So, i recently finished faulkners the sound and the fury for my MA finals, and i found the read to be both very enlightening but also kind of awkward.
For those that have read the story, i want to talk about the first section, concerning benjy, and the portrayal of his “idiocy” so to speak.
Did it make you guys feel awkward a little seeing faulkner try to emulate the thought process of someone mentally incapable of proper coherence? How do people feel about this now that time has gone on?
I understand very clearly what faulkner was trying to do with benjy, but it does feel like he leaned into stereotypes of a mentally challenged person and made a caricature more than a real exploration of their thought process.
by Its-ya-boi-waffle
3 Comments
I think I would want to take issue with your choice of the term ‘proper coherence’ here. Who’s to say what’s proper and what’s improper? Faulkner’s novel, after all, came at a time when modernist authors were engaged in some pretty rigorous investigation of what it really means to be coherent, questioning the utility of traditional, linear prose narratives in representing what actually goes on inside human minds. I don’t think the novel commands that we read less linear, less coherent narrative as somehow subordinate to its more traditional counterpart.
Obviously, attempting to represent the highly divergent thought processes of a character like Benjy, even in this context, is a very bold gambit: I wouldn’t want to suggest that the novel is, to use today’s vernacular, unproblematic. On the contrary, it can be very uncomfortable. But I don’t think we necessarily need to read it as a stereotype nor as an archetype so much as an exploration of what the world might look like from the perspective of one individual whose thought processes are very atypical and, of course, of how that individual might be perceived, marginalised and medicalised by those around them.
I haven’t read Faulkner’s yet, but I am curious OP, have you read Flowers for Algernon yet? Not asking with ill intention, genuinely curious if you have, how you feel about that compared to The Sound and The Fury!
Speaking as someone who also read this for their MA finals, it was easily my least favorite of the required texts.
The storytelling method in the Benjy sections are so outlandish that it distracts the reader from what is essentially a straight-forward and bitter tale.
Whether the thought process is representative or otherwise, I felt that it became more of a writing exercise for Faulkner (and one that doesn’t pay off in any meaningful way).
As I passed from my MA to an MFA, I’ve come to value texts that communicate in clear language…which is to say that *The Sound and The Fury* feels like a text that was meant to be study material rather than engaging/entertaining (when the really TRULY great texts do somehow manage to do both).
tl;dr, *Of Mice and Men* eats *The Sound and The Fury*’s lunch.