In the Absence of Meaning: Experiencing Existentialism in The Sound and the Fury
“It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth 5.5.26-28). Echoing with the famous monologue in Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury reveals the author’s endeavor to refigure the meaning of sound and fury in human experience. This essay will argue that The Sound and the Fury is experimental, while exploring the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness, resonating concerns of Existentialism. The essay will first examine the first and the second section of the fiction, while focusing on how the two narrators, Benjy and Quentin, experience the world. With reference to Viktor Shklovsky, the essay will analyze the technique of “defamiliarization” in the fiction to explore how Faulkner makes familiar objects unfamiliar and hence diminishes the objectivity of pre-existing meanings. Defamiliarization and diminishing meanings lead readers to encounter the meaninglessness, which resonates with the core concerns of Existentialism. The essay will elaborate this parallel to Existentialism by arguing that, in The Sound and the Fury, the narration implies that experiencing the world is a subjective and disordered process, without universal and reasonable patterns. This Existentialist implication reveals the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness in its narration.
In his essay “Art as Technique”, Viktor Shklovsky has put forward the notion of “defamiliarization”. He argues that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important…” (Shklovsky). To elaborate his argument, Shklovsky has analyzed the works by Leo Tolstoy in which Tolstoy repeatedly used “defamiliarization” techniques by describing familiar objects as if he were seeing them for the first time rather than naming them. This essay will argue that William Faulkner uses the artistic technique of “defamiliarization” frequently in The Sound and the Fury, particularly in the first and the second section.
In his interview with Jean Stein in the Paris Review in the 1950s, William Faulkner made one of his most influential comments on the composition of The Sound and the Fury, elaborating on his intention of choosing Benjy as the first narrator. “I had already begun to tell it through the eyes of the idiot child since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why” (Lion in the Garden 245). Knowing what happened but not why excludes the possibility of explicitly offering readers reasonable narration. Therefore, in Benjy’s section, readers have encountered strange and unreasonable expressions. Benjy remains mentally disabled at the age of thirty-three, so that he is unable to know and talk about things correctly, and his narration reveals Faulkner’s efforts in defamiliarizing objects and challenging readers’ prior reading experience and their perception of the world. Benjy recalls the day Dammudy passes away and the day the Compson family hears about Quentin’s suicide, and he describes the scene as “Dilsey was singing and I began to cry and she stopped… Dilsey was singing in the kitchen and I began to cry” (Faulkner 22). Benjy does not recognize the sorrow of his family. To him, the sound of crying is not distinguishable from the sound of singing; he has heard the sound but he could not perceive emotions correctly. To produce the effect of defamiliarization, Faulkner does not use the correct word “cry” to describe the sound; therefore, “Dilsey was singing” becomes strange and difficult to understand in the context. Another significant example to show Faulkner’s technique of defamiliarization is that Benjy repeatedly goes back to the metaphor that Caddy smells like trees. As Benjy recalls, “Candy smelled like leaves […], “Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep” (Faulkner 4). Benjy perceives Caddy through smell. His narration becomes unfamiliar when readers encounter no pre-established parallels in literary meanings or cultural basis to enable them to understand the smell of trees. It only makes sense for Benjy himself what the smell of trees signifies, and the meaning signified is coherent throughout his narration. After Caddy kisses Charlie, Benjy senses that she loses her innocence and hence he “hushed and Caddy got up and we took the kitchen soap and washed her mouth at the sink, hard. Caddy smelled like trees” (39). The repetition of “smelled like trees” implies that in Benjy’s mind, the association between trees and innocence is a stable and functional one. But to readers, the metaphor is strange and difficult to understand. Faulkner mentions the smell of trees every time after Caddy’s innocence and virginity get damaged, so it is from observing the repetition that readers can perceive this metaphor correctly, which echoes with Shklovsky’s argument that the technique of art is to increase the difficulty and prolong the perception process.
To apply Shklovsky’s theory to examine The Sound and the Fury is to explore the further implication of making objects strange and unfamiliar. I will suggest that the technique of defamiliarization demonstrates Faulkner’s endeavors in portraying the meaninglessness of human inventions. Benjy’s narration diminishes the significance of defining human emotions. It is people that have defined “sing” and “cry” with different emotions and hence distinguished the two kinds of sounds. Meanings of sounds are inventions of human beings, rather than intrinsic qualities in their own right. Living within his mind where no meanings pre-exist, Benjy could not perceive the sounds correctly, but he has invented his own vocabulary to narrate in his monologue. He builds his perception system on his senses, which could be provoked by sound, smell and sights, to perceive the world through associations forward or backward in time (Kartiganer 79). Benjy defines things according to his subjective associations in time and sense, which indicates the meaninglessness of objective associations that people have established. Also, Faulkner demonstrates that the meaning of time constructed by human is meaningless to Benjy. As Benjy could not locate himself correctly in chronology, in his mind the past and the present are one. His stream-of-consciousness narrative makes time strange and unfamiliar. He resists that changes can happen as time goes by. As Kartiganer has suggested, in Benjy’s mind Caddy represents a mode “blind to durational process, recording the real in such rigid clarity that Benjy can return to it again and again” (Kartiganer 81). He believes that Caddy will smell like trees forever. Benjy cannot understand that time is moving forward, and every day is a different and unique one, because the past thirty-three years and the present day make no differences to him. If no changes should happen, if all the days are the same day, it is meaningless to mark dates. By refusing the fact that things could change with time going by, Faulkner challenges the meaning of time.
In the second section, Faulkner challenges readers’ assumption about the meaning of time through Quentin’s narration. On the last day of his life, Quentin wakes up in the morning, seeing “the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again” (Faulkner 63). Recognizing himself as being in time or out of time implies that in Quentin’s consciousness exists the desire to alienate himself from the domination of time. Quentin recalls that when his father gives him a watch, the watch is understood by his father as a “mausoleum of all hope and desire” (63). This interpretation of the watch demolishes its original function of counting time mechanically; on the contrary, it reveals that the watch endangers the meaning of time. Quentin explicates that there exists an incoherence between scientific time and time perceived by human consciousness. Watches click off the scientific time. “There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one another” (71). Through Quentin, Faulkner defamiliarizes our perception of scientific time, which is supposed to be universally ordered and correct. Quentin finds that all the watches are contradicting each other. So he recalls what his father has said. “Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (71). The meaning of time can only be founded in its own existence, not in human inventions. “That each watch states that he is in a different moment of time establishes, for Quentin, the absurdity of making any statement whatsoever. … If the clocks, or whatever statements about reality we attempt, contradict each other, then the statements are absurd and meaning does not exist” (Broughton 114). Therefore, the idea that a watch can express the meaning of time is an illusion. There is no objective meaning inherent in time. Time then is a condition of subjective experience or existence.
While Faulkner refigures the meaninglessness, he also implies that subjective meaning exists, and his narrative voices in The Sound and the Fury demonstrate significant parallels to the concerns of Existentialism. As Sartre has cited Heidegger in his Being and Nothingness, “existence precedes and commands essence” (Sartre 565). In the perspective of Existentialism, the meanings could never be given as being general and universal. Meaning is decided by the existing itself. Therefore meaning is not objective or pre-existing; on the contrary, it is subjective, varying among different human beings. In Benjy’s narration, the meaning of “Caddy smells like trees” does not signify anything from the perspective of our view. But it can signify what Caddy means to Benjy, and to him this meaning is significant. Describing crying as “singing” represents how Benjy experiences the sound and what the sound means to him. Quentin’s failure at Harvard University highlights that, although being admitted into Harvard signifies the honor of the family, Quentin finds in it nothing but meaninglessness. When Quentin struggles to destroy the watch in an attempt to escape from the scientific time that is dominating the world, he is rejecting that the world should be taken as ordered, clear and rational as scientific time. The stream-of-consciousness technique blurs the boundary between the past and the present, as Bigelow suggests in his “A Primer of Existentialism”, this narrative voice can be read as an evidence to demonstrate that life is a “unique and subjective experience-that is, existentially. The conventional view of externalized life, a rational orderly progression cut into uniform segments by the hands of a clock, he rejects in favor of a view which sees life as opaque, ambiguous, and irrational-that is, as the existentialist sees it” (Bigelow 178). Through Quentin’s opaque, ambiguous and irrational narration, Faulkner expresses the meaninglessness of counting time. At the heart of this meaninglessness lies the possibility to experience the world in a way that is not following objective rules but discovering meaning out of the existence itself. “In order to arrive at real time, we must abandon this invented measure which is not a measure of anything. … It gives us access to a time without clocks” (Sartre 85). The access to meaning is to get rid of the meaningless human inventions and conventions. Quentin recalls his father in the morning saying that “it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s” (Faulkner 63). Quentin’s father tells Quentin how to take everything as meaningless in the world, not only time, but also virginity, Christianity, and human experience. This belief at its climax turns out to be an assertion that all that has been done under the sun is to no purpose, and meaning can be signified only within what the subjective mind can sense.
Bleikasten has suggested that, “from the outset, the reader is jolted into the uncomfortable awareness of a text that refuses to fit into prior reading experience” (Bleikasten 68). The narration of Benjy and Quentin provokes sensations through a difficult process of perception, highlighting Faulkner’s efforts in refiguring how people can experience the world, while challenging the prior reading process with its technique of “defamiliarization”. In The Sound and the Fury exists the juxtaposition of meaning. In the seemingly “signifying-nothing” language, in the irrational and chaotic narration, beyond the literary meaninglessness we encounter the Existentialist implication that meaning is never objective but subjective, never collective but individual. In The Sound and the Fury, “a virtue out of knowing more than it means, trying to force language to reach beyond the meanings that precede and prepare it”(Kartiganer 73) identifies itself as experimental, as it embodies Existentialism in its absence of meaning. While Quentin’s narration demonstrates that meaning can be subjectively demolished, Benjy’s narration demonstrates that meaning can be subjectively constructed. The construction and demolishment of meaning in Modernist literature rightly claim our strenuous endeavors to explore and experience.
Works Cited
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