July 6th, 2010 was the 48th anniversary of William Faulkner’s death. Yet, nearly fifty years later, his distinctive narrative technique continues to influence and inspire writers. He lived and worked on the front lines of modernity. To analyze this technique and its importance we’ll examine the narrative style of three of Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!
Even after several successful publications, Faulkner found it difficult to get his work published. When he sent in the manuscript for The Sound and the Fury, he said something like ‘this is not a work I expect to get published’ and many, many publishers and critics agreed with that assessment at the time. It seems quaint, given the novel’s success and its induction into the western literary canon as a magnificent tour-de-force, but writers today face the same difficulty when working in avant-garde forms.
The reason for this is that some critics and readers consider techniques like Faulkner’s to be cryptic, to be complex for complexity’s sake. They argue that the stream-of-consciousness, fragments, non-sequential style of Faulkner obscures his stories and renders them near unreadable. But the truth is that Faulkner and the modernists and post-modernists find this to be a more accurate representation of the human experience than the façade of straightforward narrative found in novels prior to the modernist period.
As I Lay Dying is perhaps Faulkner’s most widely read novel, mostly due to its inclusion as required reading in many high school or lower-level college literature courses. The novel’s style is unique in a couple of different ways. First, Faulkner gives nearly all of the main characters a chance to express their perspectives. This multi-narrator approach had hardly ever been done before and never on that scale. Each “chapter” is told from the perspective of a different character. This alone is a remarkable advancement of literary narrative style, but coupled with Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness style, a style first brought about by the European modernists like James Joyce, creates an immersive, driven story, with fully rounded characters.
The reader of As I Lay Dying shares in the conscious experience of every character that gets a voice. Their unreliability, their biases, their perspective and their particular thought patterns are open to the reader in a way traditional narrative style could never allow. The lack of omniscient narrator contains the story to the multifaceted expression of the characters that participate in it; it lacks the crutch of the bird’s-eye view typical to traditional novels. This is important because human experience is not a bird’s-eye view, ever. We are down in it, trapped in our particular subjective experience.
Another technique Faulkner used in As I Lay Dying was to ascribe extremely eloquent words, phrases and thoughts to characters who lacked education and whose speech was colloquial and broken. This is not oversight or Faulkner breaching the author/character wall, but rather an expression of a humanistic belief: the belief that each person, regardless of education or social status, is capable of feeling deep, complex emotions that are just as real to them as any feelings are to any person—they simply lack the tools to express it. By using these complex, eloquent, even poetic phrases, Faulkner translates the obscure, abstract emotional experience of an average person into a language that perhaps begins to do it some justice.
The Sound and the Fury explored the multi-narrator technique, with each section having a separate perspective, but the real narrative breakthrough in The Sound and the Fury is how it deals with time. The novel is decidedly anti-chronological. Things happen out of sequence, not just from section to section, but even within a section, even from one sentence to the next. This especially happens in Benjy’s section, due to his expressly disjointed mind and series of images, but is true for all the sections to a certain extent.
So why? Why tell a story out of sequence? In denying the typical narrative structure of direct, chronological storytelling, Faulkner accomplishes a couple of things. One, he more accurately reflected actual human experience, because people exist in the past, present, and future all at the same time. Who does not flash back to the past or worry or anticipate the future while dealing with the present? To omit these time-shifts in a fictional narrative is to omit a crucial piece of human subjective experience.
Secondly, he skews the relationship between cause and effect. Causality still exists in Faulkner’s narratives; it is simply obscured. It is obscured because more often than not causality is obscured to us in our direct experience. Traditional novels all too often approach the present with a hindsight sensibility of causality. In reality, people rarely put all the pieces together until long after the particular event has passed. And like reality, one can really only appreciate the causality of The Sound and the Fury after the fact, when one has completed the entire novel and can reflect and go back and piece together the sequence of events and their relationship to each other. It is the great modernist paradox: truth through obfuscation.
Finally, in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner explores the reliability of narrative. Absalom is an exploration of narrative itself, stories within stories within stories, each narrator less reliable than the last. The old woman, Rosa Coldfield tells the Sutpen story to Quentin, who then tells it to Shreve. Shreve and Quentin essentially invent the last quarter of the book from speculation. Stories from Quentin’s father intrude into the narrative. Gothic horror tales, southern history, and the Civil War all take up their place in this story. What Faulkner does is to question, or rather make the reader question, just what the value of narrative is. Does a story’s value increase with its truth, or are the two separate qualities? This kind of meta-awareness is more typically post-modern than modern and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, published in 1936, was well ahead of its time in this regard.
Perhaps the most disjointed and difficult of Faulkner’s novels, Absalom also offers the most to the critical reader who is willing to do their part in its reading. Traditional novels are straight forward enough that not much work is required on the part of the reader to understand it. Some novels, great in their own respects, like Hugo’s Les Miserables, spell out explicitly the ideas and ethics of the narrative. However, Faulkner’s approach is to make the novel more akin to human experience. The meanings, the themes, the ideas, the connections in the novel are not put on the surface or casually narrated by an all-seeing voice. They are buried in the details and the reader must piece together the fragments to form their own idea of the novel. This is exactly the process that Shreve and Quentin go through in Absalom.
For Faulkner and the modernists, meaning was only meaning when it was worked for. When readers have to go through the act of discovery themselves, rather than being spoon-fed their opinions and emotions, they personalize the meaning. It belongs to them. As literature progresses, narrative techniques will be rejected, morphed, parodied, and re-invented. New styles will emerge, new ways of expressing human experience, each striving for just a tiny sliver more of truth. Each author who dares to approach the avant-garde will always face the same difficulty in publication that Faulkner faced. Publishers want to sell copies. Writers, real writers, want to express truth. Often the two are incompatible, but nonetheless, literature will continue to evolve and change and move forward until the forms we accept and understand today will be lampooned out of existence to make room for the unimaginable forms of the future.
Mark Brendle is a writer living in Oregon. His short fiction is available on the web at http://brendlewords.blogspot.com
