Inside the Labyrinth of The Sound and the Fury

To say that William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a difficult novel is something of an understatement: when you've ploughed the first sixty pages and have no clue what's going on it's very tempting to give up, and when the first part ends and instead of a breather you're presented with something even more difficult it's almost painful to keep going, but to reach the end of the book is a beautiful experience, and well worth the headache. Fury was written in the 1920s, when stream-of-consciousness writing was all the rage, and guys like Joyce and gals like Woolf were fiendishly trying to make their books as impenetrable as possible, in the hope that a hundred years later people would think they were great novelists but run screaming at the thought of having to read their books. This plan worked well. Faulkner was a similar kind of chap from the USA, and wrote his masterpiece chronicling the disintegration and decay of a formerly well-to-do Southern family in four parts: the first written by a mentally disabled man-child who flits back and forth and back again through numerous time periods whenever any tiny detail catches his memory's attention, and the only thing to help the reader is a line in italics when the focus shifts to a different time period. The first part is set over thirty years and features around fifteen different time lines, and if that's not hard enough two of the characters have the same name. Apparently, Faulkner intended originally for the different time periods to be printed in different ink colours to make things easier to follow, but they didn't have the technology to do this.

After a few pages of trying to follow the action, I realised the best way to read was to just go for it, let the scenes slide past me and head for the finish line, and hopefully eventually all would become clear. And by the time I got to part three, hard shapes started to appear out of the misty background, and I saw just how remarkable a piece of writing this is. In a similar way to the stream-of-consciousness employed at the beginning of the novel, my mind is jogged to realise that in fact I did understand certain things from the first parts of the novel, I just didn't know I understood them until they were placed in context. Although it seems that nothing going on makes sense and none of it is going into your brain, it really is, and you just have to enjoy the ride and get towards the end and some clarity. The entire thing is a complex metaphor for the mind, thoughts and memories swirling around and catching when a couple fit together. On finishing it, my first thought was that I'm really looking forward to reading the book again in a few months when the dust has settled in my brain, in a similar way to how a mind-boggling film like Donnie Darko begs a second viewing. In fact, I think I could read Fury again and again, each time fitting more pieces into the jigsaw, but because of its fragmentary style, never quite completing the puzzle. The Sound and the Fury is truly an amazing book.