William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Family Background • The firstborn son of a family prominent for three generations • The great–grandson of Colonel William C. Falkner, a Civil War hero and a writer • Grew up amidst tales from his family’s past, had a sense of an inevitable decline • Sense of the importance of ancestry appears in many of his works Colonel William C. Falkner 1826 -1889

Educational Background • Sketchy formal education: two years at high school and a year at the University of Mississippi • Enrolled in late 1919 after an unsuccessful attempt to take part in WWI • Illustrated several campus publications and wrote some poetry sequences for various girlfriends

Faulkner’s Literary Education • Found a dramatic club called “The Marionettes” • Wrote a Symbolist-inspired play also called “The Marionettes”, never produced • Introduced by Yale scholar Phil Stone to the classics, to the contemporary modernist poets and to Balzac • Had a profound knowledge of Biblical myths, instilled by his family • Had an enduring love for the works of Melville, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, and Conrad

Faulkner’s Influences • Freud’s theories of sexuality • The mythic world of Frazer’s Golden Bough • The literary innovations of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce • The despair of the post-war generation • Mississippi society and culture

Faulkner and Mississippi • Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi; in 1902, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi. • The state of Mississippi is regarded by Faulkner as a quintessence of the old South; with no big cities, its provincialism is relatively untempered by national influences; it is his idea of ‘southern’ • The region is a volatile mixture of extremes: a manorial society side by side with a white folk culture still fiercely independent and still practicing the frontier virtues and vices

“Little postage-stamp of soil” • Concentrated on what he came to call his “little postage-stamp of soil” aka the small Mississippi towns that he knew so well • Made it the setting of all of his great works, first starting with Sartoris(1929) • Fictionalized area as Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha county: A fixed universe containing a complete encyclopedia of the manners and morals, the habits and customs, and the beliefs and values of the post-Civil War South

Yoknapatawpha County • Created a mythic cosmos • Populated by all the different classes, races and genders of the South • Map of Yoknapatawpha County • from The Portable Faulkner 1946

The Sound and the Fury (1929) • Four narrators: three brothers and their black nurse, circling back to the same narrative issues but in different voices • An unsurpassed examples of the use of the stream of consciousness • A radically new prose style suitable for expressing the lost of familial love and honor, for making the readers aware of the decline of a great culture

Faulkner’s Approach • Most of his novels, using different characters to tell parts of the story, demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling as much as in the subject • The use of various viewpoints makes him very self-referential or “reflexive” • The novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest and is part of the history of a region

Faulkner’s Art • Two important dimensions to Faulkner’s work: • A total dislocation of order expressed in the broken narratives and chronology of his stories, in the long and convoluted sentences which radically disrupt the traditional grammatical order of English • Bespeaks the disruption of human consciousness brought about by modernity

William Faulkner