The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Summary

Henry Nash Smith. “Three Southern Novels.” Southwest Review, 15 (Autumn 1929), iii–iv.

…William Faulkner's novel calls for a re-examination of our premises. It raises at least two perplexing questions: first, does an unmistakably provincial locale make a book a provincial piece of writing? and secondly, what evidences of provincialism might one expect in the style of a novel written by a man who has, in the trite phrase, sunk his roots into the soil?

The first question suggests some consideration of a new Southwestern book, Dobe Walls. Stanley Vestal's novel, for all its wealth of frontier incident and description, is perfectly conventional in its plot, its technique, and its heroine; only in one of the men (Bob Thatcher for instance) does the influence of the Frontier on character become evident. Dobe Walls escapes from the here and now of life; it is a historical tale with unusually authentic information about the period and the region it treats. In this respect it is vastly different from The Sound and the Fury, which is concerned with a regional tradition only as it appears in the present, and from Mr. Faulkner's earlier novels, which often lean toward satire. Yet both novels have a regional setting, and both authors are residents of the provinces. Are both books to be related to the “new provincialism”?

The question of a provincial style is even more involved. One may always be suspicious when talk grows as theoretical as discussions of the “rhythm of a landscape” or “the spacious gesture of the frontier” tend to become. It seems entirely possible that some of us have been misled by an analogy, and have wandered a little into realms of speculation.