Read the book by a week from Wed/Thursday 25th/26th as you would a novel in college.

Transcription

1 Reading schedule Read the book by a week from Wed/Thursday 25th/26th as you would a novel in college. Discussion/ reading checks for the following pages will take place on: The book takes place in real time from April 6 th -April 8 th 1928 during Easter week: Benjy: Versh-1905 TP Luster Monday/Tuesday 17 th 18 th Benjy April 7 th 1-45 (yellow) 1-38 (new) Faulkner and the South Wed/Thursday 19 th 20 th Benjy April 7 th Autism/ Friday/Monday 21 st 24 th Quentin 1 June 2, Stream of consciousness/freud Neurosis

2 Psychosis Bipolar Manic depression Tuesday wed 25 th 26 th Quentin2 June 2, Bibical allusions Caddy seen through the eyes of her brothers Thursday/Friday 27 th 28 th Quenitn 3 April 6th The South s historical past The South s modern future Tuesday/wed 1 st 2 nd Jason 1 April 6th Thursday/Friday3 rd 4 th Jason Monday Tuesday 7 th 8 th Dilsey

3 257 End 305-end Final Wed Thusday

4 Yoknapatawpha County: Pronounced "Yok nuh puh TAW fuh." The novel's title is taken from a monologue spoken by Shakespeare's Macbeth, who has attained the throne of Scotland through murder and has held it through the most brutal violence and tyranny; at this point in the play he has just heard that his wife has killed herself. Sated with his own corruption and looking forward to his imminent defeat and death, he said Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's just a waking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale

5 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Macbeth V.v. In Carolyn Denard's essay "The Long, High Gaze: The Mythical Consciousness of Toni Morrison and William Faulkner," she notes that Faulkner often gave "voice to the 'discredited' within the South - the alienated, the insane, the idiosyncratic - Ike, Benjy, Darl. These nationally and locally discredited get Faulkner's gaze He does not simply praise these characters the gaze is not applause; it is a sincere, lingering consideration of their place in the universe how they fail and how they triumph, but always how they matter." (Kolmerten 22). In the first chapter of William Faulkner's emotionally charged novel, The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson, the severely retarded son who narrates this section, matters in a most profound sense. It is through his voice childlike, detached, and often disorienting that readers are confronted with the reality of time as a recurring motif and how time affects and informs human experiences. It is through Benjy's voice and acute sense of order that readers are

6 able to ascertain the nature of the Compson family decline, as we work to make meaning of a tale told by an individual for whom time as we know it is inconsequential. What does matter is Benjy's perception of order, sensation, and memory within the realm of presentday time. Benjy matters because in this novel, and in this first chapter, the reader is asked to grapple with questions of perception, history, and chronology.

7 A county in northern Mississippi, the setting for most of William Faulkner s novels and short stories, and patterned upon Faulkner s actual home in Lafayette County, Mississippi. Its county seat is Jefferson. It is bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River (an actual river in Mississippi) and its southern boundary is the Yoknapatawpha River. It consists of 2,400 square miles, the eastern half of which is pine hill country. According to the map included in Absalom, Absalom! (published in 1936), the county's population is 15,611, of which 6,298 are white and 9,313 are black. Originally inhabited by the Chickasaw Indian tribe, white settlers first came to live in the area around Prior to the Civil War, the area was home to a number of large plantations, including Grenier's in the southeast, McCaslin's in the northeast, Sutpen's ("Sutpen's Hundred") in the northwest, and Compson's and Sartoris's in the immediate vicinity of Jefferson. The name "Yoknapatawpha" is apparently derived from two Chickasaw words: Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land." According to some sources, that was the original name for the Yocona River, also an actual river running through southern Lafayette County. According to Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha means "water flowing slow through the flatland." Arthur F. Kinney, however, postulates an additional possibility for the origin and meaning of the name. In Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time, he suggests Faulkner might have consulted a

8 1915 Dictionary of the Choctaw Language in which the word is broken down as follows: ik patafo, a., unplowed. Blacks/Whites Old South/New South Innocence/evil Past is always present Experiments with language-engage the imaginative participation of the reader-more subjective flexible language Rhetorical conventions-dislocation of logical assumptions Like music and poetry-requires active participation of the reader Experimental techniques/psychological violence

9 He also thought that he should find in them the semblance of human spirit anywhere. Writers that the only subject worth the agony and sweat of the artist is the human heart in conflict. With a first novel, Soldier s Pay (1926), accepted for publication, he left in 1925 for a six month tour of Europe. By 1929 he was able to publish the beginning of his significant and mature work: Sartoris which initiated the Yoknapatwpha cycle with a study of the Sartoris family; and The Sound and the Fury which introduced the Compsons, a related family, and gave the world its first experience of this author s combination of experimental techniques and psychological violence. The older families hold in recollection the pioneers who first conquered the land, the old people, as a heritage that they share. Curiously too, the blacks have withstood better than the white people the shifting ordeals of history. Intruder in the Dust (1948) Absalom, Absalom! (1936) The Unvanquished (1938)

10 As I Lay Dying (1930) Faulkner s complex style may be regarded as consistent with his difficult objective - to keep continuously in focus the immediate character, the human heart in conflict, while evoking that past which is always present with us. He similarly intended to engage the imaginative participation of the reader and to provide a language more subjective and flexible than ordinary prose. The dislocation of logical construction in the free association of images. Faulkner s psychological approach, the projection of events through the memory of consciousness of the character in the form of interior monologue. April Versh before 1905 T.P Luster 1928

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