The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner Review

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is the first time I saw mention of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury as it was on the booklist the kindly librarian gives Dahl’s precocious heroine (by the by, I re-read Matilda years later and, miraculously, it still held up). I’ve also always been aware that Faulkner is part of that cadre of mid-20th century American writers - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck - and that he’s my blind spot in that group.

So, in an attempt to finally cross this title off my Matilda reading list and to say that I’ve read all the great US novelists from that era, I decided to read The Sound and The Fury. Well, I think Roald Dahl was utterly mental to put this on a list of books a kid - even one as bright as Matilda - should read because this was not just tough to get through but an utterly loathsome and ugly novel (and not just because the n-word is on every page).

Good fucking luck finding a story in this disasterpiece. It’s set in the American South in the 1910s and 1920s. There are names - I won’t call them characters because they didn’t have any - yammering at one another but seemingly not doing anything. The few scenes that were decipherable was one name arguing with another name (possibly his kid) about skipping school, and one scene where a man helps a lost child get home and her older brother thinks the man’s trying to abduct her.

It’s mostly written in that maddening stream of consciousness style that was all the rage back then, having been (then recently) pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In Faulkner’s hands, the overall effect is of impenetrable, wholly unengaging sludge on the page.

Another stylistic choice that I despise is idiolect - writing the way a person speaks. He does this for the black people in the story, but not the white people, and I’m going to speculate, but I think he did it to make black people look ignorant and stupid in comparison to white people. I can’t imagine Southern white people spoke the King’s English themselves but it’s only black people who are portrayed as barely articulate, thoroughly simplistic caricatures. But beyond the foul taste of racism this leaves, it’s a horrible experience to have to read through and I hate any novel that employs this moronic style.

There’s no story, no characters, no point - I read the blurb and it mentioned some drivel about this being about the decline of the South, perhaps to make it seem like it’s not the overrated garbage it is, but I don’t buy it. Like the Shakespeare quote from which the title is derived, The Sound and The Fury is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.