The Sound and the Fury

Thoughts on The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The freedom of the individual and their ability to escape the past has been a recurring theme in twentieth century literature.  While other works, such as Nightwood suggested the possibility of “forgetting”, this book is all facticity - it seems there is no escape from the past. Faulkner shows life as confused and constantly being oppressed by the intrusion of the past into the realm of present thought.

This imprisonment by the past is most exemplified in Quentin (at least in the first half). He is certainly obsessed; with family, the past, and time itself. An interesting revelation of this is when Quentin goes into the jeweler’s shop. He keeps asking if any of the clocks are accurate - until he gets the answer no. His mental response to this is remembering his father‘s view that “says 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” (97).  Earlier, he while contemplating what time is, he remembers his father saying that “constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function” (87).  Apparently mind-function is a bad thing, in this sense it detracts from life lived in the moment.  The answer that none of the clocks is accurate shows that time is merely an arbitrary concept; it isn’t real – at least in the ways that it is measured.  Furthermore, it suggests that there are no foundations to the modern world.  There is no fixed absolute from which everything else can be quantitatively or qualitatively evaluated.

Like the conceptual reversal of time, Quentin’s father inverts the idea of sexual innocence, stating that “women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature” (132).  Faulkner doesn’t reveal an argument to clearly backup the position that purity should be a negative state, but it seems that Mr Compson is indicating that the world as a whole exists in a fallen state, and it is just common sense to realize that no one could live up to the ideals of purity.  He also makes reference to the “reducto adsurdum of human experience” (97).  He sees that life can’t be organized by reason and molded into what we want it to be.

This obsession with what is not, or what can’t be, seems to indicate that there is a very profound crisis underlying life. Reducing time to the mechanical workings of a human machine makes it artificial.  The construct of the modern world, the artificial, is in conflict with the natural order.   Quentin seems caught in the middle of this conflict.  On one side Benjy represents a more innocent state of being.  He is naturally able to see things from a simple point of view.  The references to the age of thirty-three and the holidays of Easter and Christmas in his chapter suggest he lives in a traditional (Christian), or pre-modern world.  Quentin’s father on the other hand has already accepted the absurdity of life, rejected imposing his own structure on it, and continues living in a dysfunctional state.  This nihilistic view has advanced beyond the modern.  Only Quentin realizes modernity and with his hyper-conscious thought he is obsessed by the nagging “lack” in the world and finds it a problem to be fixed.  Unfortunately, he is trapped in time and doesn’t seem to be able to find a solution.  This leaves him with a developing neurosis that results in incestuous thoughts, anger management issues, and the inability to live in the present or the future.

I found reading the second part of the book to be a much bleaker experience than the first half. It seemed to me that Quentin (the brother) was really the heart of the story. Without the presence of Quentin, Caddy, and Mr Compson (with his unusual but provoking thoughts about the world) the family seems very empty. I haven’t been sure what to make of the repeated idea that “Caddy smells like trees,” but by the end I’m thinking that she represents the natural order of things and as her experiences begin the breakdown of the Compson family, they move away from the natural to a very artificial state of being. 

There is no more spirit in the family, leaving only a mechanical functioning to everyday life.  Jason’s thoughts are very cold and calculated, with no time to stop for any useful introspective thoughts. All that matters now, at least to Jason, is money. Everything he does revolves around it. But, even after all the effort he expends involving constant attention and resulting headaches, he still loses his wealth. There are constantly forces at work that are beyond his control, and his security is placed in the market.  He uses the market to hopefully profit, but when things go wrong he replies that “that’s not my fault either. I didn’t invent it” (282).  There is no acknowledgement of responsibility and rather than make smarter decisions he continues to let things happen and then blame others.

At this point, I can only assume that Faulkner is making a comment on the rising consumer culture which quantifies everything into units of time and money. In this world the everyday rat race becomes just a superficial “sound and fury”, and the internal life of the self begins to “signify nothing.”  Once life is adapted into this structure, there is no essence of humanity left.  Faulkner may have been reacting to the change in the South, but this whole process of decay, or perhaps devolution, seems applicable to the world and time at large.  At the fundamental core of life is the relationship one has to other individuals.  When this breaks down there is nothing left to build upon. 

Almost all of the characters spend their time concerned with the actions of others, but only out of concern for themselves.  Jason is so obsessed with imposing discipline on everyone else that he leaves no room for them to act autonomously.  In the process he neglects control over his own actions and loses some of his selfhood.  Quentin’s obsession  leads to his own demise when he can’t reconcile Caddy’s actions.  Quentin Jr.  barely has a self and is consciously aware that she “is going to hell” and doesn’t care (217).  Only Dilsey offers some contrast to this, as she has a notion of the importance of the self and finds some possibility of salvation in religion.  But as the older views and traditions are replaced and the younger generation of the family takes over, it seems that this emptiness will expand.  At the end (is it even an end?), I can only think that Faulkner is suggesting that one should be a more active participant in their own life, choose appropriate courses of action and then ultimately find connection with others in a more constructive manner.

El Dorado

i. Long-Shadowed Sun

I remember..
The enchanted English walled garden
Days of summer air and honey-suckled nights
The capricious dance of lavenders and cabbage-whites
Made more than 3D, glowing in the evening long-shadowed sun
Nowhere better. But in England, although nothing really changes, the weather always does…

The thunder approaches
The heavy sighing of the monster…
  - El Dorado, Marillion (2016)


In video game design the Green Hill Zone is the initial, idyllic landscape from which the player begins their journey, an area of relative safety which allows the player to ease into their virtual existence before encountering serious conflict.

Born into American culture of the later part of the twentieth-century, specifically in the Mid-west, life existed in a world of a Green Hill Zone.  The only existential danger were those economic downturns which particularly devastated rural livelihoods.  But, in these cases the worst outcome was far better than the world's poor classes and farther above the historic peasantry.  World-War II was now a receded nightmare, the result of an antiquated historic period.  We were finally enlightened, modernized and civilized.  Even living under the nuclear threat, the economic golden age of the 50s and 60s were the prologue to the utopian future.  After the Fall of Communism and the ostensible end of the nuclear threat of the Cold War, the future really was now.  War, still never too far away, and in many ways now an omnipresent, ongoing campaign to maintain safe order, was at least clean. Genocide, holocaust, and the mass destruction of function society were unthinkable (without the final push of a button). Of course Sarajevo happened quickly, an actual siege of a modern city.  But that was a one-off, an exercise, something to show how well the new Western-led international community could respond.  Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur, Myanmar, these were and are all so far away.  By the time of the Syrian war post-2011, it was no longer possible to say that the horrors of mass warfare were impossible. Now, the Green Zone, that safe zone, may not remain outside of the action and the resulting horrors.  Mid-America may not witness destruction, ignoring it even as it helps to sustain the mechanisms that create it. But it is no longer causally separated from such events and it is no longer insulated from the damaging effects.  In the process of making America "great" (again?) it is an active part of the center of history, susceptible to engagement and consequence.

This week David Lynch suggested Trump "could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much." I cant agree with Lynch's logical position, as he claims that "No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way."  Of course, everything Trump does can be countered by an intelligent (an exponentially more intelligent) response.  But he is right in the sense that Trump and his supporters are not operating on the cognitive and intelligent level. You can't have an intelligent negotiation because they don't care, they are solely functioning on a reptilian-response level.  For whatever reason, Lynch is coming from a similar perspective to Zizek, seeing the positive result of Trump tearing down the old Order. I wouldn't in any case look to Lynch for rationality, in fact his artistic expression has its own genius precisely because it is irrational, it embodies the Real, the inarticulate-able, primordial, pre-symbolic aspects of existence. Lynch is the auteur of the Real, just as Zizek is the philosopher of the Real.  But, there is an extreme danger when these views collide with the practical world, and the idealistic vision to build something new from the ground up allows for a path to catastrophe. Lynch did follow up, adding “Unfortunately, if you continue as you have been, you will not have a chance to go down in history as a great president ... You are causing suffering and division.”  He is at least not oblivious.

At this point, when the government is literally torturing and abusing children (as young as a few months old) by separating them from parents and throwing them into detention camps (as sick, twisted, supporters are cheering it on), it is certainly safe to say that we will longer be able to avoid the storm unscathed.  Innocent people will suffer at the hands of a tyrant and his evil supporters.  Those ready to take their ideological fight to the front-lines may suffer, but they are not the measure of history.  It is the innocent, those who are trying to flee, avoid conflict, ans simply live (and who likely don't have a say in global politics) who will be caught under the machinery which manifests the Storm. [1]

As Tobias Stone wrote:

At a local level in time, people think things are fine — then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this, it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later, it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another . . .  We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction . . .  It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. . . . The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights . . . we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end . . . for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

We are already seeing those at the sharp end.  For many, white Americans not near the faultlines, things will go on, possibly without disruption. But for many it won't - those trapped in between the faults, those that are crushed by America (the New American Direction) and can't be defended by their own governments, and maybe those who try to stop it. The Storm is coming, It can now be seen and heard on the horizon.

As Sartre argued there is no non-choice, any war is our war, everyone's war.  Each individual must make a moral choice, and stand on the moral side of the war.  For those of us in the culture creating this conflict, it is our responsibility. History will judge those who allowed evil things to happen.

[1] What i call The Storm (or Trump's Storm) is not to be confused with any ridiculous conspiracy theories, although I think they a apt name.

Tropic of Cancer

Thoughts on Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

It is hard to imagine the impact of Henry Miller’s vulgar language in 1934, but I suppose in the pre-shock-jock era someone had to push the bounds of language and conventional thought. If Dostoevsky's underground man was the kind of person that must exist in the nineteenth century, created by the expanding rationalistic world of modernism, then Miller’s persona in the Tropic of Cancer is a logical but extreme extension of that thought. Given the possible nihilism that has come about after Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the possibility of value has been eroded in the early twentieth century. Miller’s reference to Turgenev shows an affinity with Russian nihilist thought. He states that:
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been
dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been
crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it
off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the
coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. (26)

Since nothing seems to rise above into a hierarchy of meaning and value, Miller seems to reject everything as the same, and in response concerns himself only with the base values of food and sex. He quite consciously claims that he is not of the human world but the inhuman, and it seems Paris suits his activity better than American and its “puritanical” values .

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could
have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am
proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and
governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles.
I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I
belong to the earth!

This view indicates Miller wants to throw off all artificial limitations created by man, and live in a much more naturalistic way, answering only to the self. Despite his rejection of value, there does seem to be times where Miller regards the act of creation as having intrinsic value, and the (sometimes) eloquent and poetic quality of his writing suggests a pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Ultimately, Miller’s interest is only in what is immediately present, the concrete elements of life. He is interested in the awareness of the: discrepancy there is between ideas and living. A permanent dislocation, though we try to cover the two with a bright awning. And it won’t go. Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living: (242)

Life requires action, it should not be “an abstract idea nailed to a cross” (243). Life is lived on the margins of society. Anything that takes the vitality out of life (such as social conventions, normative morality, etc) should be rejected. While this worldview may not be sustainable for societies at large, it does seem applicable to the artist striving to find the center of life, to create something new, and live life to its fullest intensity. I think Miller is proposing that the only way to find value in the modern world is to first destroy all of the systems that have been built up in the past and start over by finding value in life itself.