past that is final, emerging into a future that is open, but as sheer presence. A blooming buzzing confusion that barely gestures at such temporal cleavages. He is in what Bergson calls, at one point, the “plane of dreams.” And indeed, his experience, as depicted, is not unlike the mad associations of a dream: unmoored from the material necessity of action and phenomenological time-ordering that typical human action requires, surrendered to pure association.
The second chapter takes place from the perspective of Quentin, Benji’s brother who is sent to Harvard with the money made from his family by selling their pasture. His experience is depicted as he wanders about aimlessly on his last day, pondering what what it is that led up to this point. We see that his mind wanders as he does. Memories of his past haunt him, and constantly erupt into consciousness as he muddles about in the present. Quentin, unlike Benji, experiences a clear distinction between pastness and presentness. And importantly, even though he is obsessed with the past and cannot stop thinking about it, he is not reliving his memories—just recalling them. In this way, his memories are not situations coming to be, as they are with Benji, but a reminder of past situations that are ineluctably written into the history of the world. Thus, he is constantly experiencing their finality, the fact that the past is the way it is and cannot be changed. It is precisely this that he cannot cope with. Quentin’s experience is defined by his inability to come to terms with the finality of the past. Because of this, it haunts him, and its effect is debilitating.
Jason, whose misplaced moral clarity was forged in the ruins of his disintegrating family, tempered by relative material disadvantage, and sharpened by prejudices comfortably close to hand (each of which serve as fulcrums for his perceived authority), has a different, though similarly fraught relationship with his own temporality.
Like Quentin, he experiences a clear distinction between the past and the present. However, the depiction of his experience in this chapter is not of a past that he cannot come to terms with, but a past that robs him of his future. For Jason, his life is merely the confluence of other people’s choices and their consequences. Those choices have, for him, foreclosed on the possibility of him making his own choices, and thus on his future. It is not, as with Quentin, that he cannot come to terms with the fact that things happened the way they did. He accepts that the past is the way it is. It is rather that he takes the past to be completely determinative of the present possibilities, and has therefore ruled himself out of being a source of those possibilities. Whether it is his father, mother, brothers, Caddy, Quentin, or the bankers in New York, for Jason, someone somewhere has always made choices that have robbed him of his own, and therefore of his future. It is instructive that you eventually find out he has put away a substantial amount of money for himself, but never a shred of what he might be planning to do with it. That’s just it: he is not planning to do anything with it. He has already completely resigned himself to his situation, which, at each new juncture, appears to him merely as the necessary product of what came before.
In a previous essay, The Malady of Memory, I argued that there are appropriate ways of comporting ourselves towards our own temporality. These can be derived from our relative relationship to our own past and future. I argued that the settled-ness of the past, the fact that it cannot be changed, implies that we should take an attitude of acceptance towards it. Acceptance consists of an existential orientation towards the past that never wishes anything in their past could be changed, on account of the fact that such wishes, and all the small ways in which they infect our thinking, are futile endeavours. It is to recognize that such thoughts cannot do us any good and can only bring us down.
I then argued that the openness of the future, the fact that it is subject to our choices and actions in that it will be shaped in accordance with them, implies that we should take an attitude of transcendence towards it. Transcendence consists of an existential orientation towards the future where you are continually shaping and creating your evolving situation. In transcendence, you continually choose the life that you live. This is appropriate on account of the fact that the future is open to the influence of your choices and that whatever situation you are in, you are constantly transcending it. Denying this is to deny that you are made anew at every moment, and that part of what is made really is your choice, at every moment.
In both cases, to not take these attitudes towards our own temporality is to live in denial of what that temporality consists of: settledness and openness. Refusing to accept the past is refusing to accept that it is settled. Refusing to transcend your situation is to refuse that the future is open. Hence, not taking on these attitudes is a kind of self-deception wherein you deny certain facts about the temporality of your existence. Both are cases of what Sartre calls ‘bad faith.’
From what I’ve said above, we can now see that my account maps perfectly to the phenomenological depictions in the book, at least of Quentin and Jason. Quentin is unable to take on an attitude of acceptance and is thus haunted by his past. He wants so badly for it to be different that he even fantasises and lies to others about it. But the fact that things went the way they did still destroys him, he never comes to terms with it. Jason is unable to take on an attitude of transcendence. He conceives of his past as wholly determinative of his present. He does not see the future as something that is open to his choices, he only sees a situation that is the product of the past. Being merely a product of it, he conceives of himself as a subject of fate, rather than as a subject.
What role is the final chapter of the novel supposed to play, then, given that it radically breaks with the preceding chapters, in that it takes place from a third-person perspective and shies away from virtually any phenomenological description? It does not delve into what anyone is feeling or why they are feeling it. It merely describes the events and the way the characters look as they unfold, all from the outside. I’m not confident that I have something final to say about what the purpose of this chapter is, so I will keep it brief.
One thing you will notice is missing from the three Compson brothers is that none of them have any real conception of the future. Given they make up the bulk of the book, you could almost say, therefore, that the entire book is without a future. Now, this is interesting in its own right, especially as a depiction and diagnosis of defective attitudes to human temporality. But I also think that this lack of a future symbolises the fact that the family (as well as other families like them in the American south), and not just the individuals making it up, also lacks a future. When Dilsey says that she has seen the beginning and the end, it is the beginning and the end of the Compson family that she is talking about. The events of the final chapter signify that end for Dilsey, and for us too. We are witnessing the demise of the Compson family.
Thus, if we hold to the view that this is a book about the Compson family and it is a book without a future, or at least one that does not have a view to the future, then it had to end when it did and the way it did. The only Compson character with anything left to hear about was Quentin, and through her actions, she effectively, like her mother, ceased to be a Compson. But just as she ceases to be a Compson she also secures herself a future: that which is, by design, outside the view of the novel.
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