It is certainly different from the neurotic Quentin’s section with its equally loose shifts back and forth in time. Is this really how Maury/Benji perceived the world? Possibly. Stream of consciousness can be hard enough to read when applied to any character but Faulkner may have been the first to apply it to an individual with a cognitive disability. Even if your edition had Faulkner’s italics or other devices, his lack of standard punctuation and other stream of consciousness techniques made for challenging and rough going. So readers got a book printed the standard way in black ink. There were plans for the Grabhorn Press to realize his dream but the Great Depression put an end to the project and the only copy with Faulkner’s own notes for colorization disappeared. His idea was to print it in multiple colors representing the shifts in time perspectives. This prompted an angry letter from Faulkner with just a quick count of the time shifts and a desire to find a printer willing to match the innovation of the novel with similar innovation in printing. Faulkner’s agent, Ben Wassom, took the first misstep in “correcting” the author’s use of italics to mark time shifts in order to make ‘the sheer technical outrageousness and freshness of the Benjy section’ easier to read and understand. The publisher was then challenged to take Faulkner’s manuscript and create a book that captured the writer’s intent. When he handed the manuscript over to his agent in 1929, he told him “It’s a real son-of-a-bitch…this one’s the greatest I’ll ever write.” The author was a pioneer of this technique, along with James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe. So what makes this book so of an effort and so challenging for everyone?įor the writer, the stream of consciousness techniques from three different perspectives and accompanying abrupt and random time-shifts must have been tough to keep straight while Faulkner wrote it. When the Folio Society took on the challenge of printing a unique limited edition, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Challenging novels like this excite me despite their difficulties for the reader. The Modern Library list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20 th century has it ranked 6 th by the board and 33 rd by the readers.

It was influential in why Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, with the academy citing his ‘powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American Novel’. The importance of the book manifests in several ways. The Sound and the Fury is one of those landmark books that are the result of herculean human effort from everyone involved.

The sound and the fury first edition