Broadcast: December 12, 2004
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VOICE ONE:
I'm Faith Lapidus.
VOICE TWO:
And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today, we finish the story of the writer William Faulkner. He created an area and filled it with people of the American South.
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VOICE ONE:
In nineteen-forty-five, all seventeen books William Faulkner had written by then were not being published. Some of them could not be found even in stores that sold used books.
The critic Malcolm Cowley says, Faulkner's "early novels had been praised too much, usually for the wrong reasons. His later and in many ways better novels had been criticized or simply not read. "
Even those who liked his books were not always sure what he was trying to say. Faulkner never explained. And he did not give information about himself. He did not even correct the mistakes others made when they wrote about him. He did not care how his name was spelled: with or without a "u. " He said either way was all right with him.
Once he finished a book he was not concerned about how it was presented to the public. Sometimes he did not even keep a copy of his book. He said, "I think I have written a lot and sent it off to be printed before I realized strangers might read it. "
VOICE TWO:
In nineteen-forty-six, Malcolm Cowley collected some of Faulkner's writings and wrote a report about him. The collection attempted to show what Faulkner was trying to do, and how each different book was part of a unified effort.
Cowley agreed that Faulkner was an uneven writer. Yet, he said, the unevenness shows that Faulkner was willing to take risks, to explore new material, and new ways to talk about it.
In nineteen-twenty-nine, in his novel “Sartoris,” Faulkner presented almost all the ideas he developed during the rest of his life. Soon after, he published the book he liked best, “The Sound and the Fury.” It was finished before “Sartoris,” but did not appear until six months later.
VOICE ONE:
In talking about “The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner said he saw in his mind a dirty little girl playing in front of her house. From this small beginning, Faulkner developed a story about the Compson family, told in four different voices. Three of the voices are brothers: Benjy, who is mentally sick; Quentin, who kills himself, and Jason, a business failure. Each of them for different reasons mourns the loss of their sister, Caddie. Each has a different piece of the story.
It is a story of sadness and loss, of the failure of an old Southern family to which the brothers belong. It also describes the private ideas of the brothers. To do this, Faulkner invents a different way of writing for each of them. Only the last part of the novel is told in the normal way. The other three parts move forward and back through time and space.
VOICE TWO:
The story also shows how the Compson family seems to cooperate in its failure. In doing so the family destroys what it wants to save.
Quentin, in “The Sound and the Fury,” tries to pressure his sister to say that she is pregnant by him. He finds it better to say that a brother and sister had sex together than to admit that she had sex with one of the common town boys of Jefferson.
Another brother, Jason, accuses others of stealing his money and causing his business to fail. At the same time, he is stealing from the daughter of his sister.
Missus Compson, the mother in the family, says of God's actions: "It can't be simply to…hurt me. Whoever God is, he would not permit that. I'm a lady."
