POLYPHONY AND REPRESENTATIVENESS IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY

Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL), 2021

In this article the polyphonic structures of two novels from two distinct literary traditions are put under parallel syntactic analysis. Both texts are prevalently dominated by both inner and outer dialogisms, but the psychological tempers of their authors have dramatically affected the styles of their narration. In The Sound and the Fury, the inner polyphonies are of a high importance. Quentin- reckoned to be symbol of Faulkner in this article- narrates most of his part through flashbacks and dialogues that occur in his mind. In fact, these inner polyphonies endorse the fact that Faulkner had the same obsessions of Quentin. These repressed complexities have direct relations with Faulkner`s disappointments of his family and life and these internal struggles were still present in 1929 when the book published. Faulkner`s psychological complexities led him to hint them through symbolization of a character who always talks to himself and remember all others’ dialogues in his mind. Soliloquies and stream of consciousnesses are the means of expressing the inner repressions. On the other hand, Reza Baraheni was in a situation that the period before Iran’s revolution in 1979 stood as an era of both courtiers and society’s corruptions for him. Even in 1987 when he sent all his manuscript for the publication, there existed a loophole of a different and better future for him. His dream of a great nation with respect to all its citizens was alive in his mind. This hope made him write a novel that had in fact more descriptive style rather than a subjective narration. Polyphonies in his writings are predominantly of external ones and the present dialogues of characters in his writing make up the majority of his dialogisms.

Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), 2023

The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualization of readerly listening has yet to be thoroughly discussed. This essay argues that, in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner cultivates a specific phenomenology—a negative audition—in his reader that holds an ethical valence: an attunement to sonic stimuli, which one is socially and bodily taught to register as inaudible. These internal readerly guidelines paradoxically advance a reading of Faulkner's novel against its own racial bias.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

The history of reception of William Faulkner’s most cherished work,The Sound and the Fury, tellingly reveals the changes that have occurred in reader attitude toward the novel since its first publication in 1929. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the modalities of interpretation employed by three, culturally and historically distinct “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980): American literary critics and reviewers evaluating the novel upon its first publication, Romanian literary critics and reviewers expressing their opinion on the Romanian translation of the novel published in 1971, and contemporary Internet bloggers and commenters discussing their reading experience with the novel.Relying on Hans Robert Jauss’s notions of “aesthetic distance” and “horizon of expectation” (Jauss 1970, 1982), I have raised two questions that I will try to answer at the end of this paper. First, I would like to see whether the literary career ofThe Sound and the Furyfollows the trajectory f...

Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les avatars contemporains des récits d'esclaves, ed. by Judith Misrahi-Barak, 2005

CounterText 5.3, 2019

The article theorises the notion of contrapuntal polyphony as applied to literary narrative and sketches out an algorithm for reading William Faulkner's 1939 The Wild Palms in terms of the musical analogy. Contrapuntal fiction is contrafactual, since neither actual sound nor simultaneous parts of equal importance are presented in literary narrative. Such notions as ‘the polyphonic novel’ and ‘novelistic counterpoint’ are attacked from the vein of restrictionism by scholars who are dissatisfied with the metaphoricity of these terms despite their coiner Mikhail Bakhtin's disclaimer that no literal link to music is originally intended. Leaning on the heuristic and perceptual value of metaphors as illuminated by cognitive studies, this paper outlines an extensionist audionarratological alternative to the restrictionist approach by arguing that perceptual methods of processing parallel melodic lines and consecutive segments of narrative information share the common gestalt basis discussed in the auditory scene analysis of psychoacoustics. Opting to register and internalise certain details in the two apparently unrelated alternating stories of The Wild Palms, the reader begins to assemble a mental score and to learn performing the parts simultaneously, toward an integrated polyphonic whole.

This essay proposes a historically material theory of resonance in experience and literature. Working against contemporary techno-deterministic assessments of sound, I argue for a historical, rather than individual, modality of listening – a collective acoustical unconscious. Understood in its technical expression, Faulkner’s literary acoustics helps us to draw out some of Benjamin’s more elliptical points regarding an acoustical unconscious, a notion that Benjamin never directly articulated, but can be found scattered across the writings. Both Faulkner and Benjamin teach us that the acoustical unconscious far exceeds the boundaries of the individual life. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner crafted a narrative space that is a sensitive recording apparatus, more sensitive than any mechanical device. But as history moves through narrative space and its radiophonic air, there are consequences for racial consciousness. In Faulkner’s narrative space, blackness and whiteness become, above all, sound-effects, or what I call a “fact of resonance” rather than of essence or substance.

2020

Published in 1929, William Faulkner\u27s The Sound and The Fury was translated in 1961 into Arabic by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prominent Arab writer and translator. Through translation, the novel\u27s narrative configurations, especially stream of consciousness, have been of significant influence on Arab literary writers. However, not all of the source text\u27s configurations are accounted for in the translation. This is pertaining to Faulkner\u27s polyphonic design and dialectal structures which are prevalent in Faulkner\u27s text. This study aims at exploring the translation strategies used by the translator to see how these configurations are treated by Jabra. Textual micro-analysis is used to describe how the translator renders the source text, explaining, through macro-analysis, how certain modes of language in the target culture encroach upon the mediation process, and how they constitute a major part of the translational performance as the translator compromises the source tex...

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2024

Faulkner’s 'The Sound and the Fury' attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.