Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a Struggle for Ideal Communication

Abstract

And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled, it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself. (Plato, Phaedrus 275E) From the moment of its publication, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, one of the most exemplary modernist novels, has been notorious for the difficulty that it presents to the reader. Even professional critics and literary scholars admit the challenge Faulkner’s narrative technique poses for them as readers. The reader’s difficulty corresponds to the author’s ‘‘anguish’’ in writing it: Faulkner repeatedly said that in this novel he most earnestly tried for the impossible, and failed. 1 His impossible goal can be defined as ideal communication, a struggle to overcome the grammatical and pragmatic limits of language and annihilate the distance between the writer and the reader. This paper explores The Sound and the Fury as a peculiar, contradictory, and idealistic communicative gesture. Moreover, I will argue that this text epitomizes the communicative situation of the modernist novel in general, which according to Walter Benjamin is an attempt to convey an incommunicable experience. The novel’s opening narrator, the non-speaker Benjy, sets and figuratively represents the novel’s situation vis-a`-vis the reader. Benjy also strongly links the novel to Plato’s metaphor of the written text as a helpless orphan, thrown on the unfamiliar and unpredictable world after the author’s ‘‘death’’ (passing the text on to the readers). 2 Understood in this way, The Sound and the Fury may be seen as a quintessential embodiment of