William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!

소개

My argument in this essay is that William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are the deliberate and complicated embodiments of the artistic efforts to capture the modern reality in motion. For Faulkner, reality as well as time is a matter of human consciousness. Faulkner uses delicate and complex time schemes primarily through theme, time setting and characterization, which are easily found in the two novels, to explore human consciousness, to represent the time and history of the American South and hence to constitute modern reality in his own way. I will focus in this essay on Faulkner’s and his characters’ time concepts, and on the artistic transformation brought about by the time shifts between historical time and mythical time found in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!

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Fictions as works of art are paradoxically the stable and fixed form to “arrest” continuously changing reality and communicate it to the reader, and both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are the most remarkable instances of it among modernist novels as well as among Faulkner’s novels. In investigating the process of procreating the artistic fixed form, we can come to reach beyond mere time schemes and concepts toward the central thematic and formalistic thrust of his novels—the formation of static works of art, a Keatsian “Grecian Urn,” which successfully captures the essence of changing reality underlying the depth of the ideologies of chronological time and of historical time within the stasis of the mythical time frame.
Faulkner’s concept of time illuminates an effective perspective on how to see the complex time layers embedded in characters and their latent significance in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!:

my own theory [is] that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were taken away the universe would itself collapse....
(William Faulkner, quoted in Hoffman, 21)

참고자료

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· New York: Random House, 1936.
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