Madness and madness

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Schall und Wahn , engl. The Sound and the Fury , is a novel by William Faulkner , published in 1929. Today it is considered an important work of the early modern era and one of the most important novels in American literature . In 1998 the Modern Library listed him at number 6 of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century .

The novel reports in a complex narrative structure from internal monologues of three narrators and characterized by numerous intricate flashbacks from the decline of the once powerful southern family Compson.

The title refers to a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth : "Life ... is nothing more than a fable, told by an idiot, full of noise and madness that means nothing."

content

In four sections, the novel mainly tells of the events and thoughts of the main characters from the Compson family on three consecutive days in April 1928. The Compsons live in Jefferson (county seat of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County ) in a house that has grown too big: The father of Family died from alcoholism and the rest of the family is falling apart emotionally. The family, which in earlier times had a governor and three generals, mainly includes the mother Caroline Compson, her mentally handicapped son Benjamin, his depressed older brother Quentin, his younger brother Jason, his sister Caddy and later theirs Daughter, also called Quentin. The black servants, old Dilsey, her husband Roskus until his death, their sons TP and Versh and their daughter Frony and her son Luster also live on the property.

In the first part of the novel everyday family life is described from the perspective of the adult and mentally handicapped Benjy, who communicates with his family by moaning, whimpering and screeching. All of his sensory impressions barely go beyond a simple short-term memory - people and things appear from somewhere into his field of vision and disappear from it in a way that is just as mysterious for him.

The second part, dated some eighteen years earlier, tells of Quentin who drowned himself in the river at the end of the day he told.

The third part tells Jason, the third eldest, who took over the role of host after the death of his father. He works as a salesman for a small income and haplessly invests in stocks. Jason's relative prosperity results mainly from the fact that he regularly siphons off some of the money with which his "fallen" sister Caddy, who has been driven out of the house, supports her daughter who lives in the family. Jason feels that fate and his family have treated him unfairly and shows this dissatisfaction clearly in his pronounced cynicism and his malice.

The fourth part is told by an anonymous narrator outside the family who is equally distant from all the characters involved. The focus is on Dilsey, the old black servant and good soul of the house, and Jason. His cash box is broken open by Caddy's daughter Quentin, who flees with her mother's $ 3,000 food money and Jason's other savings, which her uncle has long withheld from her. The deceived cheater, his cold-blooded, sorry mother and his mentally handicapped brother stay behind in the desolate house.

people

The list shows the main characters in the novel.

  • Mr. Jason Richmond Lycurgus Compson , the father of the family, is a cynical intellectual, nihilist, and fatalist who drinks whiskey and reads Greek and Roman literature. He believes that life is absurd and meaningless and that there is little he can do to influence the fate of his family. Family honor and caddy's illegitimate pregnancy bother him little. He dies of alcoholism in 1912.
  • Mrs. Caroline Bascomb Compson , the ailing mother of the family and wife of Jason Compson, is neurotic and hypochondriac . She complains a lot, dissolves in self-pity and has little love for her children. Jason junior is given preferential treatment by her and gets all her affection and attention because she considers him a true Bascomb as the only one of her children, while Quentin, Benjamin and Caddy are Compsons to them. She is very concerned about the honor of her name; She interprets Benjamin's intellectual disability as a curse on the family.
  • Quentin Compson , the eldest Compson child (born 1891), is a sensitive Harvard student who romanticizes and breaks ideals like honor, purity and virginity when he learns that his sister Caddy, whom he loves dearly, has lost her virginity . The past size of the family and its decline is a great burden for him, which is expressed in his obsession for his grandfather's watch, which he always carries with him and which breaks on the day of his suicide. After his first year at Harvard, he committed suicide on June 2, 1910 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by falling from a bridge into the Charles River , complaining with two irons .
  • Candace "Caddy" Compson , the only daughter and the second oldest Compson child (born 1892), is loving and motherly. Although none of the four chapters are told from her perspective, she is the heart of the novel. She is an emotional reference point for her three brothers. Their precocity and promiscuity , which leads to the loss of family honor, largely determines the novel's plot. She has her first sex with Dalton Ames. In April 1910, when she was pregnant, she was married to the Indiana banker Herbert Head, whom she and her mother met during the summer vacation in French Lick. He divorced her in 1911 when he discovers he is not the father of her child. She then leaves Jefferson forever, leaving her illegitimate daughter, Miss Quentin, in the house.
  • Jason Compson junior , the third oldest Compson child (born 1894), is the head and sole breadwinner in the Compson's house after the death of his father in 1912. His character is characterized by selfishness, malice, sarcasm, domination and hatred. Despite the affection and love he gets from his mother, he is unable or unwilling to reciprocate. He rejects family love just as much as romantic. Because of Caddy's divorce, he has to give up the promised position at Herbert Heads Bank. Caddy's illegitimate daughter, Miss Quentin, becomes the cause and projection screen for all his problems. For years he withholds the maintenance money that Caddy sends for her daughter.
  • Benjamin "Benjy" Compson (born Maury in 1895) is the youngest Compson child. He cannot speak and is mentally handicapped. When his mother discovered the disability, she changed his name from Maury (after her brother) to Benjamin in 1900. He cannot distinguish between past and present and relives his memories as if they were still happening. For fear of shame and shame, the family does not take him to the asylum in Jackson, but keeps him indoors. Despite his inability to understand the world, he has a particular sensitivity to tragic events. He perceives Caddy's loss of virginity by smell and Quentin's suicide over a great distance.
  • Miss Quentin Compson (born 1911) is Caddy's and probably Dalton Ames' illegitimate daughter and was named after Caddy's brother even before she was born. She is wild, rebellious and unrestrained and lives out her precocious sexuality as freely as her mother, but unlike Caddy feels no guilt or shame. Jason junior and Caroline think she inherited all of the bad qualities of the Compson line. She is at the mercy of Jason junior and flees from Jefferson on the night of April 7th to 8th, 1928 with her lover, a carnival artist, and a stolen cash box (with the maintenance money to which she is entitled anyway).
  • Dilsey Gibson , the housekeeper and cook of the Compson family and witness to their decline, is selfless, pragmatic, patient and kind. She takes care of the Compson children, for whom she is the only steadfast support in life. Ironically, it embodies the very basic values ​​(family, religion, honor) on which the past greatness of the Compson family was built, and at the same time symbolizes the hope for a revival of these old values ​​in a pure, unadulterated form.
  • Roskus Gibson , Dilsey's husband and once servant of the Compsons, who recently was unable to do any work because of rheumatism and osteoarthritis . Like Caroline, he believes there is a curse on the family. His death is one of the memories that Benjamin lived through in the first chapter.
  • TP , Versh and Frony Gibson , the children of Dilsey and Roskus.
  • Luster Gibson , Frony's fourteen-year-old son, who responsibly takes care of Benjamin and is looking for a lost quarter to go to the fair.
  • Maury Bascomb , Caroline's brother, an unsuccessful entrepreneur who had an affair with married Mrs. Patterson, a neighbor of the Compsons.
  • Earl , the boss of Jason junior, a kind, good-natured man who treats Jason's sarcasm and rudeness with patience and kindness.
  • Dalton Ames , Caddy's first serious lover and probably the father of her daughter Miss Quentin.
  • Herbert Head , Caddy's husband, a wealthy banker who is getting divorced when he learns he is not the father of her child.
  • Spoade , Gerald Bland and "Shreve" MacKenzie (actually Shrevlin McCannon, compare Absalom, Absalom! ), Fellow students of Quentin at Harvard, who defend him at the Justice of the Peace when he is accused of kidnapping a girl.

Quentin Compson, his father Mr. Jason Compson and Shrevlin McCannon are characters in the 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom !. Quentin also appears in the framework of Faulkner's short stories A Justice (1931), A Bear Hunt (1934) and Lion (1935), and he is the first-person narrator in the short story That Evening Sun (1931), which also includes his parents Mr. and Mrs. Compson, his siblings Caddy and Jason junior and the housekeeper Dilsey Gibson and their children TP, Versh and Frony appear.

About the composition and meaning

The first three parts form a unit through the principle of the figure perspective, even if they differ significantly in the narrated time and in the style of the narrator. But despite this principle, which is applied three times, no coherent thread of action unfolds, since the events are presented in a non-chronological order and with a strong individual accentuation. Fragmentary flashbacks within a weakly coherent but chronological narrative within the parts additionally blur the coherence of the story. Quentin's day at Harvard , his walk and his encounter with the little immigrant girl are repeatedly interrupted by memories of moving experiences in the past.

A number of motifs and symbols run through the parts of the novel: clocks play an important role and indicate the time that has passed - for example a blood-smeared watch glass and broken hands on Quentin's suicide or the three-hour-long kitchen clock on the end of the family Compson.

The external fragmentation of the Compson family due to the death and flight of their children follows the manifold spiritual cracks and fissures that had already become apparent. The complex time structure of this mosaic of memories, the disparity of the parts, the diversity of the narrators - this narrative form reflects the decline and disintegration of the Compson family. In the inner monologues of the characters or their streams of consciousness , the outlines of the echoing, confusing catastrophes can hardly be made out, and the fragments of memory can only be combined with difficulty to form a picture of family history. In the multitude of allusions, a climate of emotional, ethical and perspective hopelessness gradually unfolds, from which the individual main characters cannot free themselves: Each perspective stands for itself and against that of the others.

In retrospect, the author characterized his work as "a book like I have never read it before" and always valued it as his departure for great artistic ventures, which he also sought in his later works.

filming

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/