So I’m reading The Sound And The Fury and I’ve just gotten to Jason’s bit so, no spoilers there please. It’s a very disjointed and confusing book but after two and two comes together, I’m finding I’m starting to enjoy it.
Here’s where my question comes in: Was Faulkner ahead of his time? I don’t know anything about the dude himself, but from this book, for me, it does feel like so. For a dude in the 1920s, he didn’t seem to like racism or misogyny. In fact, he looks down upon it. Quentin is portrayed as distorted with his ideas of chivalry over his sister, and Faulkner seems critical of this. He ensures that we, the reader, see Quentin in a bad light. That he is wrong in the head.
He doesn’t seem to glorify the times. Even if he lived in it, he goes to great lengths to portray the characters as bad people.
So, do you think Faulkner was ahead of his time? Lemme know.
by EmilyIsNotALesbian
5 Comments
Yeah, I think Faulkner was ahead of his time. He tackled tough themes that weren’t popular back then.
No more so than Twain. There are some humans who can see through the hypocrisy of their times. Not many, but a few.
Faulkner also was heavily influenced by Joyce, so that early 20th C post WWI experimentation was common because as far as anyone could tell after that war, there were no rules.
I dk about ahead…he was innovative and new. But maybe it was about time for that stream of consciousness stuff and what not.
Looking from a contemporary lens, Faulkner is complicated — his novels (and his short fiction!) definitely portrayed the south in a far more accurate and precise way with respect to its huge moral failures on race, misogyny, and class. Obviously, he was also technically innovative beyond just how he wrote his characters and treated his subjects.
Its hard to say if this makes him ahead of his time though — you could look at someone like Woolf and say she pioneered many of the same things that Faulkner himself employed, and she did it earlier with a keen eye to the position of women.
On race and modernism, I’d argue you can’t really understand this until you spend time with Richard Wright and James Baldwin (to name a few). Baldwin even responded to some of Faulkner’s off-handed (but now widely publicized) comments about how integration / desegregation / equality in the south should be approached slowly (his infamous “go slow”) with a great essay: [https://www.epl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Faulkner-and-Desegregation-from-James-Baldwins-Nobody-Knows-My-Name.pdf](https://www.epl.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Faulkner-and-Desegregation-from-James-Baldwins-Nobody-Knows-My-Name.pdf).
That’s not to say I didn’t love his works — I grew up in the south and had a great English Lit. teacher in high school who placed a lot of this in context for me. I think in a year I read “The Sound and the Fury”, “Absalom, Absalom”, and “As I Lay Dying” back to back, and it really changed how I viewed many many things including family, society, destiny, etc. But it’s also important to consider Faulkner’s place in what is a large canon of work, and how writers responded to Faulkner (and how Faulkner himself placed himself within these spaces, etc.).
Faulkner did oppose racism and his novels are written from a surprisingly progressive viewpoint, given that he was a white man born in 19th century Mississippi.
On the other hand, he was the perfect example of the “white moderate” that MLK famously criticised in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in the sense that he supported the “go slow” approach to racial integration in the South so as to not to cause too much disruption, a view which has not aged well at all. Even at the time, he was strongly criticised for for it by James Baldwin. He is also known to have used racist language in his personal correspondence.
That said, he died in 1962, when the civil rights movement was still gathering steam, so who knows whether he would have modified his views if he’d lived to see the events of the next few years.