The Sound and the Fury and its Origins in Folklore

The article about The Sound and the Fury that I read this week provided significance for some of the details of the story that I would have otherwise dismissed as unimportant. Charles D. Peavy’s article “Faulkner’s Use of Folklore in The Sound and the Fury,” as the title suggests, discusses the connection between Faulkner’s novel and some common Negro and Southern folklore. The connections vary from Faulkner’s use of certain objects that imply a greater significance than is readily noticeable, such as the jimson weed and its pairing with Benjy with its various meanings or the “squinch” owl and the howling dog as omens of death, to his direct allusions to certain folktales, as in Quentin’s allusion to the common Negro saying that “a drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” (Faulkner 90). The explanation of each of these provided greater insight into Faulkner’s genius.

The jimson weed has several meanings and connections that make it much more than just a random object that Benjy was given to play with. Through Peavy’s article, I learned that the jimson weed is poisonous and possesses a “heavy and oppressive perfume” (Peavy 437). Its odor is significant because it contrasts the smell of trees that he had once attributed to Caddy but that he can no longer smell, and the fact that it is poisonous leads the reader to wonder why Benjy was encouraged to play with it by his caretakers. There is also a certain irony in the fact that Benjy is holding the one plant that is most commonly associated with the male sex organ as it closely resembles one when the bud is closed when Benjy has been castrated. Peavy explains that Faulkner used the jimson weed as a phallic symbol not only in The Sound and the Fury but also in Sanctuary, in which a woman runs through a field of jimson weeds on the morning before she is raped (438). This portion of Peavy’s article answered by previously lingering question as to why the jimson weed is brought up so often in The Sound and the Fury.

Faulkner’s use of the “squinch” owl or screech owl and the howling of dogs as death omens originates from common Negro folktales. According to Peavy, Negroes frequently said that if “an owl screeches at a house where anyone is sick it will make him worse and probably cause him to die” (441). It was also customarily understood that a howling dog was a forewarning that someone was dying or about to die. Faulkner uses both of these symbols in the scene in which Mr. Compson is very sick and about to die. Roskus understands Benjy’s ability to sense impending death in relation to a howling dog’s similar ability; he believes that Benjy functions the same way a dog does in this situation. He says, “He know lot more than folks thinks. He knowed they time was coming, like that pointer done” (Faulkner 31). Faulkner portrays Benjy’s ability to sense death as superior to that of the dog because he shows that he sensed the impending death of his father even before the dog did.

Faulkner’s allusion to the folktale that a “drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” is particularly interesting (90). Peavy connects this Negro tale to a similar belief in ancient India and Greece that “to look at one’s reflection in water was bad luck” and “an omen of death” (439). This proved to be true in The Sound and the Fury because in the same day that Quentin looks down into the water and considers the Negro folktale, he drowns himself. Peavy’s article was particularly enlightening about the intricacies of the novel The Sound and the Fury, of which the ones I have mentioned are only a small fraction (643).

Citations:

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Peavy, Charles D. "Faulkner's Use of Folklore in The Sound and the Fury." The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 79, No. 313 July-September 1966: 437-447. JSTOR. .

A Week of Thoughts Written Post-Antibiotics (Thank Goodness!)

This week, I have read three more stories whose class discussions I have missed: “Greasy Lake,” “The Things They Carried,” and “I Stand Here Ironing.” In this blog, I’m going to write about two of them: “Greasy Lake” and “The Things They Carried.”

“Greasy Lake” is a coming-of-age story of three young men – the narrator, Jeff, and Digby – who after getting themselves into more than they bargained for, realize that being “dangerous characters” is not as cool as it seems (130). They go to Greasy Lake for two reasons: because “everyone went there” and because a myriad of indecent yet alluring things – loud music, illegal substances, bad behavior – go on there (131). With such a setting, it seems inevitable that the narrator, Jeff, and Digby are going to get themselves into a precarious situation. And so the reader is almost not surprised when these three characters obnoxiously bother the people in a car that is expected to be their friend’s only for them to discover that it is actually the car of a “very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots” (132). A fight ensues and the narrator hits the man over the head with a tire iron, knocking him to the ground, unconscious. The man’s girlfriend comes out of the car, and the boys, overwhelmed by adrenaline and fear, try to rape her and then, when another car comes, they disperse into the trees. The situation only gets more frightening when the narrator, hiding in the disgusting lake, comes upon a dead body. Once the man that he had hit regains consciousness, vandalizes his car, and leaves, the boys are able to go back to the car, find their keys, and prepare to go. It is clear that they have been seriously – and necessarily – affected by the happenings of the evening when an intoxicated girl comes to their car, offers them drugs, and invites them to party with her and her friend, and they – who previous to this situation would very likely have jumped on this offer – respond to this with silence and the narrator “thought [he] was going to cry” (137). The image at the end of the story is quite a powerful one; as the boys drive away, the see the girl still standing in the same place with her hand outstretched. It is powerful because it is clear how pathetic and ineffectual drugs and alcohol make a person. In this evening, the three main characters have seen and experienced quite enough to keep them from returning to Greasy Lake and from returning to the old path of trying to be “dangerous characters,” and they seem to have absorbed that message.

“The Things They Carried” is a story about the shared hardships of war and the coping mechanisms that soldiers use to keep from being enveloped by the misery of war. Throughout the story, the narrator, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, talks about both the physical and emotional burdens of the soldiers – “the things they carried.” My favorite line in this story is, “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” This quote can be applied not only to the massive amounts of weaponry that they carry but also to the emotional things that they carry: “the weight of memory,” “their own lives,” and “all the emotional baggage of men who might die” (631-632, 634). Lieutenant Cross’s method of dealing with the war is fantasizing about Martha, the woman back home and at college who he loves a great deal, but who he does not believe loves him. At the end of the story, after one of his men dies and he blames himself because he was distracted by his fantasies of Martha, Lieutenant Cross comes to a rather abrupt and, in my opinion, extreme decision. Because he blames his fantasies for the death of Ted Lavender, he decides that these fantasies are not worth the trouble that they have caused and that, therefore, he will no longer be motivated by love. He says that he “would dispense with love; it was not now a factor” (636). This seems extreme because I do not believe that he ever truly loved Martha; I think that he chose Martha to represent the love that he is missing now that he is at war. She was a symbol for love to him, but there was never the real thing. He has now allowed himself to become hardened by the war, a lamentable but unfortunately common occurrence among soldiers (768).