Sunday Snippet

I picked up this book to read on the flight home - 'The Sound and Fury' by William Faulkner - drawn firstly by the cover. I looked inside and decided to buy it.

My snippet is from the introduction and this is because I am still reading it and am hoping to experience the fog clearing 'in a flash'. I took this introduction to heart as I may well have been totally confused by now, but realise that this is a part of the book.

I defy an ordinary reader to disentangle the people and events concerned at a first reading. But the beauty of it is this; there is no need to disentangle anything. If one ceases to make the effort, one soon finds that this strange rigmarole holds one's attention on its own merits. Vague forms of people and events, apparently unrelated, loom out of the fog and disappear again. One is seeing the world through the eyes of an idiot: but so clever is Mr. Faulkner that, for the time being at least, one is content to do so.

With the second part the fog begins to clear. The narrator now is one of these vague figures, a brother Quentin, who committed suicide at Harvard in 1910: and he describes with a beautiful sense of tragedy and ironical farce his last day alive. With the third and fourth parts, which return to the present day, the fog rolls away altogether, the formless, sizeless, positionless shapes looming through it, condense to living people: the story quickens. It is here this curious method is finally justified: for one finds, in a flash, that one knows all about them, that one has understood more of Benjy's sound and fury than one had realised: the whole story becomes actual to one at a single moment. It is impossible to describe the effect produced, because it is unparalleled; the thoughtful reader must find it for himself.

Richard Hughes

I also thank all of you who followed the posts that I left until I came home. It is much appreciated and it was a joy to me to see and read your various comments. ¡Muchas gracias!