How to Read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Introductory Lecture)

It’s time to begin our journey through William Faulkner's dark, difficult, and profound novel : The Sound and the Fury.

Our reading will teach us about time, memory, the past, the Southern Gothic genre, modernist narratives, family, home, identity, class, communication, and much more.

Today we’re discussing how best to break into this challenging story and bring ourselves fully to this American masterpiece.

Video Timestamps:

0:00 how to read The Sound and the Fury

2:00 the greatness of William Faulkner

4:00 combatting the difficulty of Faulkner

6:00 relationship between story and structure

8:00 why read The Sound and the Fury?

9:00 William Faulkner at time of writing

12:00 how to read really difficult books

14:00 reading assignment for you now

15:00 what is the story of the novel?

16:00 who are the characters of the novel?

17:00 storytelling from multiple POVs

18:00 section one - Benjy’s POV

19:00 should you skip the beginning?

21:00 stream-of-consciousness style

22:00 why is Benjy’s section difficult?

23:00 subjective temporality in the novel

24:00 reading the opening together

25:00 section two - Quentin’s POV

28:00 reading Quentin’s section together

29:00 section three - Jason’s POV

31:00 how the story came to Faulkner

32:00 section four - Dilsey third person

35:00 Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner

36:00 how Faulkner presents time

38:00 allusion to Shakespeare’s Macbeth

41:00 when past mistakes repeat again

43:00 what does Modernism mean?

44:00 19th vs 20th century literature

46:00 why are modernist works difficult?

49:00 Faulkner’s work at the post office

50:00 modernism vs post-modernism

51:00 the nightmare of the modern era

52:00 Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech

55:00 the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses

56:00 awaking from nightmare of history

57:00 what is the southern gothic genre?

58:00 on the origin of gothic literature

59:00 antiquated structures inform today

1:00:00 what we find in gothic works

1:01:00 Old South vs New South

1:02:00 markers of the southern gothic

1:03:00 southern gothic character types

1:05:00 great southern gothic writers

1:06:00 post Civil War Jim Crow era

1:09:00 great fictional heterocosms

1:10:00 welcome to Yoknapatawpha

1:12:00 Faulkner’s Southern myth-making

1:15:00 Faulkner’s portrayal of race relations

1:16:00 the shifting image of the South

1:19:00 film appreciation at the book club

1:20:00 Faulknerian sublime in prose

1:22:00 rereading slowly and aloud

1:23:00 Hemingway vs Faulkner

1:27:00 ‘the day dawned bleak and chill’

1:30:00 pacing for Faulkner lectures

1:31:00 reading Chaucer at the book club

1:33:00 your experience with Faulkner?

Resources:

• Editions: There are many wonderful editions of The Sound and the Fury to choose from. The Vintage International paperback is an excellent choice and the definitive edition. If you're in the UK, the most readily available edition is the Vintage Classics paperback. If you're a hardback reader, then Everyman's Library has a great edition. Vintage also have a wonderful three-volume box set that contains this novel along with As I Lay Dying and Light in August. And, as of this year, The Sound and the Fury has entered the common domain, so the novel is also available via ebook on Gutenberg.

• Audiobook: There is a great audiobook version of this novel narrated by Grover Gardner, who has won awards for his readings and has been dubbed one of the best voices of the century. For another option, Edoardo Ballerini also has a superb narration and really brings the colour and rhythm of Faulkner's prose to life. Remember whenever you find yourself confused whilst reading: slowing down, reading aloud, and hearing the work read aloud unlocks meaning.

• Portable Faulkner: Malcolm Cowley put together an indispensable curation of Faulkner's writing in the Portable Faulkner, available in Penguin paperback. This anthology is a treasure trove and a work of art unto itself. Cowley compiled both representative short stories and also resonant passages from Faulkner's novels and prefaced them with some really profound essays. This is a great must-have for those looking to get into the great writer and those who have been friends with him for years. And, for another tremendous collection of Faulkner's short fiction, his Collected Stories is a grand resource to have on hand.

• Meet the Author: There is a tremendous interview with William Faulkner in The Paris Review in their Art of Fiction in issue twelve from 1956. His thoughts on the craft of writing are fascinating. It's in this interview that Faulkner was asked what he would recommend for readers who don't understanding his books even after reading them three or four times. To which he replied: 'Read them four times.' If you would like a great biography of the writer, then Joseph Blotner has an excellent one. You may also find his powerful Nobel Prize speech interesting to read.

• Shakespeare: 'Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' Faulkner takes his title from one of the most bleak and nihilistic speeches in all of literature, which comes at the end of the visionary tragedy of Macbeth. It's well worth either reading Macbeth, watching a film version, or listening to one of our lectures on the play, as Shakespeare's comments on the passing of time will inform our reading of this novel. And here's Sir Ian McKellen delivering the great soliloquy.

• Book Club Complementary Reads: If you have read James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, you may find now is a good time to reflect upon their works. You can do that by revisiting our introductory lectures for Ulysses and Orlando. Think about modernist narrative techniques like stream-of-consciousness and the distortion of temporality. You may also find it interesting to muse upon the impact Faulkner had by keeping the following book club writers in mind: Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Cormac McCarthy. You may also wish to recall the American Sublime in writers like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and John Steinbeck and think about how Faulkner adds to the grand tapestry of American Literature. If you have yet to read these great writers, you have an exciting journey ahead of you. I'd recommend making a note of just one work that piques your curiosity the most right now and make a plan to read it in the near future.

• Film Appreciation: We mentioned a few great films in this discussion, like A Streetcar Named Desire and The Night of the Hunter, but the main one to focus on for now would be the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, adapted from the novel by Margaret Mitchell. Give yourself a screening of the film and think about its presentation of the American South. As we read through The Sound and the Fury together, we will have recommended films for you to watch for which Faulkner himself wrote the screenplays.

• Screen Adaptations: There have been three screen adaptations of The Sound and the Fury to date, which demonstrate the clear difficulty in translating Faulkner's storytelling style to film. There's the 2014 film directed by James Franco. There's a 1959 film starring Yul Brynner. And there was a CBS television adaptation from 1955. The Franco film received poor reviews, but I think they did a fair job given the challenging nature of the work. I would recommend holding off on watching until you have read the novel through once. Think about how you would adapt the work to the screen. Having said that, if one is struggling with comprehension, watching the Franco film alongside reading will make the story easier to understand.

• Our Next Read: As mentioned previously, we will be also be meeting and discussing Chaucer. Discussions for these two genius writers will be on alternating weekends. So this weekend coming, we will have our next introductory 'how to read video' for The Canterbury Tales. In that video, we will discuss our approach, historical context, structure, and mindsets for appreciation. You may wish to secure your copies of the original work and also a modern English prose retelling. We don't need to read anything for that just yet, so focus on getting into Faulkner for now.

Reading Assignment:

Our next discussion will cover the first section of the novel, which is titled 'April Seventh 1928'. This takes us through the first sixty or seventy-five pages depending on which edition you're working from.

So start making your way into the work, reading slowly, meeting the characters, and noting down any themes, ideas, or passages that personally resonate with you.

Questions for You:

1) What is your current relationship with William Faulkner? Is this your first reading or a rereading of this masterpiece?

2) What themes from your wider reading would you like to pull into The Sound and the Fury?

3) What makes a narrative difficult for you? And how do you approach challenging books?

4) What are you hoping to get out of your deep reading of Faulkner?

Happy reading, everybody!