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The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.

Like the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, the sound of the clock announces a tale of doom and despair: the fall of the house of Compson, once proud community leaders in Jefferson, Mississippi, now destitute and morally corrupt. Faulkner is mapping this decadence by getting inside the head of three members of the Compson clan: an idiot, a suicidal youth, and a paranoid, cynical ‘businessman�. As a coda and conclusion, there is a fourth section, narrated by one the family’s black servants. The style is clearly reminiscent of the ‘stream of conscience� approach to the modern novel pioneered by Proust, Joyce and Woolf. What separates Faulkner from his European counterparts is for me the decision to follow not the meditations of highly educated intellectuals and artists, but those of ordinary characters. Instead of references to Classic and Renaissance culture, he explores the darker side of our psyche, people tormented by inner demons and petty concerns.

It may be the most confusing section in the story, but after I finished the whole novel I think I understand why Faulkner has chosen Benjy as the first narrator. He is an idiot, but in his unique way of looking at the world, and in his speechless revolt at the cards he has been dealt by Fate, he is maybe the most honest of all the Compsons. He has simple needs, and screams like a toddler when they are taken away from him: to walk in the grass fields near the house, to watch fires burning, and to have his sister Caddy near him.

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of the planets.

His frustration is a recurrent theme throughout the novel, a dark summation of the whole human condition that is destined to end in death and sorrow, and explains the title borrowed by Faulkner from a Shakespeare play:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I know many readers might be put off by Benjy and his skewed perspective, but I love puzzles, and I found it fascinating to try to build a coherent picture from the broken pieces he offered me. The key that opens his section is the fact that Benjy lives in the ‘now�, he makes no distinction between the past, the present and the future, between the waking world and his dreams. He jumps back and forth from childhood to his middle age from one line to the next, he sees and hears the other family members moving around him, but he doesn’t rationalize their actions. I simply followed his emotional outbursts and his tidbits of fact, trusting in the many other critics and readers who consistently vote this novel as one of the best written in the twentiest century. I am a convert now, and my recommendation is not only for patience, but also for multiple readings, as coming back to earlier sections will make clear most of the mysteries surrounding the events witnessed by Benjy in this first part.

The second section is narrated by Quentin, the smartest scion of the family who is the sent to Harvard at great cost. He is closer to what I expected from a stream of conscience protagonist, with a vivid imagination, rich cultural background and beautiful phrasing. He makes me want to check out the poetic works of Faulkner with passages like this, another reference to time and its destructive nature:

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. [...] I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you may forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

We get to meet Quentin as he is preparing to say goodbye to the world. Life has proved to hard a nut to crack for him, and he is ready to throw in the towel. His elegy takes us on a prolonged walk through the alleys and parks in the student campus, locked inside his troubled mind, trying to come to terms with an illicit passion for his sister Caddy, with homosexual inclinations, with a rigid and outmoded Southern code of honour, with the decay he sees in even the most beautiful flowers.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

He is not explaining or justifying his decision. In a way, he is not so far emotionally for Benjy, but Quentin screams are silent and ignored by all his friends. His recurring theme is not musical, but a pervasive smell of summer nights, a pheromone of both peace and forbidden passion:

Honeysuckle was the saddest odor of all.

Most of the quotes I saved in the novel are from Quentin’s tale, subtle and poetic reaffirmations of the central theme. They are also important to me because, beside enjoying puzzles, I prefer to follow my emotional reactions and not my analytic mind when judging a book. Here’s one more fragment of verse, to serve as Quentin’s epitaph:

A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

In a progressive march towards sanity, the third narrator is both articulate, and firmly anchored in the life of the town. He knows what he wants (money, power, fame) and he is ready to do anything - lie, beg and steal - to get to the top of the social ladder. Jason, the fourth of his name, is bitter, vengeful, hateful, a despicable person without any redeeming quality, but to the purpose of the novel he is also delusional, like the rest of the Compsons. The world he lives in may have all the appearances of the real one, but what defines it is the constant filtering and adjusting Jason engages in in order to make himself the hero of his own story. I didn’t care at all for Jason and his hatred of blacks, foreigners, jews, women, but I admired how Faulkner is able to convey his secretive and envious mind, his paranoid and selfish personality:

Last time I gave her forty dollars. Gave it to her. I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I’m going to give her. That’s the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.

To finish the saga of the Compson family, the author changes gear in the fourth section and abandons the first-person narration, following Dilsey, the old and loyal family cook, as she performs her daily chores around the mansion, and her nephew Luster, tasked with the daily care of the idiot Benjy.

Never you mind. I seed the beginnin, en now I sees de endin. exclaims Dilsey as she goes around her kitchen, silently judging the Compsons and finding them lacking. Luster echoes the sentiment: Dese funny folks. Glad I aint none of em. . I like to see the servants as symbols of a simpler, more natural life, as the true pillars of common sense and honesty that keeps the edifice of civilization standing, where their more sophisticated white counterparts have wasted the gifts they were born with and locked themselves inside their selfishness and pride.

Stylistically, Faulkner does again a slide in tonality, not unlike the changing styles in Mitchell’s six-part Cloud Atlas, exploring the Southern vernacular and experimenting with spelling and punctuation. Since I am a big fan of Delta blues, I really enjoyed gems like this :

Dat’s de troof, he says. Boll-weevil got tough time. Work ev’y day in de week out in de hot sun, rain er shine. Aint got no front porch to set on en watch de wattermilyuns growin and Sat’dy dont mean nothin a-tall to him.

In an appendix the author added several years after the first publication, many of the questions about the Compson family are answered, but he needs only two words to describe Luster and Dilsey they endured

I have reached the end of my notes, yet I feel I have only scratched the surface of the novel. A whole separate review could, and should be written about the women in Jefferson, Mississippi, about the weakness and fragility of the matriarch Caroline, about the wild, seductive, elusive grace of Caddy or about the rebellious and finally liberated Quentin, named after her ill-fated uncle. A re-read is a must for the serious scholar. And the position among the best 20 century novels seems justified for this mausoleum of all hope and desire