American Literature

1900-1945

Survey Course Instructor:

Mihai Mîndra
 Lecture 11

Modernist Fiction II:

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the
Fury, 1929;
John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., 1938
(collected).
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
 Born in New Albany, Mississippi  his
work reflects the history & the culture
of the South as a whole:
 Oxford, town in Lafayette County, state
of Mississippi -- the model for the
fictional town of “Jefferson”
 Lafayette County – the model for his
“Yoknapatawpha County”
A map of
Yoknapatawpha
County
drawn by Faulkner,
who claimed to be
its
"sole owner and
proprietor“
(Absalom,
Absalom!)
•Role of the
modernist
writer and his
relation with the
actual
geographies,
politics and
official history
•Art replacing &
subverting all
official
discourses
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
 World War I: rejected by the U.S. Army
because of his height
 Joined the Canadian and then the Royal Air
Force, but did not take part in much wartime
actions
 1949: the Nobel Prize for Literature
 2 Pulitzer Prizes:
 1955: A Fable
 1963: The Reivers
 2 National Book Awards:
 1951: Collected Stories
 1955: A Fable.
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
 Excerpt from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
 “I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough
to say that man is immortal simply because he will
endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has
clanged and faded from the last worthless rock
hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening,
that even then there will still be one more sound;
that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking. I
refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not
merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not
because he alone among creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a
spirit cabaple of compassion and sacrifice and
endurance”.
 the humanist side of American modernism
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 Three types of inadequate relation to
EXPERIENCE (Benjy, Quentin, Jason &
other Compsons) in stream of
consciousness technique
 + an adequate one (Dilsey) in
classical omniscient narrative
technique
 The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 "I aint done nothing to him." Luster said. "He was playing there,
and all of a sudden he started bellering.“ What you want to get
her started for, Dilsey said, Whyn't you keep him out of there.
He was just looking at the fire, Caddy said. Mother was telling
him his new name. We didn't mean to get her started. I knows
you didn't, Dilsey said. Him at one end of the house and her at
the other. You let my things alone, now. Dont you touch nothing
till I get back. "Aint you shamed of yourself." Dilsey said.
"Teasing him." She set the cake on the table. "I aint been
teasing him." Luster said. "He was playing with that bottle full of
dogfennel and all of a sudden he started up bellering. You heard
him." "You aint done nothing to his flowers." Dilsey said. "I aint
touched his graveyard." Luster said.
 What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
 Explain stream of consciousness
 What is / are the referent(s) for the personal pronouns written in
green? What is their role?
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 “WHEN THE SHADOW OF THE SASH APPEARED ON THE
curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I
was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's
and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you
the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather
excrutiatingly 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. I
give it to you not that you may remember time, but that
you might forget it now and then for a moment and not
spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle
is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field
only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is
an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
 What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
 Explain stream of consciousness
 Discuss / explain the bits in green
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 “When I finished my cigar and went up, the light was still on.
I could see the empty keyhole, but I couldn't hear a sound.
She studied quiet. Maybe she learned that in school. I told
Mother goodnight and went on to my room and got the box
out and counted it again. I could hear the Great American
Gelding snoring away like a planing mill. I read somewhere
they'd fix men that way to give them women's voices. But
maybe he didn't know what they'd done to him. I dont reckon
he even knew what he had been trying to do, or why Mr
Burgess knocked him out with the fence picket. And if they'd
just sent him on to Jackson while he was under the ether,
he'd never have known the difference. (…) Well, like I say
they never started soon enough with their cutting, and they
quit too quick. I know at least two more that needed
something like that, and one of them not over a mile away,
either.”
 What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
 Explain stream of consciousness
 Explain the phrases written in green.
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 “ ‘Eight oclock,’ Dilsey said. She ceased and tilted her head
upward, listening. But there was no sound save the clock and
the fire. She opened the oven and looked at the pan of
bread, then stooping she paused while someone descended
the stairs. She heard the feet cross the diningroom, then the
swing door opened and Luster entered, followed by a big
man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance
whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another
or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking
and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait
like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been
brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in
daguerrotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of
cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.”
 What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
 What kind of narrative is there in this excerpt?
 Who is “the big man”? Comment on the phrases / sentences
written in green.
 The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 “Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or
fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved
in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he
considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved
but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of
its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace; not only this, she
loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself
was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all
not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she
placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was
no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved
death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the
calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the
hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's
child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already
named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and the
brother) knew was already the same as dead, when she married
(1910).”
 What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
 What kind of narrative is there in this excerpt?
 What are the referents for “he”, “she” and “Quentin”?
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
 Source of dramatic tension and focal
point of various perspectives: Caddy’s
surrender to Dalton Ames
 The sequence of events is not caused by her
acts but by the significance which each of her
brothers attributes to it
 As a result: the four sections appear quite
unrelated even though they repeat certain
incidents and are concerned with the same
problem: Caddy’s loss of virginity.
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 Each of the sections is static, but
through their reading the plot reveals
progressively.
 There is no development of either
character or plot in the traditional
manner.
 The consciousness of a character is the
agent illuminating and being
illuminated by the central situation
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 fixing the structure while leaving the central
situation ambiguous  forcing the reader to
reconstruct the story and to apprehend its significance
for himself
 The reader recovers the story while he is grasping the
relation of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason to it.
 with respect to the plot the 4 sections are inextricably
connected, but with respect to the central situation
they are quite distinct and self-sufficient.
 As related to the central focus, each of the 1st 3
sections presents a version of the same facts which is
at once the truth and a complete distortion of the
truth; e.g:
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 “I went along the fence, to the gate, where the girls passed with their
booksatchels. "You, Benjy." Luster said. "Come back here." You cant do no
good looking through the gate, T. P. said. Miss Caddy done gone long ways
away. Done got married and left you. You cant do no good, holding to the
gate and crying. She cant hear you. What is it he wants, T. P. Mother said.
Cant you play with him and keep him quiet. He want to go down yonder and
look through the gate, T. P. said. Well, he cannot do it, Mother said. It's
raining. You will just have to play with him and keep him quiet. You,
Benjamin. Aint nothing going to quiet him, T. P. said. He think if he down to
the gate, Miss Caddy come back. Nonsense, Mother said.
I could hear them talking. I went out the door and I couldn't hear them, and
I went down to the gate, where the girls passed with their booksatchels.
They looked at me, walking fast, with their heads turned. I tried to say, but
they went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and they went
faster. Then they were running and I came to the corner of the fence and I
couldn't go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and
trying to say.

 Benjy’s voice – silenced in terms of plot; his missing Caddy will lead to his
running after one of the girls; the daughter’s family & his own family would
misinterpret his intentions  taken to Jackson (see slide 11 & Jason’s
perception and interpretation of the event).
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 “The month of brides, the voice that
breathed She ran right out of the mirror,
out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses. Mr
and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson
announce the marriage of. Roses. Not
virgins like dogwood, milkweed. I said I
have committed incest, Father I said.
Roses. Cunning and serene. If you attend
Harvard one year, but dont see the boat-
race, there should be a refund. Let Jason
have it. Give Jason a year at Harvard.”
 Quentin’s version of Caddy’s story
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 “ONCE A BITCH ALWAYS A BITCH, WHAT I SAY. I SAYS you're
lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you. I says
she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead
of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and
waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a chair
unless they've got a pan full of bread and meat to balance
them, to fix breakfast for her. And Mother says, "But to have
the school authorities think that I have no control over her,
that I cant--" "Well," I says, "You cant, can you? You never
have tried to do anything with her," I says, "How do you
expect to begin this late, when she's seventeen years old?"
(…) "Sure," I says, "I never had time to be. I never had time
to go to Harvard like Quentin or drink myself into the ground
like Father. I had to work. But of course if you want me to
follow her around and see what she does, I can quit the store
and get a job where I can work at night. Then I can watch her
during the day and you can use Ben for the night shift."
 Jason’s version of Caddy’s story via Quentin’s (Caddy’s daughter)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 "They deliberately shut me out of their lives," she says, "It
was always her and Quentin. They were always conspiring
against me. Against you too, though you were too young
to realise it. They always looked on you and me as
outsiders, like they did your Uncle Maury. I always told
your father that they were allowed too much freedom, to
be together too much. When Quentin started to school we
had to let her go the next year, so she could be with him.
She couldn't bear for any of you to do anything she
couldn't. It was vanity in her, vanity and false pride. And
then when her troubles began I knew that Quentin would
feel that he had to do something just as bad. But I didn't
believe that he would have been so selfish as to--I didn't
dream that he--" "Maybe he knew it was going to be a
girl," I says, "And that one more of them would be more
than he could stand.“
 Their mother’s version via Jason’s; what is it that Quentin
(Caddy’s brother) did and proved to be “selfish”?
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
 each of the 1st 3 sections presents a version of the same
facts which is at once the truth and a complete distortion of
the truth
• the theme of the novel, as revealed by its
structure, is: the relation between the act and
man’s apprehension of the act, between the
event and the interpretation.
• It is a matter of shifting perspective: for each
man creates his own truth. This does not mean
that there is no truth, or that truth is
unknowable. It only means that truth is a
matter of the heart’s response and the mind’s
logic  MODERNISM
• Dilsey’s responses seem to be nearest to it, as
humanly round and really moral.
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  each of the 1st 3 sections presents a well
demarcated and isolated world built around
one of these splinters of truth
communication is difficult, if not impossible:
 Caddy (with everything entailed by this character
and its doings), who is central to all three, means
something different to each.
 For Benjy: smell of trees (Benjy’s perception is
sensorial)  innocence & maternal protection.
 For Quentin: honor ( an abstract and
emotional perceiver of morality)
 For Jason: money (or the means to obtain it:
logic and social communication are his
antennae)
 John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

John Dos Passos as a Sunday Painter. (He was a good

amateur painter.)
Oil on Canvas.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

 three volume
sequence of novels
The 42nd Parallel
(1930), 1919
(1932), The Big
Money (1936) -
published together
in 1937 as U.S.A

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936.

The Big Money (1936)
 Experimented with:
 Juxtaposition
 rapid cutting
 fragmentation, owing a good deal to the cinema
techniques of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein and
D. W. Griffith.
 Other devices:
 Simultaneity
 pluralized narration
 intersection of documentary material with
personal stories
The Big Money (1936)
 tracing the growth of the history of the
United States from its optimistic and
progressive hopes at the turn into the 20th
century, through the crisis year 1919, when
Woodrow Wilson’s hopes began to fail, and
so to the crass materialism of the
1920s
 background material is divided into :
“Camera Eye”, “Biography”, “Newsreel”
The Big Money (1936)
 “NEWSREEL LXVIII
WALL STREET STUNNED
This is not Thirty-eight but it's old Ninety-seven You must
put her in Center on time MARKET
SURE TO RECOVER FROM SLUMP
Decline in Contracts

 POLICE TURN MACHINE GUNS ON COLORADO MINE

STRIKERS KILL 5 WOUND 40

 sympathizers appeared on the scene just as thousands of

office workers were pouring out of the buildings at the
lunch hour. As they raised their placard high and started an
indefinite march from one side to the other, they were
jeered and hooted not only by the office workers but also
by workmen on a building under construction”
The Big Money (1936)
 “THE CAMERA EYE (51)
at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the
broken floor of a lurched over cabin a man halfsits halflies
propped up by an old woman two wrinkled girls that might
be young chunks of coal flare in the hearth flicker in his
face white and sagging as dough blacken the caved-in
mouth the taut throat the belly swelled enormous with the
wound he got working on the minetipple the barefoot girl
brings him a tincup of water the woman wipes sweat off his
streaming face with a dirty denim sleeve the firelight flares
in his eyes stretched big with fever in the women's scared
eyes and in the blanched faces of the foreigners
without help in the valley hemmed by dark strikesilent hills
the man will die (my father died, we know what it is like to
see a man die) the women will lay him out on the rickety
cot the miners will bury him (…)”
The Big Money (1936)
 covers 1920-29
 chronicle of America’s failure in the post-war
period
 failure is presented through the
unabashed pursuit of wealth, prestige and
power at the expense of political freedom,
equality of economic opportunity and
human dignity
 Dos Passos did not see the novel as a
linear structure, moving by progression
of character and incident, but as a
montage of people and activities: e.g. Mary
French
The Big Money (1936)
 “MARY FRENCH
Mary French had to stay late at the office and couldn't get to the hall
until the meeting was almost over. There were no seats left so she
stood in the back. So many people were standing in front of her that
she couldn't see Don, she could only hear his ringing harsh voice and
feel the tense attention in the silence during his pauses. When a roar
of applause answered his last words and the hall filled suddenly with
voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet she ran out ahead of the
crowd and up the alley to the back door.
Don was just coming out of the black sheetiron door talking over his
shoulder as he came to two of the miners' delegates. He stopped a
second to hold the door open for them with a long arm. His face had
the flushed smile, there was the shine in his eye he often had after
speaking, the look, Mary used to tell herself, of a man who had just
come from a date with his best girl. It was some time before Don saw
her in the group that gathered round him in the alley. Without
looking at her he swept her along with the men he was talking to and
walked them fast towards the corner of the street”.
The Big Money (1936)
 His comparison between the new novel structure
and a tableau clarifies his intention:
 “I have paid a good deal of attention to painting. The
period of art I was very much interested in at that
time was the 13th and the 14th centuries. Its
tableaux with large figures of saints surrounded by a
lot of little people just fascinated me. I tried to
capture the same effect in words.”
 the narrative method and authorial choice in the
trilogy must be seen in light of Dos Passos’ aim of
creating a new kind of fiction to couple
history with fiction, to “keep up a contemporary
commentary on history’s changes, always as seen by
some individual’s ears, felt through some individual’s
nerves and tissues.”