Photo by Jessica Furtney on Unsplash
Two writers from near polar opposite backgrounds created two modernist masterworks within just a few years of each other. William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury in 1929 from his Nobel-stained armchair in the deep south, through the eyes of a white artist. And Jean Toomer published Cane, the first book of the Harlem Renaissance, from his tenement room in the eponymous New York City neighborhood, through the lived experience of a black artist. The combined result: two sweeping portraits of America at a new dawn.
Not 50 years after Reconstruction and a decade after the World War I ceasefire, America sought fresh, bold voices—new visions of a united country, pacification. But Faulkner and Toomer weren’t interested in propaganda. The two writers revealed to the nation its bitter truths. They painted a country marred by obsolete traditions and crumbling heritage, revealing festering racism. How plantation politics continued to hold strong. How southern paranoia bubbled up in the everyday, regardless of racial ethnicity. The artists sculpted two distinct works that reify the contemporary state of America, its hardened divisions: black-white, north-south, male-female. Rendered with precise foreboding from both ends of the paradigm, Faulkner and Toomer illuminate striking interpersonal, socio-cultural dynamics that, twenty-one years after the turn of the century, should appear archaic—but, sadly, remain familiar.
Toomer, in an inter-genre novella, engages the reader page after page with robust character-driven vignettes that organically evoke their deep south setting. For example, in Cane’s Georgia section, where the book begins, the reader is immediately introduced to natural imagery and charged symbolism through a poem shaped like an old spiritual:
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
O cant you see, O cant you see it
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
…When the sun goes down.
Thus begins “Karintha.” Like Cane’s other stories that incorporate poems, “Karintha” dictates the vignette’s narrative and emotional crux within just a few poignant, beautiful lines. That is: Karintha, at first too young to understand, is objectified by the coarse, remorseless men that inhabit her small southern town, leading to a cycle of torment, abuse and neglect. We learn that Karintha became a mother not of her own will, in secret, in a pine forest away from town. We understand that the men who objectified her were not aware of the damage they caused, and that they would never stop. We learn that Karintha, herself, was not aware that her soul—"a growing thing ripened too soon”—never had a chance to be anything other than abused.
At the conclusion of the vignette, Toomer writes about the men who misguidedly search for Karintha’s soul, her love: “They will bring their money; they will die not having found it.” Karintha’s soul is perfect dusk on the eastern horizon—untouchable, taken for granted day after day by the men about town. To them, Karintha’s soul is simply the final element to be acquired, taken from her. To Karintha, her soul—independence, health, safety, virtues—outside of the male gaze does not exist. She has been bereft of the opportunity to understand herself and so she cannot share it with others. The tragedy is that she accepts her soulless station, her duty, her emptiness. The local men are attracted to Karintha’s vacant disposition, her mystery. They pay her for clues and for her body. They’ve created her and stole her very being but are not satisfied. In fact, they are disappointed. Karintha has no more to give. Her fall from innocence is complete. So, when the spiritual refrain resurfaces with an additional “Goes down…” at the end of the vignette, the tragedy of Karintha’s existence is reinforced. We sense that, had she the chance to discover her own soul, she would not share it with these men—but, like the falling sun, she never had a choice in the matter. It is significant, too, that Toomer placed “Karintha” is first in the collection. It sets the precedent that oppression, imbalance and identity will inform almost every story, verse, platonic, romantic, and racial relationship to come. Metaphorically, one can say the same about our nation at the time. And America today.
While Toomer’s project with Cane was to examine—celebrate, question, immortalize, sing—African American identity in post-WWI America, it seems Faulkner’s project with The Sound and the Fury (TSTF) was to inspect an evolving deep south by embodying its haunted constituency. In this case, the white Compson family and its black servants make for Faulkner’s ideal composites. Like Toomer, Faulkner employs an innovative, stylized structure that serves to illuminate the narrative’s core themes—disorder, apprehension, insecurity, innocence—which reflect the nation’s exuberant, if fraught ethos at the time, on the verge of the Great Depression.
Through chaotic first-person limited narration, Faulkner zigs between characters and zags between timelines. It is never immediately clear who’s perspective we’re reading, nor what we should be paying attention to. We have no lifeline. Everything is immediate. And it is a prototypical modernist challenge in this way, but it is also what makes TSTF a masterwork in symbolism. For symbols are all we have to place us—we cannot rely on voice. Benjy is developmentally disabled. Quinten is obsessive, suicidal. Jason is delusional, paranoid. Dilsey is exhausted. Caddy is ever-present, yet unknowable. Therefore, we can only comprehend the characters’ slow revelations of past offenses and simmering intentions through the recurring images that Faulkner serves us. From a red tie to a blue bottle and the “smell like trees” and the “smell of the cold” to the tick of a broken watch, the image-heavy stream of consciousness technique succeeds in this way. Likewise, the novel becomes something like visual art, an abstract painting. Examine a single section up close and one discovers beautiful linework, the rage, joy, obsession behind each stroke or splatter. But step back, study the entire canvas and one is able to comprehend—or at least, appreciate—the work’s full gravity, intention. Its breadth, technique and expertise resonate as one pulsing experience before you. After all, TSTF is more than a collection of strokes and splatters, unreliable voices and symbols, it is a portrait of a misshapen, dying southern aristocracy. Each member, the product of his or her own accursed experiences and habits. Each character, arriving to us in the present, carrying the full weight of the family member that came before him or her.
For this reason, it is notable that Faulkner closes the novel from Dilsey’s perspective, marking a shift into omniscient narration. Dilsey is the Compson’s black servant and, yes, plays the stable foil to the family’s inevitable unraveling—but Dilsey also serves a grander purpose. She is the final say. The eyes and ears of the Compson present and past. The culmination of three generations. Structurally and narratively, as the loose plot unfolds from chapter to chapter, so, too, does everything rest upon Dilsey’s back. She is the only individual on the crumbling Compson estate that has been there long enough—and with enough mental capacity and mature awareness—to comprehend the family’s generational tragedies and ultimate downfall. She becomes our objective camera, with which to see the family as they are to the world. Though Faulkner’s rendering of Dilsey’s speech and occupation are often steeped in racism, her position as a galvanizing force within the home, the lone soul holding the Compsons together across the ages, remains unquestionable.
This may be a racist stereotype of black servitude in and of itself, but Dilsey’s section can also be read as metaphor. A symbolic reckoning with the fact that the deep south—and America as we know it—has been built upon the backs of unpaid slave labor, the shoulders of Karintha’s grandparents, of Jean Toomer’s ancestors. I doubt that this fact escaped William Faulkner. And I know it did not escape Jean Toomer. In fact, I’d gamble it drove each writer, in his own way, to examine this dawning of a new America, through the haze of the deep south’s morning light.
John Nicholson is an Austin-based writer. Born beneath New Jersey’s Walt Whitman Bridge, he has made many moves before landing in Texas. His work has appeared in Digging Through the Fat/Digging Press.