A History of American Literature

420 Making It New: 1900–1945

section, is eventually tempted to discard language altogether. Benjy resorted, as he

had to, to a howl, Quentin to suicide, Jason to impotent, speechless rage – all to

express their inarticulacy in the face of the other, their impotence as they stood

in the eye of the storm, facing the sound and fury of time and change. And Dilsey,

responding to a more positive yet passionate impulse, becomes part of the

congregation at an Easter Day service – where, we are told, “there was not even a

voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures

beyond the need for words.” In ways that are, certainly, very different all four

characters place a question mark over their attempts to turn experience into speech.

And they do so, not least, by turning aside from words, seeking deliverance and

redress in a nonverbal world – a world of pure silence or pure, unintelligible sound.

The closing words of The Sound and the Fury appear to bring the wheel full circle.

As Benjy Compson sits in a wagon watching the elements of his small world flow

past him, “each in its ordered place,” it is as if everything has now been settled and

arranged. Until, that is, the reader recalls that this order is one founded on denial,

exclusion, a howl of resistance to strangeness. The ending, it turns out, is no ending

at all; it represents, at most, a continuation of the process of speech – the human

project of putting things each in its ordered place – and an invitation to us, the

reader, to continue that process too. We are reminded, as we are at the close of so

many of Faulkner’s stories, that no system is ever complete or completely adequate.

Something is always missed out it seems, some aspect of reality must invariably

remain unseen. Since this is so, no book, not even one like this that uses a

multiplicity of speech systems – a plurality of perspectives, like a Cubist painting –

can ever truly be said to be finished. Language can be a necessary tool for under-

standing and dealing with the world, the only way we can hope to know Caddy; yet

perversely, Faulkner suggests, it is as much a function of ignorance as of knowledge.

It implies absence, loss, as well as fulfillment. Sometimes, Faulkner admitted, he felt

that experience, life “out there,” existed beyond the compass of words: a feeling that

would prompt him to claim that all he really liked was “silence. Silence and horses.

And trees.” But at other times he seemed to believe that he should try to inscribe his

own scratchings on the surface of the earth, that he should at least attempt the

impossible and tell the story over again, the story of himself and the world, using all

the tools, all the different voices and idioms available to him. As Faulkner himself

put it once, “Sometimes I think of doing what Rimbaud did – yet I will certainly

keep on writing as long as I live.” So he kept on writing: his final novel, The Reivers

(1962), was published only a month before he died. To the end, he produced stories

that said what he suggested every artist was trying, in the last analysis, to say: “I was

here.” And they said it for others beside himself: others, that is, including the reader.

Making it new in drama

Modernism came late to American drama. So, for that matter, did realism,

experimentalism, and even – with the notable exception of The Contrast by

Royall Tyler –Americanism. There was, in fact, plenty of theatrical activity in the

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