William Faulkner
(1897 - 1962)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, the 'Old Colonel', who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War colonel, railroad financier, and finally a best-selling writer (of the novel The White Rose of Memphis), the Old Colonel, even in death, loomed as a larger-than-life model of personal and professional success for his male descendants.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. He grew up in Oxford, "a shy and troubled boy who would become a shy and troubled man," according to biographer David Minter, working in his father's livery stable, dropping out of high school, meeting his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. At the Oxford High School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose. Before graduating, he dropped out school and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; After being rejected from the army because he was too short (5' 5''), Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had basic training in Toronto. He served with the RAF in World War I, but did not see any action. The war was over before he could make his first solo flight. This did not stop him later telling that he was shot down in France. The only 'war injury' he received was the result of getting drunk and partying too hard on Armistice Day.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; After the war he enrolled as a special student at the University of Mississippi, and began to write for the school papers and magazines, quickly earning a reputation as an eccentric. His strange routines, swanky dressing habits, and inability to hold down a job earned him the nickname 'Count Nocount'. He also wrote some poems and drew cartoons for the university's humor magazine, The Scream. "I liked the cartoons better than the poetry," recalled later George W. Healy Jr., who edited the magazine.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In 1920 Faulkner left the university without taking a degree. Years later he wrote in a letter, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's life was characterized by ambivalent desires for fame and privacy. In his youth he cultivated a bohemian look, "put on airs," according to some townspeople, and became known as "Count No Count." His mother brought him up to be a proud person, which he rightfully was, but he was also withdrawn. Perhaps, as Faulkner scholar Dianne Roberts said, he invited ambivalence and ambiguity because "as a writer you get a lot of energy from conflict - conflict is where writing comes from."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner moved to New York City, where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore, and then returned to Oxford.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; For a time Faulkner supported himself as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi, but resigned three years later, after the postal inspector finally noticed how much time Faulkner spent writing (and ignoring customers).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In spite of his disdain for formal schooling, literary people had a very early influence upon him. In Oxford, these included Phil Stone, the Yale-educated lawyer who encouraged Faulkner to read Keats and Swinburne and who read Faulkner's own first poems, saying later that "anyone could have seen he had real talent, " and Ben Wasson, a University student who later would become his first agent.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The early works of Faulkner bear witness to his reading of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the fin-de-siècle English poetry.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His first book was The Marble Faun (1924), a collection of poems in an edition of 1,000 copies, dedicated to his mother and with a preface by Stone. It did not gain success.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans and fell in with a literary crowd which included Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio was a pillar of American Modernism.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His activity centered around The Double Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits include the first published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner published several essays and sketches in The Double Dealer and in the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the latter would later be collected under the title New Orleans Sketches.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner planned to go to Europe so as to refine his writing skills. Instead, he ended up staying in New Orleans for a few months and writing.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His friendship with Anderson inspired him to start writing novels.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; He wrote his first novel, Soldier's Pay, and on Anderson's advice sent it to the publisher Horace Liveright. After Liveright accepted the novel, Faulkner sailed from New Orleans to Europe, arriving in Italy on August 2.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His principal residence during the next several months was near Paris, France, just around the corner from the Luxembourg Gardens, where he spent much of his time; his written description of the gardens would later be revised for the closing of his novel Sanctuary.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; While in France, he would sometimes go to the cafe that James Joyce would frequent, but the shy Faulkner never mustered the nerve to speak to him. After visiting England, he returned to the United States in December.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In February 1926, Soldier's Pay was published by Boni and Liveright in an edition of 2,500 copies. It centers on the return of a soldier, who has been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Again in New Orleans, he began working on his second novel, Mosquitoes, a satirical portrait of Bohemian life, artists and intellectuals in New Orleans. It is today considered one of Faulkner's weakest novels.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; For his third novel, Flags in the Dust, Faulkner considered some advice Anderson had given him, that he should write about his native region.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In doing so, he drew upon both regional geography and family history (particularly his great-grandfather's Civil War and post-war exploits) to create Yocona County, later renamed Yoknapatawpha. (The Chickasaw Indian term meant "water passes slowly through flatlands.")

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner may have been excited by his novel, but his publisher, Liveright, refused to publish the novel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Dejected, Faulkner began to shop the novel around to other publishers, with similar results. In the meantime, believing his career as a writer all but over, he began to write a novel strictly for pleasure, with no regard, he said, for its eventual publication. (It was The Sound and the Fury.)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His friend, Ben Wasson, a literary agent in New York, convinced Harcourt, Brace to publish Flags in the Dust, but only with extensive cuts from the manuscript. The purged novel, trimmed by about a third, was published in January 1929 under the title Sartoris.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A restored version of the original Flags in the Dust would be published in 1973, more than ten years after Faulkner's death.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In a 1956 interview, Faulkner described the liberating effect the creation of his fictional county had for him as an artist:

"Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top" (Lion in the Garden, 255).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling (Light in August) to series of snapshots (As I Lay Dying) or collage (The Sound and the Fury).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Go Down, Moses (1942) was a short story cycle about Yoknapatawpha blacks and includes one of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, The Bear, about a ritual hunt, standing as a symbol of accepting traditional cultural values.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Contrary to his earlier opinion, the novel Faulkner had written strictly for pleasure was publishable, though he did have to convince his new publisher, Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith (formerly of Harcourt, Brace) not to interfere with his manuscript.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A revolutionary novel in style and content, it was divided into four discrete sections, the first three of which are told by brothers in a single family.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The first section is told by an idiot with no concept of time - his narrative slips easily back and forth in time with no warning to the reader except for a usual brief shift to italic typeface.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Individually, each section is revealing both stylistically and as an exploration of character; together, however, the four parts operate to reveal the slow demise of a once-prominent southern family, which is demonstrated most explicitly in the gradual decline and disappearance of the brothers' sister, Caddy Compson.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Taking his title from a soliloquy in Shakespeare's Macbeth which refers to life as "a tale told by an idiot," Faulkner called the novel The Sound and the Fury.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; After The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929, Faulkner had to turn his attention to making money.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Earlier that year, he had written Sanctuary, a novel which Faulkner later claimed in an introduction he conceived "deliberately to make money." Because of its sordid subject the novel was immediately turned down by the publisher.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's need for income stemmed largely from his growing family. In April, Estelle Oldham had divorced her first husband, and in June Faulkner and his childhood sweetheart, a lawyer, were married at College Hill Presbyterian Church, just north of Oxford.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Estelle brought to the marriage two children, Malcolm and Victoria, and after a honeymoon the Mississippi Gulf Coast, they lived in Oxford.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In the introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (his sixth novel), William Faulkner took an unprecedented step for a writer of 'serious' fiction. Lifting the veil around the pragmatic side of his career, he stated flatly that the novel was deliberately conceived to make money.

"I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought. [so] I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might as well make some of it myself . . . [I thus] invented the most horrific tale I could imagine.".

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; When Sanctuary appeared in 1929, the response was both one of horror at a book that described such deviant behavior as that of Popeye, Temple Drake, and Horace Benbow, and one of admiration of the book's power.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Sanctuary was called a horrible book not fit for nice people to read. But it was also described as "most terrifying," "most extraordinary," a great novel written by an author of "prodigious genius."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; It sold the 10,000 copies Faulkner hoped for. It was the novel that 'broke him' to readers. It would be Faulkner's best-selling novel until The Wild Palms was published in 1939.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; By the time of his death in 1962, there were four American editions, three British editions, numerous reprints, and translations into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese, and several other languages. There also were two motion picture versions.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner, now working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying, later claiming it was a "tour de force" and that he had written it "in six weeks, without changing a word."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though his hyperbolic claims about the novel were not entirely true, As I Lay Dying is nevertheless a masterfully written successor to The Sound and the Fury.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; As with the earlier work, the novel focuses on a family and is told in a stream-of-conscious style by different narrators, but rather than an aristocratic family, the focus here is on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens, whose matriarch, Addie, has died and had asked to be buried in Jefferson, "a day's hard ride away" to the north.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The journey to Jefferson is fraught with perils of fire and flood (from the rain-swollen Yoknapatawpha River) as well as the family members' inner feelings of grief and loss.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The novel was published in October 1930.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The year 1930 was significant to Faulkner for two other reasons as well. First, he bought a decrepit antebellum house in Oxford, which plunged him further into debt but in which he would find comfort and pleasure for the rest of his life.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Built originally in 1844 by a Robert Shegogg, Faulkner named the house "Rowan Oak," after a Scottish legend alluding to the protective powers of wood from the rowan tree (scorus de munte)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Also in April, Faulkner saw the first national publication of a short story he had written, A Rose for Emily, in Forum magazine.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In January 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama. The child, born prematurely, would live only a few days.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's first collection of short stories, These 13, would be published in September and dedicated to "Estelle and Alabama."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Soon after Alabama's death, Faulkner began writing a novel tentatively titled Dark House, which would feature a man of uncertain racial lineage who, as an orphaned child, was named Joe Christmas.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In this, Faulkner's first major exploration of race, he examines the lives of outcasts in Yoknapatawpha County, including Joanna Burden, the granddaughter and sister of civil rights activists gunned down in the town square; the Rev. Gail Hightower, so caught up in family pride and heritage that he ignores his own wife's decline into infidelity and eventual suicide; and Lena Grove, a (literally) barefoot and pregnant girl from Alabama whose journey to find the father of her child both opens and closes the novel. At the center of the novel is the orphan, the enigmatic Joe Christmas, who defies easy categorization into either race, white or black.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The novel would be published as Light in August in October 1932 by his new publisher of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The year 1932 would mark the beginning of a new profession for Faulkner, as screenwriter in Hollywood.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; During an extended trip to New York City the previous year, he had made a number of important contacts in Hollywood, including actress Tallulah Bankhead.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In April 1932, Faulkner signed a six-week contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in May Faulkner initiated what would be the first of many stints as screenwriter in Hollywood.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In July, Faulkner met director Howard Hawks, with whom he shared a common passion for flying and hunting. Of the six screenplays for which Faulkner would receive on-screen credit, five would be for films directed by Hawks, the first of which was Today We Live (1933), based on Faulkner's short story "Turn About."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner returned to Oxford in August after the sudden death of his father. With the addition of his mother to his growing number of dependents, Faulkner needed money. He returned to Hollywood in October with his mother and younger brother Dean, and sold Paramount the rights to film Sanctuary.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The film, retitled The Story of Temple Drake, opened in May 1933, one month after the Memphis premiere of Today We Live which Faulkner attended.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's MGM contract expired in May 1933, and with his temporary windfall he purchased a Waco-210 monoplane.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In June, Estelle gave birth to Faulkner's only surviving daughter, Jill.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The following winter, Faulkner wrote to his publisher that he was working on a new novel whose working title, like Light in August before, was "Dark House." "Roughly," he wrote, "the theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the man's family. Quentin Compson, of the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In the spring of 1933 he published A Green Bough, his second and last collection of poetry.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In April 1934, Faulkner published a second collection of stories, Doctor Martino and Other Stories.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; That spring, he began a series of Civil War stories to be sold to The Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner would later revise and collect them together to form the novel The Unvanquished (1938). In March 1935, he published the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon, which was inspired apparently by the death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans. A few months later, in November, his brother Dean was killed in a crash of the Waco which Faulkner had given him. Married only a month before to Louise Hale, Dean would be survived by a daughter (to be born in March 1936), who would be named Dean after her father. Faulkner would take complete responsibility for the education of his niece.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In December, Faulkner began another "tour of duty" in Hollywood working with Hawks, this time at 20th Century-Fox, where he met Meta Carpenter, Hawks' secretary and script girl, with whom Faulkner would have an affair. Late that month, Faulkner and collaborator Joel Sayre completed a screenplay for the film The Road to Glory, which would premiere in June 1936.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Back in Oxford in January 1936, Faulkner spent what would be the first of many stays at Wright's Sanatorium, a nursing home facility in Byhalia, Mississippi, where Faulkner would go to recover from his drinking binges.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Not an alcoholic in a clinical sense, Faulkner nevertheless would sometimes go on extended drinking binges, often at the conclusion of a writing project. The January binge came on as he finished the manuscript of what he had first called "Dark House."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; At the center of the novel is the character of Thomas Sutpen, a mysterious figure who in 1833 had come to Yoknapatawpha County, bought a hundred square miles of virgin timberland, and set out to create a vast 'design' of wealth, power, and progeny in the form of white, male heirs.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Set in the present day of 1909-1910, the novel's historical past is narrated by four characters: Rosa Coldfield, Sutpen's sister-in-law, who regarded him as demonic; Jason Compson, a nihilist and fatalist and alcoholic father of Quentin; Quentin Compson, formerly of The Sound and the Fury, and his Harvard roommate, Shreve McCannon, who together try to piece together the discordant fabric of the story of Thomas Sutpen, who had been killed more than forty years earlier.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In addition to its focus on family, race, and history, the novel's narrative structure also confronts the key issue of reading itself, how readers interpret evidence and construct narratives from it. The novel would be published in October 1936 by Random House. Faulkner's new title for the book, alluding to King David's lament over his dead son in the Old Testament, was Absalom, Absalom!

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;    Faulkner spent much of 1936 and the first eight months of 1937 in Hollywood, again working for 20th Century-Fox, receiving on-screen writing credit for Slave Ship (1937) and contributing to the story for Gunga Din (1939).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;    Back at Rowan Oak in September, Faulkner began working on a new novel, which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separate casts of characters appearing alternately throughout the book. Faulkner's title for the book was If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, consisting of the novellas "The Wild Palms" and "Old Man."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworking stories into an episodic novel about the McCaslin family, several members of whom had appeared briefly in The Unvanquished.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though several stories that would comprise Go Down, Moses had been published separately, Faulkner revised extensively the parts that would comprise the novel, which spans more than 100 years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; At the physical and psychological center of the book is "The Bear," a hunting story that encompasses both the fading wilderness, Native American issues of land ownership and environmental stewardship, and the problems of miscegenation compounded by incest.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The book was published in May 1942 as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, but in subsequent editions, Faulkner had the phrase "and other stories" omitted, insisting to his publisher that the book was a novel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner returned to California in July 1942 to begin another stint at screen writing, this time for Warner Brothers

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; He was assigned to write the screenplay for Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The movie, the first film to feature Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall together on screen, would premiere in January 1945.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In August 1944, Faulkner began writing a screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective novel The Big Sleep. It would premiere, also starring Bogart and Bacall, in August 1946.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; During this period, Faulkner also collaborated with Jean Renoir on his film The Southerner It would premiere in August 1945.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The three films together would represent the pinnacle of Faulkner's screen writing career.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In 1944, Faulkner began a correspondence with Malcolm Cowley, who at the time was editing The Portable Hemingway for Viking Press. Cowley had in mind a similar collection for Faulkner, whose novels by this time were effectively out of print.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though Faulkner's reputation remained high in Europe, especially in France, where Jean-Paul Sartre allegedly said, "For the young people in France, Faulkner is a god," in America the public had largely ceased to read his work.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Cowley's collection begins with an introductory biographical and critical essay, in which Faulkner had to correct for the first time some of the misconceptions of his war record. The collection itself consists of stories and novel passages that relate, in roughly chronological order, the "saga" of Yoknapatawpha County.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; For the book, Faulkner contributed a new "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury, in which he examined both the distant past and the near future of the Compson family as told in the novel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Published in April 1946, The Portable Faulkner would mark the beginning of the resurgence in popular and critical interest in Faulkner's work.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In the summer of 1949, Faulkner had met Joan Williams, a young student and author of a prize-winning story. In 1950, he began a collaboration with her on Requiem for a Nun, a part-prose, part-play sequel to Sanctuary in which nursemaid Nancy Mannigoe is sentenced to hang for the murder of Temple Drake's infant daughter. Temple, now married to Gowan Stevens, tries to convince her husband's uncle, lawyer Gavin Stevens, to save Nancy from execution.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In narrative prose sections preceding each of the play's three acts, Faulkner details some of the early history of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, and the state of Mississippi. His collaboration with Williams would eventually grow into a love affair.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In August 1950, Faulkner received word that the Swedish Academy had voted to award him and Bertrand Russell as corecipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, Russell for 1950 and Faulkner for the previous year. At first he refused to go to Stockholm to receive the award, but pressured by the U.S. State Department, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, and finally by his own family, he agreed to go.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; On December 10, he delivered his acceptance speech to the Academy in a voice so low and rapid that few could make out what he was saying, but when his words were published in the newspaper the following day, it was recognized for its brilliance; in later years, Faulkner's speech would be lauded as the best speech ever given at a Nobel ceremony.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In it, Faulkner alluded to the impending Cold War and the constant fear, "a general and universal physical fear," whose consequence was to make "the young man or woman writing today forget the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The artist, Faulkner said, must re-learn "the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." He concludes on an optimistic note: "I decline to accept the end of man.. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things.. 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."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; On June 17, Faulkner was injured by a fall from a horse. In constant pain, he signaled something was wrong when he asked on July 5 to be taken to Wright's Sanatarium in Byhalia.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though he had been a patient there many times, he had always been taken there before against his will.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His nephew, Jimmy, and Estelle accompanied him on the 65-mile trip to Byhalia, where he was admitted at 6 p.m. Less than eight hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 1962 - the Old Colonel's birthday - his heart stopped, and though the doctor on duty applied external heart massage for forty-five minutes, he could not resuscitate him. William Faulkner was dead of a heart attack at the age of 64.

The Sound and the Fury

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; It is regarded as a Southern Gothic novel, a subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The Southern Gothic author usually avoids perpetuating Antebellum stereotypes like the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman, or the righteous Christian preacher. Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a more modern and realistic manner - transforming them into, for example, a spiteful and reclusive spinster, or a white-suited, fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is "The Grotesque" - this includes situations, places, or stock characters that often possess some cringe-inducing qualities, typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness - but enough good traits that readers find themselves interested nevertheless. While often disturbing, Southern Gothic authors commonly use deeply flawed, grotesque characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects of Southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralistic.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; It is Faulkner's fourth novel, his first true masterpiece, and many consider it to be his finest work. It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his "most splendid failure." Depicting the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into four parts.

Section 1: April 7th, 1928

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The first section is told from the point of view of Benjy Compson, a 33 year old idiot, and recounts in flashbacks the earliest events in the novel. As an idiot, Benjy is the key to the novel's title, which alludes to Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His language is simple: sentences are short, vocabulary basic. Reading this section is profoundly difficult, however, because the idiot has no concept of time or place - sensory stimuli in the present bring him back to another time and place in his past, instantly and without warning (except for a change in typeface from Roman to italic):

"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."

Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted. Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You dont want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.

"It's too cold out there." Versh said. "You dont want to go outdoors."
"What is it now." Mother said.
"He want to go out doors." Versh said.
"Let him go." Uncle Maury said.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Most of his memories concern his sister, Caddy, who is the central character in the novel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Benjy's earliest depicted memory, from 1898 (when Benjy was three years old), establishes the essence of her character-the children are ignorant of the death of their grandmother, "Damuddy," and Caddy is the only Compson child brave enough to climb the pear tree and look through the window at the funeral wake while her brothers stand below, gazing up at her muddy drawers, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Most of Benjy's other memories also focus on Caddy, who alone among the Compsons genuinely cared for Benjy. Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she uses perfume (1905), when she loses her virginity (1909), and her wedding (1910). Benjy also recalls his name change (from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his brother Quentin's suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate which lead to his being castrated, also in 1910.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Reading Benjy's section is difficult. There are two characters named "Maury" - Benjy before 1900 and Mrs Compson's brother, "Uncle Maury" Bascomb - and there are two Quentins - Benjy's suicidal brother and Caddy's illegitimate daughter.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; We can get some sense of the time by noting who is taking care of Benjy. Three black servants take care of Benjy at different times: Versh when Benjy is a small child, T.P. when Benjy is approximately 15 years old, and Luster in the present, when Benjy is 33.

Section 2: June Second, 1910

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The second section recounts the story from Quentin's perspective. Even though the present-day of this section is almost 18 years prior to the present-day of Benjy's section, it follows the chronological development of the novel. While many of Benjy's recollections are of their early childhood, most of Quentin's flashbacks record their adolescence, particularly Caddy's dawning sexuality. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's section takes place on the day he commits suicide, and in the present we follow his wanderings around Boston (he is a student at Harvard University) as he fastidiously prepares for death.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Like Benjy, he too is obsessed with the past and frequently lapses into flashbacks. Unlike the discrete narratives of Benjy's multiple memories, however, Quentin's are much more fragmentary - a repeated (and usually italicized) word or phrase early in his section often recurs later with greater detail and embellishment. Quentin's flashbacks also are much more intellectual than Benjy's. Whereas Benjy records mainly sensual impressions, Quentin more often delves into more abstract issues such as character motivation, guilt, honor, and sin.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin begins his section by contemplating time, even breaking the hands off his watch in a futile attempt to "escape" time. Another minor obsession Quentin has throughout his section is with shadows; the word "shadow" is repeated constantly throughout his section (thus recalling Shakespeare's image of a "walking shadow" in the soliloquy alluded to by the novel's title).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Alone among the present-day Compsons, Quentin still feels pride in his family's noble and glorious past, but he recognizes that today nothing remains of that past; it is mere shadow, and he is merely a "poor player" strutting and fretting, powerless to achieve anything of serious importance.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Part of Quentin's mental perturbation arises from his father's deep cynicism and nihilism; much of his section is a sort of inner dialogue with his father, in which Quentin hopes to prove his father wrong. In fact, his suicide may be just that - his escape from time - for Mr. Compson has told Quentin that as time passes, Quentin will forget his horror, which is unacceptable to Quentin because forgetting would render his horror meaningless, and so he escapes time in the only way he can, by drowning himself.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The source of Quentin's horror is Caddy. Looking back to antebellum views of honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity, Quentin cannot accept his sister's growing sexuality, just as he cannot accept his father's notion that "virginity" is merely an invention by men.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Most of his flashbacks concern directly his involvement in Caddy's sexual maturing. Quentin proposes a suicide pact with Caddy, but ultimately he cannot go through with it.

Section 3: April Sixth, 1928

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; This section is told by the third Compson brother, Jason, and is set on Good Friday. Unlike his brothers, Jason is much more focused on the present, offering fewer flashbacks, though he does have a few and he refers frequently to events in the past.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The tone of Jason's section is set instantly by the opening sentence: "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say." Jason is a sadist, and his grim section reveals just how low the Compson family has sunk - from Quentin's obsessions over heritage and honor and sin to Jason's cruelty, complaints, and scheming.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; This section reflects a rough chronological advancement - the focus now is not on Caddy herself (though she does appear in a few flashbacks and she often is the subject of Jason's pointed remarks) but rather on her daughter, Quentin, who came to live with the Compsons, following Caddy's divorce and who is now entering into adult sexuality.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Much of Jason's section is about his trying to track her down when she skips school to be with a man associated with the circus then in town. Among the "discoveries" in this section are that Quentin drowned himself (the suicide itself was not depicted in Quentin's section), that Benjy is a "gelding," that Caddy was divorced and that her daughter, also named Quentin, has come to live with the Compsons. Other things, too, are revealed more clearly: Mrs. Compson's hypochondria, Mr Compson's alcoholism and nihilism, and especially, Jason's meanness and greed. For years, Caddy has been sending money to her daughter, and since Mrs. Compson has forbidden Caddy's name from being mentioned in the house, she has likewise forbidden her money. To overcome this hurdle, Jason gives Mrs. Compson duplicates of Caddy's checks (for Mrs. Compson to ceremoniously burn) while he cashes the actual checks and pockets the money, giving little or none of it to his niece.

Section 4: April Eighth, 1928    

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The fourth and final section is told from an omniscient viewpoint. It is sometimes known as "Dilsey's Section" because of her prominence in this section, but she is not the sole focus in this section - a long sequence follows Jason as he pursues his niece, who has stolen about $7,000 from him.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The focus here is entirely upon the present-day, Easter Sunday, and to that end, all traces of Caddy, including her daughter and even the very mention of her name, have been removed. The two main narratives presented in this section are fairly straightforward: Jason's pursuit of his stolen money and his inevitable come-uppance when he insults the wrong man in Mottson; and Dilsey's attendance at an Easter church service, at which a preacher from St. Louis, Reverend Shegog, delivers a sermon which stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. As she says, following the service, "I've seed de first en de last ... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin."

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; As the novel ends, the two narratives again converge: Luster has secured permission to drive Benjy to the graveyard, and both he and Jason arrive at the courthouse square in Jefferson at about the same time. But Luster goes past a Confederate soldier on the "wrong" side, which causes Benjy to start crying. Jason approaches, hits Luster, and tells him to take Benjy home. And thus, the novel ends: "[Benjy's] broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place."

Background

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited below:

I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section One. I tried it with another brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself-the fourth section- to tell what happened, and I still failed.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner added a fifth attempt to tell Caddy Compson's story in 1945, when he wrote an "Appendix" to the novel to be included in The Portable Faulkner then being assembled for Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; "I should have done this when I wrote the book," Faulkner told Cowley. "Then the whole thing would have fallen into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle when the magician's wand touched it." In the Appendix, titled "Compson 1699-1945", Faulkner offers some additional glimpses into Compson family lore, both from the clan's aristocratic past and in the years following the dates in the novel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Before Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he had written a book which he thought was to be the book that would make his name as a writer. He wrote his publisher, "I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest best book you'll look at this year, and any other publisher." That manuscript was Flags in the Dust, and it would not be published until eleven years after Faulkner's death.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Later, Faulkner would say it was the novel he felt most "tender" toward because it had caused him "the most grief and anguish."

Structure, Technique, and Criticism

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; None of Faulkner's novels has generated as much critical response as The Sound and the Fury.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; There are some things on which critics agree. Few dispute that the novel depicts a "tragedy," the decline of the Compson family. There is agreement too that much of the novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character's unadorned thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way our minds actually work.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Themes critics continuously note in the novel are order, honor, sin. And nearly all critics consider it a technical masterpiece for the way Faulkner incorporates four distinct narrative modes in telling the story of a little girl with muddy drawers.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Nearly every reader agrees that Caddy Compson is a key, if not the key character in the novel, though critics differ in how prominent her role should be. Much has been made, too, of the religious backdrop of the story. The present-day setting of Easter has led some critics to question whether Benjy is some ironic modern-day Christ figure - his age (thirty-three), in particular, is suggestive of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. Still others view parallels between Dilsey and the "suffering servant" of Isaiah.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The first three sections are narrated in a technique known as stream of consciousness, in which the writer takes down the character's thoughts as they occur to him, paying little attention to chronology of events or continuity of story line.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The technique is the most marked in the first section, wherein Benjy's mind skips backward and forward in time as he relives events from the past while simultaneously conducting himself in the present.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's section is slightly more ordered, although his agitated state of mind causes him to experience similar skips in time.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Jason's section is almost totally chronological, much more structured than the first two.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In order to make reading easier, Faulkner at one time suggested printing it in colored ink in order to mark the different time periods, but this was too expensive. Instead, in the first section, he writes some sentences in italics in order to signal a shift in time. Even with these italics, however, the story is difficult to read.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Not much happens in the three days in which the novel is mainly set; instead the stream of consciousness narration allows the reader to experience the history of the Compson family and step into the lives of this dwindling Southern family. The troubled relationships of the family are at once mundane and sweepingly tragic, pulling the reader into its downward spiral.

Calvinistic Visions of Time and Humanity

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Influenced by the Calvinistic South that surrounded him, Faulkner created a Compson clan that reflected basic Calvinistic tensions.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Calvinism in The Sound and the Fury gives each Compson brother, as well as Dilsey, a different time structure in which to live. The three Compson brothers and Dilsey each have an individual vision of humanity closely linked with their sense of Calvinism and time.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A distinction must be made between theological Calvinism and pragmatic, Southern Calvinism. Theological Calvinism traditionally presents a vision of humanity that is depraved, destined, and dealing with the ramifications of Original Sin.  Perry Westbrook, in his book Free Will and Determinism in American Literature, sums it up well:

Man after the fall is evil.  He is not deprived of will; he simply is incapable of willing anything but evil.  He wills as he chooses, but his choice is determined by his sinful nature.man sins willingly through his corrupt nature, not by exterior compulsion.  The corrupt will, indeed, creates its own necessity. This does not mean, however, that humans should not struggle to lead godly lives or pursue conversion in themselves or others. Indeed, the outward fight for godliness is a sign of being of the elect, and the effort of the will is necessary for conversion.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; American Calvinism, while keeping traditional Calvinistic principles at its core, modified its tenets to stress conversion more than predestination, grace more than punishment.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; While Calvin's teachings were preached emphatically from the pulpits, its greatest influence was in the culture it created, one where God was seen as having blessed the Chosen by giving them earthly gifts, where defiance of moral codes (especially in a sexual manner) resulted in social castigation, and where the sins of the fathers did, indeed, rest on the third and fourth generations. Society determined what, exactly, these sins were.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Scotch-Irish settlers and Northern American migrants readily grafted Calvinism into the American South. Baptist and Methodist denominations adopted the notions of free will held by their Presbyterian counterparts, in part because it allowed them to justify slavery, as the absolute power of God meant that slavery was "His will and His responsibility". Many Southern churches severed ties with the North (some did so because of the slavery issue), creating an even stronger strain of Calvinism in the South. Fletcher writes that the

typical southerner saw his position as one providential trust, analogous to that of Jehovah, who had become a God of battle with a flaming sword. The doctrine of the elect, when projected into the secular world, meant that these southern Protestants were the Chosen-the instruments to carry out God's plan for instructing black men in the Gospel.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though the Enlightenment modified Southern Calvinism (much to the church's chagrin), the notions of original sin and depravity were never allowed to leave the Southerner's framework. Grace was believed to be able to cleanse one's sins, thus making salvation desirable, but the belief that few would ultimately benefit from this grace led to a focus on the vengeful God of the Old Testament in place of the God of mercy and love of the New.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though Faulkner was ambiguous about his personal faith, he was raised in a fairly religious family, with his great-grandfather expecting him to have memorized a new Bible verse each morning. He was linked to many different denominations, having been baptized into the Methodist church, married in a Presbyterian chapel, and buried by the Episcopal church.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's literature seems to reflect the world he saw around him (of his writing about the South, Faulkner said "I have tried to escape and I have tried to indict").

     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In literature, Calvinism traditionally stresses external law (most notably, the Ten Commandments), portrays a struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and contrasts free will and destiny. In addition to violence, sexual sins are often portrayed as meriting severe punishment, as in the Old Testament they are among the most unclean of sins.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The fundamental Calvinistic point in The Sound and the Fury is that we find, in each of the main characters, a soul that acts in free will on its perverted desires, though it is impossible to imagine them doing something else. There is a clear division between the elect and the damned, Dilsey belonging to the former category and the Compsons to the latter. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's Calvinism reflects his belief that "human life is perpetually meaningful and interesting," as the Calvinist creates tragedy by showing how far from the ideal humans can fall. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The notion of progress, so important in traditional American society, becomes meaningless when presented in a Calvinistic framework, because the state of the soul is the only thing that can have purpose.  Faulkner's use of a Calvinistic framework thus imbues the text with meaning that it would otherwise lack, as it forces the reader to look at the individual soul of each character rather than judging them by worldly standards.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner's use of Calvinism extends beyond thematics in The Sound and the Fury.  The story of the degeneration of the Compson family passes through one crazed, streaming mind into another, until we reach the fourth and final section, where the reader is given a glimpse of the life of Dilsey on Easter Sunday. Each major section of the novel is distinguished by how time is perceived by the narrating character, leading to remarkably different views of humanity and the future.

     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;   

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Cleanth Brooks, in his book William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, comments that unless each male Compson "can look ahead to the future, he is not free. The relation that the three Compson brothers bear to the future and to time in general has everything to do, therefore, with their status as human beings." Thus the Compson brothers' relationship to the future, to the world around them, to their concepts of freedom, and to the way they view themselves is related to their sense of time.  More precisely, their sense of time is related to their vision of humanity, and it is this vision that reflects various specific degrees of Calvinism.     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Benjy's section is the most confusing and difficult for the reader. For Benjy, time exists not in the traditional states of past, present, and future, but rather as a chaotic mix of those states, creating the sensation that his life progresses in a cyclical, rather than linear, motion. And while time is of great concern to the reader in Benjy's section (we do, as Sartre claimed, want to place all of the events of Benjy's life in order, though we know this is then not the same story that Faulkner wrote), Olga Vickery has persuasively argued that Benjy exists outside of time, removed from the limits of this world.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Benjy's place in time is very defined, however, when studied in the context of the family's relationship to him.  When Benjy is four, the family finally accepts the fact that he is mentally handicapped.  For Caroline Compson, this marks the beginning of the family's doom, so much so that her son's name must be changed from Maury, a Bascomb family name, to Benjamin, the Biblical lastborn son of Jacob.  Faulkner intentionally mixed up several Old Testament stories in referring to Benjy's name, taking "Benjamin the child of mine old age" from the story of the birth of Isaac, and "Benjamin the child of mine old age held hostage into Egypt" from the actual story of Benjamin, beloved son of Jacob, who was kept from his father by his brother Joseph in Egypt when there was a famine in Canaan (56, 108).When asked by a student at the University of Virginia if the mistake was Faulkner's or Caroline's, Faulkner answered the question with "Is there anybody who knows the Bible here?"  The response indicated that the student "looked it up and Benjamin was held hostage for Joseph."  Faulkner replied with, "Yes, that's why I used them interchangeably," indicating that he wished for the weight of the Old Testament combined, rather than individual stories, to rest upon certain elements of The Sound and the Fury (Gwynn 18).  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Just as Faulkner wished for Benjy's name to indicate a mixture of love and sorrow, joy and grief, Benjy becomes for his mother a symbol of his fallen family, a once-loved last son turned into a measure by which the outside world can see the family's doom. Indeed, Benjy is Caroline's "punishment," and he represents the end of prosperity and social standing for the Compsons (65).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The lastborn Compson, the very symbol of his family's doom, is in fact the least cursed in the Calvinistic sense, for he has no sense of impending destruction or future calamity.  Benjy can neither be saved nor cursed, for his present is the past and his future is simply not thought of.  Faulkner constructed a place for Benjy that exists without the sense of time.  Just as Benjy has no knowledge of the progression of time, he is "incapable of good and evil because he had no knowledge of good and evil," as stated by Faulkner in an interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel (233).  Thus Benjy is ultimately neutral to Calvinism, though he is surrounded by a world that insists upon it.  He does not adhere to the Southern social norms, has no sense of destiny, cannot progress financially or otherwise, and is, quite simply, a stuck cog in the Compson family wheel.  Because he has no sense of the progression of time, he is bound to the same stories, repeated over and over, and neither he nor his family can ever progress to an ending, a resolution of past problems.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; As the reader searches to make sense of Benjy's garbled thinking, it becomes obvious that Benjy struggles in telling the story not only because of his mental capacity, but also because of the story he has to tell.  His section is a warning of the rest of the story to come, telling us of the irresolution of the Compson family and the lack of ending that each section brings.  Because of this, it is even more difficult for Benjy to tell the story in a linear fashion.  Benjy's section is repetitive in word choice and thematics, which hinders progression, if not making it impossible.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; For the Compsons, Benjy represents degeneration, a regression that cannot be overcome.  As long as Benjy is alive, he is reminder to his family of their fall.  During the Easter weekend in which most of the novel takes place, Benjy turns 33, the age of the crucified Christ.  In the traditional Christian view of salvation, one must recognize that Christ came to save sinners, and that all are sinners.  In accepting salvation, Christians recognize that they are in need of such a thing.  Though Benjy does not act as a savior to the Compson family (indeed, we learn from the appendix that he spends the remainder of his life locked up in a mental hospital), he is at once both innocent of sins and a constant reminder of them.  Benjy's role as being simultaneously outside of time (in his concept of reality) and a static reminder of it (in his family's concept of reality) is similar to the role of Christ.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though Christ-like in being both transcendent and bound by time, Benjy does not adhere to the Christian notion that all are sinners.  Through his eyes, we see that Caddy can be both stained and pure, "smelled like trees" and not, for he does not perceive her as progressing linearly down a path of destruction.  She is complicated, mixed up, and his past remembrances of her purity are just as strong as those where he notes that she is impure.  Benjy's sense of time allows Caddie to be both fallen and saved, and this contrasts strongly with the rest of the family's Calvinistic rigidity, which rests on binaries:  saved/fallen, good/bad, clean/stained.  Caroline Compson obviously subscribes to this line of thought:  Jason is viewed as her "salvation" from Benjy's "punishment," and she states that "there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or not" (65).  Both Mr. Compson and Quentin, as Warwick Wadlington notes, "tend to experience difference as contradiction, multiplicity as a stalemated war between 'impure properties.'.A universe of antagonisms is formed, all divided and subdivided, as awareness focuses on each, into further bifurcations of 'A and not-A'" (362).  Quentin, Caddy's daughter, tells Jason that "I'm bad and I'm going to hell" (119).  She has already decided that she is not a lady (proving Mrs. Compson's binaries correct), and she will follow the path of her sinful mother.     

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Benjy's vision of humanity allows for the unallowable in the Calvinistic society in which the Compsons live.  Benjy does use binaries in terms of making distinctions between Caddy and not-Caddy, but his binaries do not rest on simple moral judgments.  Though Caddy does smell like trees and then not, it is important to note that these two distinctions are mixed up in Benjy's mind:  Caddy never exists only as a bad girl, for his sense of time allows him to remember her as one who did-and who does, for Benjy-smell like trees.  He sees that people are not simple binary opposites, and he doesn't view life as a simply moving forward to progressions or damnation, but he instead attempts to view the whole picture.  Though he is concerned with Caddy's blatant sexual misconduct, he does not damn her to hell for it.  He is an idiot, and yet he is possibly the sanest Compson, capable of viewing people holistically.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; However, it is important to remember that Benjy does not (and cannot) see himself as a savior or view his family as needing such a thing.  He views people through the eyes of innocence, and his discernment of his family's action is limited.  Even when he can perceive, he can only remember having "tried to say," and not actually saying (33).  Benjy can hear of the family's doom through the comments of others, and when Roskus says that "Taint no luck on this place.I seen the sign and you is too" one wonders how much of that Benjy understands (19).  Benjy sees the mud that is staining his family, but he cannot articulate what that mud is, nor can he tell the family of his complete picture of Caddy.  In the end, Benjy's message is muted.    

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner carefully places Quentin, perhaps the most seemingly Calvinistic character of all of the Compsons, right after the doomless and timeless Benjamin.  Rather than being indifferent to time, Quentin is obsessed with it, watching shadows, breaking watches, dividing his day into clear sections.  Moreover, Quentin is obsessed with what time brings, reflecting heavily on the doom time carries for his family and the inevitable suicide time will lead him to commit.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's section is less difficult than Benjy's, but it has its own unique challenges for the reader.  Quentin is not waiting for a story to unfold or to happen, he is merely going over the things in his life that have caused him to decide to kill himself.  For Quentin, there is no more choice, no more action, only the need to fulfill some pre-decided destiny.  As Sartre states,

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The coming suicide which casts its shadow over Quentin's last day is not a human possibility; not for a second does Quentin envisage the possibility of not killing himself.  The suicide is an immobile wall, a thing which he approaches backwards, and which he neither wants to nor can conceive.  (269)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Time is both obsessed over and useless in Quentin's framework, as he has already found a method by which he can transcend it.  Once he hit upon his solution, suicide, there is no possibility that he can conceive of an existence that would force him to linger in time any longer.  Escaping time allows him to enter an eternity he has constructed for himself using Calvinistic principles.     636p1524g ;    

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Cleanth Brooks notes that Quentin could be called one of Faulkner's Puritans, and certainly there is no doubt that his rage at Caddy's sexuality appears quite puritanical (Brooks 331). Calvinistically, there are few greater sins than that of sexual immorality, and his strong reaction is in keeping with the Old Testament (and Old South) notions of family honor.  Indeed, in the appendix to The Sound and the Fury, Quentin is one "who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor" (207).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; But we also know that Quentin Compson is more complex than a Calvinistic figure who desires punishment for his sister.  Quentin is not content with simply condemning Caddy to hell for eternity because of her sins.  Moreover, Quentin desires permanent unity with Caddy, rather than separation.  By constructing an almost plausible story of incest, Quentin is able to use the very Puritanism that sustains his sense of order into a thing that will jointly condemn his sister and himself to hell for eternity.  In the appendix, we learn that Quentin

loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some Presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment:  he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires. (208)  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin longs for resolution, for ending, and for a future unity with his sister.  His sense of Calvinistic doom allows him to live June second as a day that has been already resolved, and his Puritanism almost convinces him that an eternal hell will be waiting for him.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; However, as John Matthews comments, Quentin's very actions destroy any sense of resolution in his section.  Matthews states, "The suicide is the great unspoken fact of his monologue-a finality important because it eternalizes the present by 'unthinking' the future" (385).  Though his physical life has found an ending, his future spiritual life, one that he has pinned all his hopes upon, will remain forever unknown to the reader.  We wonder if his ending was merely that, an ending, or if he somehow found the hellish existence he was longing for.  Moreover, Quentin's suicide drives his family to further despair and decay.  For Caroline, and the rest of the Southern world, it is yet another indicator that the Compson family is on a downward spiral.  Rather than creating a sense of resolution, Quentin's suicide is one more sign of the growing dispersion of the family.    

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; It is important to remember that Quentin's fabricated Calvinism is one that can create a timeless order out of the chaos of his life, not one that is tied to religious faith.  He lacks a personal relationship with God, any notion of the redeeming qualities of Christianity (he is, after all, only using it to damn himself to hell), and there is no sign that Christian rituals play a part in his life.  However, he is well versed in the Bible (much like Faulkner), and different Biblical passages randomly stream in and out of his head throughout his section.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Most of Quentin's thoughts on religious figures are wrapped up in how they affect time.  He repeats his father's notion "That Christ was not crucified:  he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels," implying that time wears away everyone, though, ironically, time itself is eternal (49).  Quentin ponders the second coming of Christ, thinking that "the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up.  It's not when you realize that nothing can help you-religion, pride, anything-it's when you realize that you don't need any aid" (51).  And perhaps his vision of the inept Christ that ultimately cannot save him is the most telling of his spiritual situation, as there was only "sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not" (111).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's vision of humanity is one of continual loss with no hope of recovery.  His thoughts continually return to his childhood, and it impossible not to notice that the only happy memories Quentin has are from playing with his siblings and black friends (later servants) as children, as Irving Howe notes (272).  Quentin's childhood is an Eden of sorts, complete with a tree, a serpent, and a pastoral setting.  The struggles between the races are not yet very evident, and Benjy's idiocy is not acknowledged.  Caddy's muddy drawers make a large impression on the mind of the young Quentin, and when she becomes "stained" sexually, Quentin's edenic youth has become a descent into hell.  Quentin relies heavily on the Christian plan of purity, fall, and punishment without the hope of salvation, redemption, and a place in heaven.  His life can only be one of loss, never again of gain, and his only escape is suicide.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's modified Calvinism causes him to see people as either cursed or blessed, with no room for change.  His doomed family, and the cause of this doom, is a cause of preoccupation, as he repeatedly tells and asks Caddy "theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault" (100).  The "fault" of the family, which on the surface is Caddy's sexual promiscuity and his feigned incest episode, seems to also rest on possible past sins of the family, such as slavery.[3]  For Quentin, time has become representative of a declining morality.  However, Quentin's father constantly berates Quentin's moralizing, telling him not to fight against time as "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" (49).  Ultimately, Quentin chooses not to fight his own battle, leaving his confusing Calvinistic construct for the "clean flame" he hopes awaits him.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Benjy is outside of time and therefore has no internal struggle with his destiny. Quentin is so bound by time that his future is nothing but unavoidable horror, and he seeks to transcend it.  Jason, the final Compson brother, is the only character truly struggling with the Calvinistic notion of fate and free will, and it is this struggle that causes Jason to spew his caustic bitterness on the people that surround him.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The stream-of-consciousness technique that Faulkner uses in Benjy's and Quentin's section is once more at work in Jason's part, though it is as different from the first two as they are from each other.  Jason's telling of the tale is more straightforward, with less diversion to side stories and less movement around in time. Jason's assessment of his family is much clearer than Quentin's:  Caddy and Quentin (her daughter) are bitches, Caroline is a sniveling pushover, Dilsey is a lazy maid, Benjy should be locked up, and his brother and his father both drowned in their liquid of choice.  Jason's problems do not rest in his ability to see the world around him clearly (albeit viciously); they lie instead in his reaction to this imperfect world.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Though Quentin is the figure who commits suicide, Donald M. Kartiganer believes that Quentin is only neurotic, though Jason is psychotic.  The difference lies in their ability to interpret the world around them:  Quentin fabricates a fable (incest) "in order to deal with a reality he cannot face.  That it is a fable is something he himself insists on.  Jason, however, confuses the real and the illusory, and is quite unaware of the way he arranges his own punishment" (336).  Jason's struggle between free will and predestination ultimately causes his psychosis, for "standing between him and reality is his need to hold on to two opposing views of himself:  one is that he is completely sufficient, the other is that he is the scapegoat of the world" (336).  Jason's belief that he alone is his own master, coupled with his sense of complete victimization, leads to an unresolvable tension.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A man who tries to be both victim and bully at once can never succeed at both, and Jason's life falls apart because he is ineffective in each role he tries on for size.  He cannot be the controlling person he wants to be, but neither can he accept what fate has handed him.  Indeed, when Jason realizes that his niece is outside of his control, he "could see the opposed forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that would be irrevocable" (191).  Quentin has taken away the only thing that compensated for Jason's lost job:  his hoarded money.  Originally promised financial gain through his sister's wedding, Jason's lost job represents the fate of being a Compson.  His cache of money represented his attempt at changing that fate.  Though time moves linearly for Jason, he is still dwelling on the lost job of 15 years past.  He cannot move forward until he deals with this, and Quentin's act of thievery forces him to bring together his notion of fate and will.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin Compson's relationship to time is one of a longing for dispossession:  he wishes for nothing more than to exist in a timeless state.  John Matthews argues convincingly that Jason, on the other hand, wants to possess time and claim it for its intrinsic financial value.  For a man who cannot find an intrinsic value in life, the only value he can place on it is one of money.  He is obsessed with obtaining, hoarding, and gambling with money, for there is no other means by which he can prove his humanity.  As Matthews comments, "Surely once source of Jason's commitment to his work is that it protests against suicides' announcement that time is worth nothing" (377).  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Jason is not unlike many social Calvinists of his day.  Not knowing whether they were saved or damned, it was believed that God would show His personal approval by granting them material things.  In this way their community, their family, and themselves would know that they were blessed by God and thus saved.  W. J. Cash asserts in his book The Mind of the South that in the South was the doctrine "which has always moved along with Calvinism everywhere:  that Heaven apportions its reward in exact relationship to the merit and goodness of the recipient-that both the mill-owners and their workmen were already getting what they deserved" (358).  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Financial gain is a tragic, if easy, way to assess the value of one's life, but for Jason it becomes the only way.  He sees humanity as being worthless, without redemption (nor requiring it), and lacking morality.  Ironically, while Jason obsesses about the sexual sins of Caddy and her daughter, Quentin's suicide and his father's alcoholism, he sees nothing wrong in the cruel way he treats the remainder of his family.  Those who lack morals are wrong not because of their particular crime, but because in each of the instances Jason is left to pick up the pieces:  he must raise Caddy's Quentin and then attempt to keep her off the streets in order to preserve the Compson name, he must assume the role of eldest son after Quentin kills himself, and he is all his mother feels she has left after her husband drowns himself in liquor.  While the reader (and Dilsey) can see that Jason is alienating those that surround him because of his actions, he thinks that he is attempting to save his family.    

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Jason struggles with understanding how fate and free will works in the lives of those who surround him:  Quentin is at once a product of being Caddy's daughter (she is, in Jason's eyes, "just like her mother") and is, at the same time, a girl who makes awful choices (135).  Thus, the only objective way to assess people (and himself) is by the money they have.  Ironically, Quentin, the niece he so despises, comes out on top.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Thus, among the Compson brothers, Faulkner has moved from Benjy, who merely lived in a Calvinistic world, to Quentin, who created a Calvinistic world, to Jason, who cannot understand how that world works and who chooses to seek meaning for his life outside of himself, through financial gain, rather than from within.  The only Compson that truly struggles with the notion of free will versus destiny, Jason's quest for resolving the two opposing forces results in him judging humans solely by their productivity.  Humans are only worth the air they breathe only if they are able to prove to society that they deserve that air.  Benjy is obviously just taking up space on earth, Quentin threw his chance at Harvard away, and Caddie not only lost her chance at a good life but she lost Jason's as well.  Jason feels that he is cursed by the family into which he was born and is responsible to.   When he scrounges for some sense of self-worth through his hoarded money, he is able to live, but when he loses his money he has nothing.  Jason has lost his self-worth, and his attempt to try to beat the fated path he was placed on is thwarted, once more, by fate in the form of Quentin.  Caddy has defeated him twice.  

Written in Faulkner's jarringly normal third-person voice, the fourth section portrays the life of Dilsey on Easter Sunday.  Dilsey, in all of the other sections, seems to be the only sane person in the novel, and Faulkner affirms her saneness by writing of her day in a smooth, linear fashion.  Olga Vickery writes of Dilsey's organizational abilities in the midst of chaos:

By working with circumstance instead of against it she creates order out of disorder; by accommodating herself to change she manages to keep the Compson household in some semblance of decency.  While occupied with getting breakfast, she is yet able to start the fire in Luster's inexplicable absence, provide a hot water bottle for Mrs. Compson, see to Benjy's needs and soothe various ruffled tempers.  All this despite the constant interruptions of Luster's perverseness, Benjy's moaning, Mrs. Compson's complaints, and even Jason's maniacal fury. (Vickery 288)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The order Faulkner gives to the fourth section is marked by a characteristic that all of the other sections lack:  the act of choosing to live in the present.  Benjy's section is fuller of past remembrances than it is of present-day occurrences.  Quentin is constantly recalling his life with Caddy, and he longs to change the past in order that his future will be with her, in "the clean flame the two of us more than dead" (74).  Jason does not waste his time longing to change the past, but he carries his bitterness over his lost job to the present.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Dilsey, however, does not spend much time recalling past occurrences.  She lived with the Compsons through all of their struggles, and indeed, she notes that she has "seed de first en de last" (185).  The past is not something Dilsey has forgotten, but it is not something to be dwelled upon.  She must live in the present, for nobody else in the Compson family is willing to do so.  As the Compson clock moves three hours behind, it is Dilsey who always knows the exact time.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Her ability to live in the present is possible by the fact that her scope of time is so much larger than the rest of the Compsons.  The Compsons are bound by the finite limits of life and death, and even when Quentin wishes to escape those limits and descend to hell, he doesn't really believe that this is possible.  Dilsey's past, however, is defined by the "ricklickshun of de lamb" (185).  The lamb is the only thing she needs to remember, and the blood of that lamb will atone for all of her past sins.  Her future is also already known, for she is certain, as she tells Quentin, that her name is in the book of life (38).  With her past sins and doubts and worries given to Christ and sanctified by his blood, and her future only bringing her closer to Him, Dilsey can live in the present with grace and peace.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Dilsey's faith is the true Christianity of the novel.  If she were to articulate it in theological terms (which she never would do), her faith would come across as being very Calvinistic as well.  Dilsey recognizes her sins and the sins of those around her, which is exemplified by her participation in the Easter Sunday church service where Rev. Sheegog repeatedly calls out "po sinner" and "O sinner" to the congregation (185, 185).  She lives with the assurance that she is one of the chosen, even telling Caddie that her name will "be in the Book, honey.Writ out" (38).  She knows that not all are chosen, and she believes in a hell, spoken of as the "darkness en de death everlastin upon de generations" in the church service (185).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; However, the most important Calvinistic characteristic that Faulkner gives Dilsey is a belief in grace.  Harold Douglas and Robert Daniel rightly point out that American Calvinism does not conceive of humankind as doomed to sin, as the path to redemption is always open (2).  It is this road that Dilsey thinks about during her church service, as she ponders the paths each Compson took away from that redemption.  The point Faulkner makes, however, is clear:  there is redemption, and one need not be a hero to obtain it.  In the midst of the Old Testament lined South, the New can prevail, and it is this story of Christ's love that we see in Dilsey's church.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; As Douglas and Daniel write, Faulkner's use of Calvinism creates "a creature alienated from his Creator by his own choice," and Dilsey sees this choice clearly in the sermon Rev. Sheegog preaches (12).  Sheegog moves deftly between the Old Testament and the New, bringing stories of slavery in Egypt to the enslaved, of the newborn babe Jesus to the children, of the redemption of Christ to the sinners.  The Compsons-and all of the Negroes-are in this last lot of people:  they are the thieves, the murderers, the women in labor, the people weeping over death, and the greedy souls awaiting salvation.  Eternity is presented clearly here:  

Dey kilt me dat ye shall live again; I died dat dem whut sees en believes shall never die.I sees de doom crack en de golden horns shoutin down de glory, en de arisen dead whut got de blood en de ricklickshun of de Lamb! (185)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Depravity is the state of all souls, but redemption is a possibility for all.  Dilsey can see that the Compsons (excluding Benjy) have no desire to obtain this redemption, and this makes their future (eternity in hell, which she believes in) all the more sad.  However, she merely wants to survive and bring the comfort to them in their present, though she realizes that their present is all they have, while she awaits eternity.  She disapproves of the renaming of Benjy, as it is a sign that he is not good enough for the Compsons, though she feels he is the only Compson who will transcend the boundaries of life.  Dilsey creates order in the household, and she protects Caddy's daughter Quentin, inwardly glad when Quentin finally escapes.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Just as her sense of time is much larger than that of the Compsons, Dilsey's notion of family is a larger one as well.  She is not bound by mere blood, for her family is made up of her Christian brothers and sisters.  Indeed, her own blood relations are a bit ambiguous, leading us to wonder if Frony is Dilsey's daughter, as some have claimed, or not.  She does not often speak affectionately to her family that surrounds her, for they are not her real kin, though they are unified by their last name.  However, she finds her true family as she sits in the midst of the church service, in the group of "breddren" and "sistuhn" that Rev. Sheegog calls out to, becoming unified through Christ with those who surround her (184).  Benjy is part of this family as well, the sole white man in the group of blacks, as Dilsey knows that "de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright or not" (181).  Her black friends whisper about Benjy's presence in the church, and a concerned Frony inquires why Dilsey must bring him along.  Aware that Benjy doesn't belong anywhere ("Trash white folks.thinks he aint good enough fer white church, but nigger church aint good enough fer him"), Dilsey knows that God will accept him into His family (181).  Dilsey's worldview allows her to transcend normal boundaries set by time, family boundaries set by humankind, and social boundaries set by the different races around her.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Her vision of time and humanity is wrapped up in her own words:  "I've seed de first en de last," Dilsey tells her daughter, "I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin" (185).  Dilsey's faith allows her to live in the present, for she knows from where she came, and her future is clear.  Her clear vision allows her to penetrate almost any situation in the Compson family, and her foresight especially pertains to Jason:  she knows he will burn up his free ticket long before he actually does it, and she sees that his niece will be safer if she escapes from him.  Her omniscient knowledge is perhaps most obvious when, after discovering Quentin's absence, she tells Mrs. Compson "Dar now.Didn't I told you she all right?" (176).  The meaning is lost on Caroline, but Dilsey understands that Quentin has left for a place where her family can no longer hurt her.  Dilsey is able to cope with all of the tumult because of her faith, and this allows her to endure, as Faulkner writes in the appendix.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In Benjy, Faulkner has created a world that is the antithesis of Calvinism: there is no concept of destiny or free will, no notion of man's sinfulness, no idea of grace.  There is acceptance, love, and a lack of decisive judgement.  The lack of analysis of the problems of humankind translates freely into a lack of coherency.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Quentin's section moves beyond this, creating a world in which damnation becomes the only solution to his problems.  Quentin's life is one of binary classifications, in which people are good or bad, clean or stained, saved or damned.  His family belongs to the latter category, and the only way he can think to reunite with Caddy is by making sure he is damned as well.  Quentin's constructed Calvinism allows him to envisage a world with Caddy, a paradise in the midst of the burning flames.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Jason's place in the novel marks the turning point, Calvinistically, from mere acceptance of destiny to a desire to change one's fate.  He is the Compson who is truly struggling with his destiny versus his free will, and his inability to accept his situation creates the unresolvable tension that leads him to insanity.  In having no sense of intrinsic self-worth, however, and no notion of grace in his framework, Jason can only find value in his life through financial pursuits.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; And, finally, we approach Dilsey, who in seeing the beginning and the end, has the only rational time structure of the novel.  Her Christianity is not constructed, is not a method for escape, and brings a larger scope of time to her rather than narrowing it.  While she does not view life around her with an air of naivety or a sense that good will always prevail, she has honest compassion for others in her soul.  However, the ending of the fourth section does not leave us with the hope that Dilsey feels.   

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The troubling thing about the ending of The Sound and the Fury is that, apparently, Jason wins.  He takes control of the horse, turns the carriage around, and once more establishes his headship of the Compson clan.  In the final sentence we see Benjy, calm as the "cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place" (199).  Under Jason's command we see order restored to chaos, Benjy's crazed vision of life reduced to smooth linearity.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; This linearity is not without its price, however.  We know from Jason's thoughts that his vision of the world is not a kind one, and we have reason to believe that his sense of time, order, and humanity will lead to harm.  Indeed, when we find out in the appendix that Benjy was sent to an asylum, we are not surprised.  In Dilsey, the prevailing figure of the fourth part of the novel, we saw a glimpse of grace, of atonement, of wholeness, and of peace.  Yet she is but one figure in a slew of many, and while she brings order to the Compson clan, she cannot affect their hearts.  Her Christianity is enough for her, but not for others, and this is tragic.  While Jason prevails over the last page of the novel, a sense of humanity is lost.  For the Christian, the question is asked:  why does Christ not prevail?  Why is Dilsey's faith ultimately inept in the world surrounding her?

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; These questions can be answered on a number of levels.  First and foremost, Faulkner was not interested in presenting a story of Christian salvation.  While his own remarks about the novel tend to be convoluted and contradictory, it is apparent that the Christian walk was of interest to him, but not to an extent that he felt it need prevail over all other beliefs.  Indeed, in his lectures at the University of Virginia, when asked, "would it be true.that you favor strongly individual rather than an organized religion?" he answered, "I do, always" (Gwynn 73).  Christianity was Dilsey's method of finding meaning, but for Faulkner, it was not the only way.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Yet it is apparent that, for a number of reasons, Faulkner was not content with the original ending.  He tinkered with the story for years afterward, adding two introductions four and five years after publication, and a detailed appendix 16 years after the writing of the original novel.  After all these changes, he still insisted that he was not satisfied, telling Jean Stein vanden Heuvel that The Sound and the Fury is "the book I feel tenderest towards.  I couldn't leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I'd probably fail again" (233).  Faulkner also makes it clear that Jason was "completely inhuman," whereas Dilsey "was a good human being.  That she held that family together for not the hope of reward but just because it was the decent and proper thing to do" (Gwynn 132, Faulkner 237).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; His clarifications of the novel lessened Jason's control and gave power to Dilsey.  In the second introduction written for the novel, Faulkner alludes to Dilsey's strength:  "There was Dilsey to be the future, to stand above the fallen ruins of the family like a ruined chimney, gaunt, patient and indomitable; and Benjy to be the past" (231).  Though the reader receives a vision of Jason dominating the final scene, Faulkner saw Dilsey as being the true victor.  And in his appendix, where Caroline dies five years after the end of the novel, Caddy is left to the Nazis, her daughter Quentin simply "vanished," Benjy is committed to an institution, and Jason is "emancipated" from all who surround him, left only with his money, Dilsey and her family are the only people who "endure" (215).  In Faulkner's revisionings, Dilsey is left standing as all others fall away.     636p1524g ;  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; However, apart from all of Faulkner's additions and comments, we are ultimately left with the novel alone.  Here it is possible to differentiate between the story the text presents and the story the reader removes from that text.  Jason's apparent victory is neither desired nor enjoyed by the reader.  Perhaps, in the midst of this tragedy, we infer the real meaning of life:  that Dilsey's view of society is the one we would want.  It is also important to remember that, without Dilsey, we do not know where the Compsons would be.  Though Jason dominates the ending, Dilsey (and her family under her command) brings order to the Compson household from the opening of the novel.  Faulkner's literal ending allows Jason to take control of the household, but the reader can lift from that a construct of hope more powerful than Jason could ever hope to have.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Like Quentin, Faulkner has constructed a reality for us:  one that is devoid of hope, full of suffering, and that gives humanity no future.  We are left watching the Compson family burn in their own clean flame, their livelihoods, compassion, and humanity gone.   The temporal time that succeeds for Jason ultimately fails.  Faulkner once stated that he wanted the appendix to be simply entitled "COMPSON.  1699-1945," because it was to be an obituary of the clan (SF 203).  Ultimately, by only bringing death to the Compsons, Faulkner has shown us that the Compsons' vision of humanity has no hope for a future.  Much like Quentin, he has constructed a reality for a family where no one can possibly survive.  However, whereas Quentin's reality (and the Compsons') has no hope or desire for hope, Faulkner does.  Though Jason has a momentary victory at the end of the novel, he is doomed, and we know from Faulkner's speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize that he does not envisage doom for humanity.  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner declined "to accept the end of man.I believe that man will not merely endure:  he will prevail.He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance" (Faulkner 121).  In the end, Dilsey, with her vision of eternity, not only endures, but also prevails.    

Shakespeare above all

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; William Faulkner acknowledged the influence of many writers upon his work: Twain, Dreiser, Anderson, Keats, Dickens, Conrad, Balzac, Bergson, and Cervantes; but the one writer that he mentioned as a constant influence was William Shakespeare. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Shakespeare was the standard by which Faulkner would judge his own creativity. Faulkner once noted: "I have a one-volume Shakespeare that I have just about worn out carrying around with me." In one of his last interviews shortly before his death in 1962, Faulkner said of all writers, "We yearn to be as good as Shakespeare."

Faulkner and Shakespeare

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The parallels in the lives and careers of the two writers are remarkably striking:

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both were born in provincial small towns but found their eventual success in metropolitan cities (London, respectively New York and Hollywood);

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both had a great love of nature and the rural outdoors;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  neither received a great deal of formal education;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both started out as poets but shortly turned to other narrative forms, Faulkner to fiction and Shakespeare to drama;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both had extramarital affairs that were reflected in some of their writings;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  each wrote both tragedies and comedies, and in each case their final work was a comedy, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Faulkner's The Reivers;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  a number of dominant themes are common to both writers, including the imaginative use of historical materials, the incorporation of both tragic and comic views of life, and the paradoxical tension between fate (in Faulkner's case, determinism) and free will;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both writers exhibit a fascination for experimental form and language, flouting conventional rules to create new narrative structures and delighting in neologisms, puns, and other forms of word play;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  both writers were acutely interested in the paradoxical relationship of life and art.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Shakespeare's influence may be grouped according to the following categories:

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  (1) specific Faulkner allusions to Shakespeare's plays and characters;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  (2) a common interest in historical analogues;

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  (3) an emphasis on the theme of the immortality of art

Allusions

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; The most famous allusion to Shakespeare in all of Faulkner is the title of his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury.  As Faulkner readily acknowledged, the title phrase was borrowed from Macbeth's famous speech:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.  (5.5: 19-28)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Not only Faulkner's title phrase, "sound and fury," but also the opening chapter of Faulkner's novel which is narrated through the consciousness of a mentally retarded person, thus "told by an idiot," and the second chapter which presents Quentin Compson very much as  "a walking shadow" seeking "dusty death," provide obvious links to this Shakespearean passage. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; As William A. Frye has demonstrated in his study of the bell imagery in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner's use of Shakespeare's play goes far beyond the points just mentioned.  Frye traces dozens of references to bells and chimes throughout Faulkner's text.  Linking these to Lady Macbeth's bell that provides the signal for Macbeth to murder Duncan ("I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell" [2.1:63-5]), Frye demonstrates that the bells in both Macbeth and The Sound and the Fury "denote not only time, but opportunities for choices, summonings, even, to choose" (27). 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In this connection, Faulkner appears to be using the Shakespearean pattern, much as Joyce used the Homeric in Ulysses, to ironically juxtapose the heroic, bold, if mistaken, choices of an earlier age with the indecision and impotence often associated with the early 20^th c.

Use of historical materials

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Shakespeare seldom invented an original plot, choosing rather to take familiar characters and events from older plays or historical chronicles, most notably Raphel Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland and Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and reworking them to suit his own dramatic purposes.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Faulkner, too, drew heavily upon history for his fictional materials, incorporating into his Yoknapatawpha narratives accounts of the settlement of the South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the racial patterns and conflicts of Jim Crow and segregation, and the displacement of an agrarian life style by mechanization and industrialization.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Neither was primarily interested in history as mere history. They both wrote in what Robert W. Hamblin has called "the past-present tense," that is, in a way that utilizes the past as an analogue to or even a commentary on the present situation. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; There can never be a definite demarcation between a literary work and its creator, between objectivity and subjectivity, or between the past as lived and the past as perceived by one looking back on it from the altered perspective of the present. One of the best illustrations of this point is Arthur Miller's great play, The Crucible, on the literal level a treatment of the mass hysteria evidenced in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 but through contextual parallels an expose of the McCarthyism that was rampant in America at the time Miller published the play, 1953.  There can be no denying that The Crucible is an "historical" play; but it would certainly be a mistake to view the play as merely or even primarily historical: the ultimate meaning of the play can be grasped only by placing the historical elements alongside the contemporary event--the McCarthy hearings--that provided the motivation for Miller's writing of the play.  In Miller's case, we know, the use of the past present tense was conscious and calculated; but modern theorists would argue that even had it been unconscious and coincidental, Miller's choice of historical subject and his treatment of it would still have been influenced by his present situation, that is, by his summons to appear as a witness before the Senate's Committee on Un-American Activities.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  While Shakespeare's main purpose in his repetitions of history was in all likelihood to tell a good story, or, more precisely, to elevate the old stories into poetic form, there can be little doubt that he was very much aware of the parallels between the historical narratives he chose to dramatize and his contemporary Elizabethan world.  To cite only two examples: think of Shakespeare's presentation in the great comedies of the pastoral life style that was disappearing with the development and spreading influence of the metropolitan culture of London; or, better, think of Shakespeare's obsession with the history of kingship, even the divine right of kings, at a time when the right to the throne of the contemporary wearers of the crown, first Queen Elizabeth and then King James, was continually being challenged and even threatened with insurrection.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  Perhaps the best example of Shakespeare's using the past as a mirror to contemporary events is Richard II.  Here Shakespeare deals with one of the most crucial episodes in English history, the deposing of King Richard by Henry Bolingbroke, afterwards King Henry IV.  This event had occurred in 1399, nearly 200 years before Shakespeare wrote about it; and from his later perspective Shakespeare knew that the ultimate outcome of Richard's overthrow was the long and tragic War of the Roses, the civil war between the royal houses of York and Lancaster that lasted for thirty years.  Before writing Richard II, Shakespeare had already written four plays about the War of the Roses--the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.  Now, having already dramatized the national calamity of the war, he explores the source of that conflict in Bolingbroke's usurpation of Richard's crown.  Yes, Shakespeare acknowledges in his play, Richard was a weak king, a dreamer and an aesthete, out of touch with his subjects; and Henry was a doer, a man of action, and the crowd's favorite--but there was still the huge question, towering large for Shakespeare and others of the Renaissance, of whether any degree of inefficiency or even wickedness could justify the overthrow of God's anointed ruler and the political chaos that would ensue.  As Richard states the case,

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  Not all the water in the rough, rude seas
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.  (3.2: 50-53)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  In the Deposition scene Shakespeare has Richard compare himself to the crucified Christ:

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;       636p1524g ;      636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;        636p1524g ;  . . . you Pilates
Have here delivered me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.  (4.1: 230-32)

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  Clearly, if Richard is Christ, then Henry is Judas, the political leaders Pilates, and the British populace the fickle mob that demanded the freeing of Barrabas and the crucifixion of Christ. 

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;  The issue of who is the rightful ruler is a universal question of British politics, but Shakespeare's interest in the question, as indeed the entire history of the War of the Roses, was being fueled by particular events of his own day, not unlike the way Arthur Miller's interest in the witchcraft trials was fueled by the McCarthy hearings, or our recent revival of interest in President Andrew Johnson's impeachment was brought about by the impeachment of President Clinton.  At the time Shakespeare wrote Richard II, the Henry-Richard conflict was being repeated in the opposition of the Earl of Essex to Queen Elizabeth.  Shakespeare was very close to, if not personally involved in, this issue, since his patron, the Earl of Southampton, was one of the leading supporters of Essex.  Modern audiences and readers may not be much aware of this parallel when they view or read Shakespeare's play, but the parallel would have been unmistakable to the Elizabethan audience.  We know that the parallel was obvious to both Essex and the queen.  In 1601, when Essex and his followers attempted to overthrow Elizabeth and place Essex on the throne, they arranged to have a performance of Richard II staged at the popular Globe Theatre the very night before the attempted coup--a kind of pep rally before the big game the following day.  When the coup failed, the conspirators were arrested; and in the trial that followed Essex was condemned to death and Southampton was imprisoned in the Tower, where he remained until the death of Elizabeth two years later.  One of the real mysteries in all these developments is how Shakespeare managed to escape censure or worse, since he was such a close personal friend of Southampton and thus probably a close acquaintance of Essex.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; We also know that Queen Elizabeth was acutely aware of the parallel being drawn between herself and Richard II.  "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" she is quoted as saying after the conspiracy trial was over; and her sensitivity to the issue was undoubtedly the reason that the Deposition scene in Shakespeare's play--where Henry actually takes the crown from Richard--was officially censored and thus omitted in the first printings of Richard II, not finding its way into print until after the accession of James I (Rowse 235).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; This question of kingship and right rule is at the very heart of so many of Shakespeare's plays, not only the two tetralogies of the Henrys and the Richards, but also the great tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and King Lear, and even many of the comedies such as Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Tempest.  There can be little doubt, I think, that this theme was of great concern for Shakespeare; and his relating it to both past and present situations--in other words, his effective use of the past-present tense--provided him a means of warning his age about the tragic lessons of history.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Like Shakespeare, Faulkner was an historical writer who courageously explored the past in his attempt to analyze and understand the present.  We see this approach operative in Faulkner on the level of both individual characters and Southern society as a whole.  The best example is Faulkner's most complex, and, many think, greatest, novel: Absalom, Absalom!.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;   Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! expands the story of the suicidal Quentin Compson from The Sound and the Fury of seven years earlier.  Set during the final year of Quentin's life, 1909-10, Absalom presents Quentin's desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to come to understand both himself and his native region.  In this quest for understanding and, indeed, salvation, Quentin displaces his own inner guilts and conflicts onto a legendary story that he has heard all his life, the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a rags-to-riches Southern planter who carved a plantation out of the Yoknapatawpha wilderness in the 1830s and sought to create a family dynasty, but who saw his dream eventually destroyed by a father-son conflict that parallels the tragic conflict from which Faulkner draws his title, the biblical account of the conflict between King David and his son Absalom.  In structuring the plot of his novel, Faulkner moves back and forth from the Quentin narrative of 1909-10 to the Supten narrative of the 1810s to the 1860s.  In analyzing these time shifts, however, and in seeking to determine whether the main character of the novel is Quentin Compson or Thomas Sutpen, critics typically overlook the novel's third time dimension, that is, the time of Faulkner, the creator of the novel, which is, of course, 1935-36, when the novel was being written.   Thus, not unlike the better-known novel published the same year, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Absalom, Absalom! is written in past-present tense: while an historical novel of Civil War days, it is also a novel about, and with a message for, the Great Depression.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;   And what is that message?  We can begin the search for an answer to that question, I think, by recognizing that Thomas Sutpen is a character type frequently found in American history and literature but one that in the 1930s was coming under increased scrutiny: an entrepreneurial, laissez-faire capitalist.  Like the real-life Benjamin Franklin and John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler and the fictional Poor Richard, Horatio Alger's Tattered Tom, and Jay Gatsby, Sutpen is born poor but, through ambition, industriousness, and good fortune (pluck and luck), rises to a position of tremendous wealth and status.  With the advent of the Great Depression, however, such character types, as indeed all the business practices of capitalism, were being called into question, the more so since the failures of the Great Depression appeared to be the logical consequences of the excesses of the all-too-recent robber barons and monopolists.  As Faulkner's novel demonstrates, it was not merely New Deal politicians like Franklin Roosevelt or Henry Wallace or socialistic writers like John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck who were questioning the American economic enterprise.  The characterization of Thomas Sutpen is a serious critique of the American Dream at a time of crisis when the traditional values and methods associated with that Dream were being challenged.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; In dramatizing the reasons for Sutpen's self-destruction, Faulkner stresses Sutpen's ruthless exploitation of other people in his quest to amass wealth and power.  He utilizes and brutalizes the slaves who build his mansion, and he holds a French architect in virtual imprisonment until the house is completed.  Sutpen marries twice,  in each case not for love but for financial and social  advancement.  A racist as well as a materialist, he rejects his first wife when he learns she is part-Negro, turns away from his door the son of that union, and eventually provides his white son with a motive to murder his mulatto half-brother.  As a sad, pathetic old man and a widower, with his plantation gone and his family dead or scattered, he seeks to revitalize his dream by seducing a poor-white teenaged girl in the hope of producing a male heir: when the child turns out to be a female, Sutpen rejects both the mother and the child with perhaps the cruelest words in the novel: "Well, Milly; too bad you're not a mare too.  Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable" (286).  "They did not think of love in connection with Sutpen," the reader is told early in the novel.  "They thought of ruthlessness rather than justice and of fear rather than respect, but not of pity or love" (43).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Treating Thomas Sutpen as Faulkner's 1930s portrait of capitalism without any redeeming social consciousness leads one to a very different interpretation of Quentin Compson's obsession with the Sutpen legend than is currently offered by critics.   While, like many Americans of every day and time, Quentin envies, perhaps even subconsciously admires, the boldness and the audacity of pragmatic doers and achievers like Sutpen, at the same time Quentin is an idealist, a believer in noblesse oblige, a defender of community and brotherhood and family loyalty and romantic love--indeed, a practitioner (to reverse the negative terms earlier applied to Sutpen) of justice rather than ruthlessness, of respect rather than fear, of pity and love.  Caught between such oppositions, the America of the 1930s sought to find itself--and Faulkner, just as Shakespeare had done with Richard II, employed an historical analogue to serve as a critique of the contemporary situation.   

Art and immortality

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; A third parallel between Faulkner and Shakespeare is a common interest in the paradoxical relationship between life and art.  Most artists have a heightened awareness, some obsessively so, of the tragic brevity of life and a concomitant, perhaps even consequent, desire to create works of art that will far outlast their creators' meager space of life and breath.  Picasso, we are told, was so fearful of death terminating his creativity that he would tolerate no mention of the word or any reminder of its harsh reality.  And Keats, dying of tuberculosis, penned his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," celebrating the capacity of art to survive and inspire others even centuries after the death of its creator--and thereby expressing his own hope that he as a poet might be as lucky as the anonymous maker of the urn.  It is not at all surprising that Faulkner and Shakespeare shared this interest in the mortality of the artist and the potential immortality of art.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Death seems to have been an obsession with Faulkner from an early age.  Perhaps this fear of death may have derived from his near demise from scarlet fever at age four or from his experience, at age nine, of watching his beloved grandmother ("Damuddy") destroyed by cancer.  Whatever its origin, death surfaces as a major subject in Faulkner's early poetry and prose and is seldom again absent from his work.  Indeed, among American writers only Edgar Allan Poe seems as obsessed as Faulkner with death, decay, corpses, and cemeteries.

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;    But an existential recognition of the tragic inevitability of death is only one--and not the most important--facet of Faulkner's handling of the subject.  For Faulkner the ultimate meaning is to be found in the heroic resistance to death, and from Thomas Sutpen's struggle against time and mortality in Absalom, Absalom! onward, this theme becomes an overt motif in Faulkner's work.  As Ernest Becker has convincingly argued in The Denial of Death, all individuals experience death anxiety and consequently long for immortality, whether natural or supernatural; but Faulkner contends that this psychological conflict is especially acute for the artist.  As he once said, "Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.  This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass" (LIG 253).  Perhaps Faulkner's most sublime expression of this idea is found in his Foreword to The Faulkner Reader (1954), in which he contends that the ultimate goal of any writer is "to uplift man's heart" by "saying No to death."  "Some day," Faulkner concludes, "[the writer] will be no more, which will not matter then, because isolated and itself invulnerable in the cold print remains that which is capable of engendering still the old deathless excitement in hearts and glands whose owners and custodians are generations from the air he breathed and anguished in" (ESPL 181-2).  

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; Given his deep concern for the nature and role of artists and art, it is not at all surprising that Faulkner frequently introduces into his works what might be termed "art surrogates," that is, particular objects that have survived from the past to evoke memories or thoughts of people and incidents from earlier times.  Predictably, a significant number of these art surrogates take a "literary" form, eliciting the response of a "reader."  There is, for example, in Absalom, Absalom! the letter that Judith Sutpen gives to Quentin Compson's grandmother, which Quentin's father, two generations later, interprets as Judith's compulsion "to make that scratch, that undying mark on the blank face of the oblivion to which we are all doomed" (127).  Other examples, presented by Faulkner in greater detail, are the commissary ledgers that Ike McCaslin reads in Go Down, Moses and the "story" evoked by the signature of Cecilia Farmer scratched into the windowpane of the Jefferson jailhouse in Requiem for a Nun.  All such surrogates express symbolically the same idea that Faulkner stated explicitly in one of his letters to Joan Williams, his lover and protégé: "That's the answer, the reason for it all, the one and only way on earth you can say No to death: the best, the strongest, the finest, the most enduring: to make something" (FAB 1461).

n     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ;     636p1524g ; We know less about Shakespeare's personal life and opinions than we do of Faulkner's, but a number of the sonnets clearly evidence the same mortality vs. immortality theme that we have been exploring in Faulkner.  These sonnets are addressed to one or more unidentified individuals whom Shakespeare loved dearly (whether patron, friend, or lover we cannot be quite sure), and they all set actual experience, "Where wasteful time debateth with decay / To change your day of youth to sullied night" (sonnet 15), against the poet's desire to write "eternal lines" (sonnet 18) in which the beloved will be made immortal:  "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," sonnet 18 concludes, "So long lives this and this gives life to thee."