The Sound and the Fury

Four tellings of one family’s fall, and the subtractive test asks whether any could go. None can. Benjy gives loss without understanding; Quentin understanding without the power to act; Jason the world of money without love; the fourth section the house seen at last from outside, with Dilsey. Each withholds what another gives, and Caddy, who has no section, exists only as their sum. Inside the first section the shifts of time are cued by sense, the fence, the golfers’ call of “caddie”, a smell, and none can be cut without the logic going. What holds the axis at 9.0: Quentin’s afternoon with the little Italian girl and the scene with Bland’s party run past their turn, and Jason’s monologue, required for its argument, repeats its grievances, the telegraph office, the cotton market, the money he is owed by the world, more often than the knowledge needs.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A family that lives by a code of the past, its name, a sister’s virginity, a dead grandeur, consumes its children, and the code’s last heirs are its idiot, its suicide and its petty tyrant. The one Compson who loves, Caddy, is cast out. Meanwhile the house is held up by the Black woman who serves it: “I’ve seed de first en de last”. The gentry’s obsession with time is shown as a sickness: Quentin twists the hands off the watch his father gave him. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: Dilsey and the Black household are seen from outside, their endurance made a meaning for the white family rather than a life entered; Caddy is never given a voice, by design but at a cost to what the book can know of her; and Benjy is used as an instrument more than known as a man.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Height comes often and in more than one key. The first section rises in flashes: Caddy in the branch with her muddy drawers, the children at the window on the night of their grandmother’s death, Benjy’s bellowing at the wedding. Quentin’s last day is a sustained dread, the more terrible for its calm: the shadow of the sash, the watch, the flatirons, the bridge, the careful brushing before he goes out. The fourth section has the book’s summit, the Easter sermon of the Reverend Shegog, a small man whose voice becomes his congregation’s, “de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb”, and Dilsey weeping openly on the road home. The close turns height to horror: Benjy’s bellow in the square until the carriage swings right and the world returns, “each in its ordered place.” Held below the top because Jason’s section, a quarter of the book, is flat by design, a comedy of grievance with no rise in it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Myth built, and built into the calendar. The book is set across Easter weekend: Jason’s Good Friday, Benjy’s Holy Saturday at thirty-three, and an Easter Sunday whose empty room, Miss Quentin gone down the pear tree in the night with Jason’s hoard, stands where the empty tomb should. The fall from the garden is built from one image: the children watching through the window, Caddy’s muddy drawers in the tree. Over it stands the house of a cursed line ending in its last sons, and the title’s tale told by an idiot, which the first section is. The particular stays particular: a pasture sold to pay for a wedding and a year at Harvard. Held a step below the top because the Christian pattern is inverted and ironic, and Benjy as a Christ is more a marker of the date than a figure the book builds.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance is the Southern family romance and its plantation legend, Joyce’s interior monologue and Conrad’s several tellers. The turn: the novel opens inside the mind of a man without speech or a sense of time, in a syntax of bare perception, and gives the reader no narrator to reconcile its four tellings until the last. The woman the book is about has no section. Time is marked only by a change of type. The stake was real. Faulkner’s previous novel, Flags in the Dust, had been refused and cut, and appeared as Sartoris in 1929; this one sold little. Held below the top because Joyce had made the interior monologue and Ulysses the novel of several minds. The first section, which has no evident precedent, is the purest swerve of the four.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. Four minds circle a woman who has no voice of her own, so the book knows Caddy only as an absence, and that absence is what the brothers’ lives are about. Each section’s form is its teller’s relation to time. Benjy’s achronology is a loss that never becomes past; Quentin’s dissolving syntax is a mind in which the past has swallowed the present; Jason’s straight line of complaint is a man who lives only in the present of money; the fourth section, told from outside, releases the reader from the family’s minds into the light of an ordinary morning. The reader begins in confusion and is given understanding in the order of the family’s disintegration. Held off the top because the turn to an outside narrator in the fourth section, though necessary, is the one place where the form explains rather than enacts.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over ninety-seven years. Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on time in Faulkner (1939) read the novel as a metaphysics of time with no future in it. Cleanth Brooks and the New Critics read its form. Faulkner himself went back to the family in 1945, in the genealogy he wrote for Malcolm Cowley’s anthology, and it differs from the novel in particulars. The questions stay open: what Caddy is to each brother; whether Quentin’s claim of incest is a confession or a fantasy; whether Dilsey’s endurance is the book’s affirmation or its alibi; whether the close is order restored or order imposed. Held below the top because much of a first reading’s labour is the reconstruction of chronology, which is difficulty before it is depth.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is the American novel of its decade. The intrinsic force: the book showed that a novel could be told from inside minds that cannot tell it, that time could be broken, and that the decline of a Southern house could carry the full weight of tragedy. What holds it below the top is that the interior method rested on Joyce, and that much of Faulkner’s reach runs through the whole of his Yoknapatawpha, Absalom, Absalom! above all, more than through this book alone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: this is the book in which the method first appeared whole, the first of Faulkner’s books to be read as a model, and the book Sartre wrote on in 1939; and the Southern and African American novel after it, Toni Morrison’s included, wrote in its light and against it.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over ninety-seven years. Form: the text survives whole; the corrected text restored readings the first edition had normalised, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence is where the axis is charged. The book sold little on publication, and its wide presence came later. Since then it has been continuous and wide: the novel is taught across American and world literature and translated widely. Its rendering of Black speech and Black lives is contested in teaching today, a charge on presence, not on form. The slow start of its first years holds the axis where it stands, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. Benjy’s section is an instrument built from nothing: a syntax of perception without causes, in which golf is seen without the word for it, “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”, and in which a sister is a sense: “Caddy smelled like trees.” Quentin’s prose holds a mind coming apart, the father’s voice returning in it (“clocks slay time”) until punctuation and capitals go. Jason’s monologue, “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”, is a comic voice of grievance with few equals in the American novel of its time. The fourth section’s set prose builds Dilsey before she speaks. Charged: Quentin’s section is at moments overwrought, the father’s aphorisms mannered; and the eye-dialect given to the Black characters, a convention of its time, works against the dignity the last section gives them.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Benjy’s world of sensation without time, and Jason’s world of money and the clock, checking the cotton quotations and chasing his niece down the road. They obey one law: each Compson is ruled by his relation to a past that is lost. Benjy lives inside it, Quentin dies of it, Jason denies it and is robbed by it; Dilsey, outside the law of the family, lives in a time measured by the liturgy, and she alone sees the whole. The law holds across a wide range of register: lyric, tragic, comic, homiletic. Charged: the fourth section changes the book’s narrative physics, from inside minds to an outside view that knows more than any law of the first three permits, and the change is felt as a break as well as a release; and the comedy of Jason’s section sits at a distance from the tragedy, a distance the law covers but does not close.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Many orders, held in one family’s fall. Consciousness, in three minds, one of them without language. The family across three generations, to the daughter’s daughter. Race, in the Black household of Dilsey, Roskus, Frony and Luster, and their church. Class and money: the pasture sold for Harvard and a wedding, Jason’s job, the cotton market, the money he steals, the bank job once promised by Herbert Head. Sex and the body, in Caddy’s sexuality and Benjy’s castration. The sacred, in the Easter weekend and the sermon. History, in the dead grandeur of a name and a grandfather’s watch. Time itself, as subject. The natural order, in the branch, the pasture, the trees. They are integrated through the family. What holds the axis, with The Unconcealment, at the foot of the twelve: the state and public life are thin, a sheriff in the fourth section; Jefferson is a backdrop; and the Black lives are held only in part.

Score: 8.9 / 10