The path that led William Faulkner to write The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first canonical work of American modernism, was in no way an easy one. His first two novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), had been moderately well received critically but had not made an impact upon the general reading public. His third novel, Flags in the Dust, had been extensively edited and published in a much condensed form as Sartoris (1929). By the time he began The Sound and the Fury, he had grown disillusioned and dejected with the publishing process. “When I began the book,” Faulkner said in 1933, “I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book”; ultimately, he observed,
one day it was as if a door had clapped silently and forever to between me and all publishers’ addresses and booklists and I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I can just write. Whereupon I, who had three brothers and no sister and was destined to lose my first daughter in infancy, set out to make for myself a beautiful and tragic little girl.”Footnote 1
That girl was Caddy Compson, whose exile from her family and her banishment from her Mississippi hometown is at the heart of Faulkner's novel. The Sound and the Fury is told from the perspective of Caddy's three brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. In 1957, nearly three decades after the novel's publication, Faulkner still held Caddy's story in the highest esteem. By his own admission, the novel was “the one I worked at the longest, the hardest, that was to me the most passionate and moving idea.”Footnote 2
I first read The Sound and the Fury in my early twenties as an undergraduate at King's College London. Looking back, reading it changed my life in profound ways, leading me towards my PhD topic and the unstable life of the early career academic. Upon my first reading, I found the “passionate and moving idea” at the heart of the novel – that the South of Faulkner's time could not survive beyond its present while it ignored the rights of women and African Americans – profoundly affecting. I was also awestruck by Faulkner's literary technique, and the ways in which he effortlessly blends four wildly divergent narrative styles with free indirect discourse (where first- and third-person narration merge seamlessly) and interior monologue (where the internal thought patterns of a particular narrator are presented idiosyncratically and without authorial intervention). The Sound and the Fury not only rivals the best of European high modernism (such as Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's The Waves), but also proves that, for all of the deliberate and purposeful difficulty within the novel, Faulkner is one of the few modernists capable of telling a good, satisfying story. Indeed, Faulkner's primary endeavour as an author was to strive always to be “a storyteller, introducing comic and tragic elements as I like. Thus I stack and lie at times, all for the purposes of the story—to entertain.”Footnote 3 In my academic career, I have been driven by this admiration for Faulkner's aesthetic innovations and skills, and a desire to unpick the complex threads of his work. I founded the first research network in the United Kingdom dedicated to his work, published a monograph exploring the prevalence of mortality in his major fiction, and have been fortunate enough to gain many friends and colleagues in the worldwide Faulkner community. None of that would have been possible or even conceivable without first encountering The Sound and the Fury in my early adulthood, and so I will always be grateful to ole Bill's legacy and the opportunities he has (unwittingly) afforded me.
If reading The Sound and the Fury was the starting point of my journey into academia, then Faulkner's struggles with writing it have also shaped how I approach my own work and career. As I mentioned at the start of this entry, the circumstances prior to Faulkner writing the novel were challenging. Faulkner had to relinquish any sense of pretence and all ambition of literary celebrity with his first three novels and “just write.”Footnote 4 His tenacity, thankfully, paid off. More than sixty years after his death in 1962, The Sound and the Fury, along with his broader body of work, has proven to be “the props, the pillars [that] help him endure and prevail,” to echo Faulkner's own Nobel Prize acceptance speech.Footnote 5 How does Faulkner's capacity for endurance connect to my own experiences as an early-career academic? Above all, his reflections on his own writing have taught me to never give up. In the aftermath of COVID-19, the political and social instabilities throughout the world, and the unrelentingly bleak atmosphere of the last few years more generally, the prospect of entering any profession, let alone academia, seems nightmarish and unsustainable. However, early-career researchers in particular have so much to contribute that academia in general, and the field of American studies in particular, would be infinitely poorer without them. In closing, my advice to anyone in that position reading these words is to keep going, hang in there, and try your best. Absorb Faulkner's wisdom, and endure, then prevail.
