one goal is still lacking: the influence of friedrich nietzsche's philosophy on william...

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

One Goal Is Still Lacking: The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy on WilliamFaulkner's "The Sound and the Fury"Author(s): Marco AbelSource: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 35-51Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201235 .

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One Goal is Still Lacking: The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's Philosophy on William Faulkner's

The Sound and The Fury MARCO ABEL

WRITING AGAINST the up until then predominant opinion among Faulkner scholars that the author's masterpiece, The Sound and The Fury, is meant to be read as an endorsement of Southern values such as Christian patience and the importance of family and community, John V. Hagopian argues in his well-known essay "Ni- hilism in Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury" for a strong current of nihilism in this novel on the basis of its closure. Focusing on the various closing moments in the novel, Hagopian points out how crucial the final chapter is for a correct interpretation of the text's meaning. He shows that after Faulkner has used some foreshadowing devices for the various endings, the final section of the novel really consists of three different parts, each of which can be regarded as coherent and independent in itself.

After the opening part of the final section, in which both fami- lies (the Compsons and the Gibsons) are at home on the morn- ing of April, Eight, 1928-Easter Sunday-the Gibsons and Benjy Compson go to church, and then Benjy is taken for a ride to the local cemetery. Since communal values are stressed during the sermon of Reverend Shegog, it seems at first that the Christian belief system is introduced not only as a contrast to the previous chapters' emphasis on nihilism within the Compson family, but also as an alternative possibility, one with more than a reasonable chance to prevail in a world characterized by individuals with severely negative qualities: egotism, envy, hatred, and outrage



36 Marco Abel

personified by Jason, depression and helplessness in Quentin, meaningless fury represented by Benjy, and hypochondrial selfishness or drunken pessimism in their parents. During this part of the novel, then, Faulkner appears to encourage his audience to choose between nihilism and Christianity. Charles David Rota, in an argument similar to Hagopian's, has in fact written that the "evidence for making this choice centers around a dialectic between the nihilism of Mr. Compson and the idealism of the Afro-American preacher Shegog" (77-78). The character of Shegog, however, is almost a grotesque personification of nihilism, for he is"undersized, [clothed] in a shabby alpaca coat [and] had a wizened black face like a small, aged mon- key" (Faulkner 175). Even though this evaluation is based on ap- pearance only, Shegog's description undermines already the author- ity of the Christian motive in the novel. The point is not whether Shegog's sermon can indeed move his audience, but that the reader's first impression of the potential alternative to nihilism is ridiculed. Therefore, Rota is only partly right when he states that the ultimate meaning of the novel is based on the reader's perception of who wins the "linguistic 'battle' between Mr. Compson's nihilism (combined with the despair of his son Quentin) and preacher Shegog's sermon on the'ricklickshun of de Lamb"' (78), because Shegog's representa- tion of idealism is severely weakened by the ludicrousness with which he is described. It is correct that the battle Rota identifies influences our opinion about the meaning of the novel, but-and Rota affirms this, too-"the fact that Benjy is such a grotesquely inverted Christ figure reinforces the nihilistic side of the opposition, especially since he is the last character we see" (78).

By referring to the actual end of the novel, Rota follows Hagopian's line of reasoning. Hagopian also acknowledges the Christian forces in the church scene in this final chapter, yet he correctly sees that this is not the real end of the project. If Faulkner had ended The Sound and The Fury after the sermon, our interpretation of the novel would necessarily be different. However, even then, I believe, it would have been very difficult to disre- gard that 160 pages of essentially nihilistic actions stand against a rather short section of Christian community. The balance of the seesaw is still upset by the heaviness of the Compsons' nihilism. That "the novel has [really] to do with the discovery that life has no meaning" (Hagopian 197) becomes clear by looking at the remaining two parts of the fourth chapter. Immediately follow-



South Atlantic Review 37

ing the Christian section, we are once again exposed to the mor- dantly comical Jason Compson. Jason is desperately trying to catch his niece Quentin, who has stolen money from him-money that Jason has accumulated by deceiving his mother and his sister Caddy. Since Jason is one of the great late-comers in life, he never gets hold of Quentin and the money again. When Jason pays a Negro to drive him back to Jefferson (by then, Jason himself is unable to drive due to his problems with the emissions of his car), he is reduced to an almost stereotypical cartoon figure, showing the defeat of evil. Here, too, is a point at which the novel could have ended, Hagopian points out: "The final perspective would then have been a socio-economic one, evoking the 'thirty pieces of silver' rather than the milk and the dew of the old sal- vation. Had that been the case, [the novel] would have required reconsideration as an expose of the anti-Christian materialism of the New South" (203).

Of course, as we all know, Faulkner did not finish The Sound and The Fury with Jason's defeat either. While ending the novel with the focus on Jason would have been a strong hint at the meaningless character of existence (for what reasons did Jason chase money all his life?), the final section of the concluding chapter leaves no doubt that Christianity cannot be considered an alternative to nihilism. Because Luster, turning the carriage towards the cemetery, violates the usual habit of swinging the horse Queenie to the right of the monument of the Confederate soldier who has"empty eyes" (Faulkner 190), Benjy gets upset and starts bellowing: "Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound" (190). The horror of Benjy's disorientation resembles strongly the end of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Mr. Kurtz, tormented by a vision of his own life and death, exclaims: "The horror, the horror."

The difference is, however, that Benjy does not really have a reason to be horrified. The only thing that causes his uneasiness is that Luster, for once, did not follow a common ritual in their customary trip to the graveyard. Benjy does not understand that it makes really no difference whether the horse passes the statue on the right or on the left side, but since Benjy's noise is unbear- able to others, he finally gets his wish for a customary yet random order and calms down again. The novel ends with a sense of



38 Marco Abel

calm: "The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place" (191, italics mine). The regained order is empty and meaningless, except in the mind of a 33-year-old retardate. This end, as Hagopian argues, "takes us back full circle to the opening of the novel, where neither God nor Mammon prevails-merely chaos and meaninglessness" (203). It has become clear, Hagopian observes, that Faulkner's structual devices in terms of closure are neither Chris- tian nor socio-economic but nihilistic, "the 'reducto absurdum' of the experience of Easter Sunday and the Easter weekend" (203).

There is, however, much more evidence for nihilistic thought in the novel than Hagopian perceives, and yet this nihilism-far from being the novel's dominant effect, as Hagopian claims- remains in the novel itself a subject of debate that may be resolved. I submit that it is best resolved using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and that such debate and resolution offers a richer and more complex interpretation than most previous com- mentators of the novel have allowed. To lay groundwork for my argument about the complexity of Faulkner's particular imple- mentation of nihilism, I shall summarize my view of some of Nietzsche's basic thoughts.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a prophet in his own time and a god to the modernists. Being intellectually active in a period when the German Intelligentsia was still recovering from the disasterous outcome of the revolution in 1848 and when, as well, the victorious war against France gave birth to the authori- tarian German Reich led by KaiserWilhelm and Kanzler Bismark, Nietzsche developed a philosophy strongly opposed to such in- fluential systems of thought as Kant's metaphysics or Socrates' empiricism. Whereas Kant, among other things, is concerned with the problem of the possibility of judgment (how can we judge the world correctly if we cannot really see it?), Nietzsche ponders the possibility of agency, of what it is "about our existence in the world that makes this interpretation an essential part of our activities" (Warren 123). But while this approach is already at the core of the solution to the nihilistic problem, Nietzsche indeed began his stream of thought with a radical re-evaluation of Greek tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy, he argues for a dualistic principle of




Apollonian-Dionysian forces which are, just as Blake's Urizon and Orc, interdependent: neither one can exist without the other. He argues that the decline of Greek tragedy is mainly caused by the refusal of philosophers, such as Aristotle or Socrates, to ac- knowledge that the "separate art realms of dream and intoxica- tion" (The Birth of Tragedy 19) are both necessary elements of life and art. This conception, early and immature as it is, foreshad- ows one of his main argumentative techniques-the use of paradoxes. To most people, the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus represent totally opposing natures not compatible with each other. Nietzsche, however, manages to reconcile the forces they represent by building an argument in favor of seeing them as two sides of the same coin, separated and opposed, yet unified by the result of their struggle with each other.

From his critique on art he moved on to a comprehensive con- templation of the human condition. One of his main concerns became the decline of morals and the resulting meaninglessness of life in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Contemporary society, in Nietzsche's view, is decadent. In Heirs to Dionysus, John B. Foster accurately paraphrases Nietzsche's position by saying that "culture is decadent so long as it offers a system of values that can shape experience to some extent, even though its capacity to affirm life fully and directly has slipped to a marked degree or has never existed" (85). The situation of nihilism, Foster explains, appears as soon as the system that provides some meaning col- lapses. If this happens-and Nietzsche was convinced that it has already happened by the time he was writing-"people confront the essential chaos of the universe from which all cultural meaning has disappeared, and they experience a total loss of coherence" (Foster 86). But most of his contemporaries, Nietzsche believed, failed to recognize the decline of society and the essentially nihilistic nature of the modern human condition because Christianity, the dominant form-giving power in Western civili- zation, is in itself a nihilistic system. Obviously, this is a thought hard to swallow for people who are used to thinking of Chris- tianity in terms of a coherent and meaningful set of values. Nietzsche does not deny that the Christian system is a coherent one. However, what is important to him is to understand the nihilistic nature of Christian values. The philosopher resolves his paradoxical thought by stating that Christians are nihilists due to



40 Marco Abel

their belief in a system that does not assert life as its primary value. The Christian conception of god, so says Nietzsche, is "a declaration of hostility towards life, nature, the will to life! [Thus,] God [is] nothingness deified, the will to nothingness sanctified!" (The Anti-Christ 18). The problem is even more far-reaching. In one of Nietzsche's most famous and outrageous statements, he declares that"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" (The Gay Science 125). But again, this is an insight elusive to his contemporaries. Nietzsche meant that people participate still in worshipping an ideal which, to begin with, should never have been praised, but which now does not even exist anymore. West- ern society is praying into nothingness for nothingness, according to Nietzsche. It seeks meaning by meaningless prayer to a non-existent deity. This is not only the ultimate breakdown but also the ultimate form of nihilism. The paradox that results from this argument is that the nihilist affirms both the existence and the non-existence of god: ignoring the truth that the deity does not exist, Christian believers think they affirm god by believing, but fail to realize that this act is merely wishful thinking and affirm thus nothing at all. Thus, trying to escape the paradox of nihilism, as one of Nietzsche's major interpreters has argued, "is Nietzsche's greatest and most persistent problem. It is also the greatest and most persistent problem of our age" (Kaufman 86).

A final important point that has to be considered is that, start- ing from the above mentioned paradoxes, Nietzsche coined various phrases, such as Superman (Overman), Eternal Recurrence, and Will to Power, that gave names to the philosopher's vision of how humankind could achieve reconciliation in a chaotic world. Nietzsche was not simply a dark prophet announcing the essential meaninglessness of human society; he also suggested a way out of this dilemma. His way out is not the one of traditional transcendence in the infinite eternal, since he has declared that "God is dead." Instead, in a crucial and well-known passage of The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks his readers to imagine a demon approaching who says,

[t]his life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought




and sigh ... and everything in the same series and sequence .... The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned again and again-and you with it, you dust of dust. (314)

In his view, what is eternal is repetition. Everything will happen exactly the way it has happened in our previous lives, unless we ourselves undertake various steps in order to break out of this monotonous and bleak cycle. It is only logical, then, given his view of recurrence, that Nietzsche focuses exclusively on the here and now, on the reality of the present. Denying any hope for transcendence or an 'after-life,' he declares that humankind has to overcome the nihilistic situation of contemporary existence by means of action in order to avoid becoming trapped in nothingness forever. Only what we ourselves are able to create is more than nothingness. Therefore, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, a fiction- alized heir to the ancient dualistic philosophy of Zorasterianism, exhorts readers "not [to] speak to me of any gods" (Thus Spake Zarathustra II, 197), since we cannot create a god. But, says Zarathustra, we "could well create the overman" and what we "have called the world, that shall be created only by [us]: [our] reason, [our] image, [our] will, [our] love shall thus be realized." (197-198). Only by making the world ours, by denying the influence of a superhuman being, can we be happy and find meaning in the world. The meaning is wholly human. Zarathustra states that "if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence, there are no gods" (198). By having faith in the power of humankind and in life-the will to power-Nietzsche reveals yet another paradox in his philosophy, namely that "if it takes faith to have faith, it also takes faith not to have it" (Riva 980). We have to have faith in our own abilities, in our independence, in our will to power, in order to overcome faith in the traditional concept of god, faith in something non-existent.

To conclude, Nietzschean philosophy is marked by its inher- ent lack of structure, the abundant use of paradoxes, and a gen- eral break with traditions, all cast in a highly charged, often po- etical style. Nietzsche wrote in an age in which the Victorian novel gave way to realism and psychology; he, however, recog- nized already in the 1880s and 1890s that a clearly structured form of narration is an inappropriate way of coping with the dawn of the modern age. Because he was a visionary and far ahead of the



42 Marco Abel

ideas of his times, literary modernism gladly embraced him and his philosophy as one way of describing, explaining, and dealing with rapidly vanishing social orders. Just as Nietzsche's answer to traditional thinking was complex and complicated, "Modernism [offers] no simple set of response to a crisis in a culture" (King 138); and just as Nietzsche faces the loss of order and traditions, modernism tries to "attempt to work out a satisfactory answer to that loss" (138). Because the German philosopher looks permanently forward, into the dark future, he not only "stands in a tradition of modern thought" (142) but has initiated what is now known as existentialism, "which considers appeals to the past to justify actions (or inactions) as cowardly self-exculpation, as what [Jean-Paul] Sartre called 'bad faith'. History, in this view, becomes the source of alibis, a lie not so much against reality as against vitality" (142).

Nietzsche's influence on the occurence and evolution of literary modernism can be shown in such milestones of fiction writing as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but it is really in William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury where Nietzsche's spirit dominates the narrative, since almost all of the characters are consciously or unconciously haunted by their nihilistic beliefs and thoughts. Almost all members of the Compson household are severely in- fluenced by the meaninglessness of their lives or by the desire to overcome the nothingness that surrounds them. Furthermore, it is arguable, following Nietzsche's lead, that even Dilsey and her family are essentially nihilists even though they try to fight against this notion by believing in transcendence. In addition, as has already been shown by John V. Hagopian, the very structure of the novel gives sufficient reason to interpret the end, and therefore the whole story, as pessimistic and nihilistic, for like Nietzsche's vision of the essential pattern of life, namely eternal recurrence, the novel's structure is cyclic. But Hagopian neither mentions the possibility of Nietzsche's influence on the novel's theme or structure nor contemplates the philosopher's inspired suggestion for a way out of the nihilistic trap.

As one Faulkner critic has noted, both Nietzsche's writing style and the content of his books are a "celebration of the collapse of structure" (Kartiganer 27). And what else but chaos faces the reader exposed to The Sound and The Fury for the



South Atlantic Review 43 first time? Faulkner presents his audience a story in which the meaning remains veiled until the last chapter, and even then it is not quite clear what the purpose of this literary event really is. It takes more than one reading to find a way through the maze of stream of consciousness with which the better part of the story is narrated. The author upsets constantly the reader's common conception of time and structure in a world which, if only superficially looked at, still seems to be held together by some order. To point out that this is self-decep- tion on the part of the audience, that the world is out ofjoint- that is one of the novel's main achievements. By "[c]onstantly unmaking itself, [by] refusing its own fictional character even as it describes the failing coherence of its four narrative consciousnesses, The Sound and The Fury combines a sense of nostalgia or loss, touching on despair" (Kartiganer 32).

All of the characters are trapped in their own memory; the Compsons constantly remember what has been or what people long dead have said. Mrs. Compson often recalls her situation before her marriage to Mr. Compson; she almost wishes never to have married him because it would have prevented her from becoming part of a declining family. Quentin is obsessed with his father's nihilistic view of the world and cannot help but wishing that events in the past had never happened. One of the most fascinating examples of this desire to undo what cannot be un- done occurs when he imagines himself to be Dalton Ames' mother: "If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laugh- ing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived" (Faulkner 49). What Quentin lusts for is to prevent Caddy's lover from being conceived. And just as Quentin is preoccupied with thinking about noble Caddy, so is Benjy. The difference between these two brothers is that Quentin's irrational wish is produced by a mind which supposedly is capable of rationality, whereas Benjy's state of mind excludes any logic, due to his illness. Benjy is unable to differentiate between the past, present, and future, and even though he has a tremendeous sense of loss, a loss which he can smell (Nietzsche once said "I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies-smelling them out.-My genius is in my nostrils" [Ecce Homo 782, second italic mine]), he does not com- prehend that Caddy has gone forever and that "his life implies no



44 Marco Abel

expectation of redemption or meaningful sacrifice" (Rota 79). Because Faulkner really ponders the issue of memory and how one can get paralyzed by it, he is close to Nietzsche's exploration of the modernist obsession with memory and cultural tradition. Richard H. King accurately observes that "the modernist sensi- bility has displayed a profound ambivalence toward the past's claims on the present and had strong doubts as to the capacity of memory to understand the past" (139). During the course of Faulkner's novel it becomes obvious that none of the main characters is able to use memory as a means to interpret the past productively. Benjy, Quentin, or Jason, and to some extent even Dilsey, all delve into their memories without finding a meaning for the present life. Their memories, often unwilled recollections, have gradually become meaningless, and so have their lives.

But despite all structural and thematical choices in this novel, some of the most persuasive indicators of the Nietzschean current in The Sound and The Fury are what the characters them- selves are saying, thinking, or remembering. There are, for in- stance, minor hints at the fact that "the Compson's Christianity has been reduced to a cultural shell" (Rota 74), such as Mrs. Compson's statement, remembered by Benjy, that"[n]obody knows how I dread Christmas" (Faulkner 6) or that Dilsey finds the family bible "face down" (179). Jason, the family comedian against his will, remembers a man who bought himself a Chinese missionary because he was scared of ending up in hell. As a reader, I could not help imagining Jason's smiling face while he thinks "how mad he'll be [the missionary] if he was to die and find out there's not any heaven" (117). But of course, Jason is a person who sees in everything the negative side rather than the positive; he al- ways feels that there is a conspiracy against him. Nietzsche, talk- ing about exactly this attitude towards life, says that "[s]igns of goodness, benevolence, sympathy are received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful termination, a means of confusing and outwitting, in short as refined wickedness. [Because this disposi- tion exists in the individual, namely Jason,] a community can hardly arise" (Human, All Too Human 37). Community, however, is what can actually give meaning to the human condition.

Luster's rage against the five jaybirds to whom he shouts "Git on back to hell, whar you belong at. 'Taint Monday yet" (Faulkner 161) indicates, according to Hagopian, that "Chris-




tian values cannot appease or redeem the meaningless vio- lence of the Compsons" (200). The birds symbolize hellish forces. They assert their power by resurfacing early, before Easter Monday-the day of Christ's symbolic resurrection; thus, Christian values and the believers' dream of redemption are defied. Even Dilsey, though not consciously, adds to the reader's growing awareness that nihilism is a more than domi- neering influence on this novel. She claims that "I seed de beginning, en now I sees de ending" (Faulkner 177) and em- phasizes this shortly after when she says that she has "seed de first en de last" (179). Dilsey apparently believes in the lin- earity of the world, which is marked by a clear beginning (the creation) and ending (the apocalypse); she is not aware of the fact that the theories of Einstein, Bergson, or Jung challenge such notions in modern times, an age where "absolutes were lost" (Broughton 64) and when time in the form of the trip- tych past, present, and future gave way to a new concept in which the past lingers within us and the future can be appre- hended by the collective unconscious. Because Dilsey is igno- rant of this important re-interpretation of the nature of the universe and time, her belief in god becomes meaningless-if not to her then to the modern reader. Since not even those people who seem to believe in god are able to convince the reader that the human condition at present is not nihilistic, we have to agree with Nietzsche that "God is dead."

The sense of nihilism is strongest in the Quentin section. As Foster writes, "when a cultural myth can no longer be believed, the resulting loss of structure and of any points of reference brings man to a confrontation with nothingness" (99). The section en- titled "June Second, 1910" begins in medias res, and we get to know that Quentin "was in time again" (Faulkner 47). This beginning implies that there has to be more to the story, that there has to be something in the past which influences Quentin so much that he has problems with being permanently in time. That Quentin suffers severely from a time-phobia becomes increas- ingly clear as the section progresses, but it is important to notice that his father, Mr. Compson, has shaped his son's perception of time enormously. Mr. Compson, sitting "all day long with a de- canter of whiskey and a litter of dogeared Horaces and Livys and Catulluses" (228), has made such a strong imprint on the soul of



46 Marco Abel

his son that the latter is not even really capable of differentiating between his own feelings and thoughts and the ones of his death- in-life-like father. That the first paragraph already introduces the interplay between father and son by mixing up the thoughts of both in Quentin's stream of consciousness should alert the reader that decay steers the lives of the living.

Quentin remembers that his father, giving him grandfather's watch, called it "the mausoleum of all hope and desire" (47). His father told him that he would "use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience" (47), and this prophecy becomes the motto of the rest of Quentin's life. He drowns (literally) in his inability to forget or at least accept the past. While he is constantly remembering his unhappy love for his sister Caddy, he gradually but irresist- ibly approaches his final hour. His memory of the past does not convince the reader that Quentin is a knight-errant figure who has been defeated in a fight with a dragon in order to save his beloved. Quentin, repeating the words of his father, believes that "nothing is even worth the changing of it" (48). This and the fact that his entire memory of his time with Caddy is characterized by inaction on his part leads us to the conclusion that Quentin is no Superman. He reflects on the moment when Dalton Ames, the man he hates so much because he presumably has deflowered Caddy, "put the pistol in my hand" so that Quentin might shoot him, but he "didn't" (49). A scene like this is easy to understand-easy for people who have not, like Quentin at Harvard, stopped going to their psychology classes. First of all, it indicates that Quentin is all mouth or thought but essentially a coward when it comes to fighting for his desires (that this desire is incest is telling in itself, but shall be neglected at this place). In addition to not being brave enough, it is apparent that the Freudian symbolism is also meant to allude to Quentin's sexual immaturity and impotence. Clearly, he is no Nietzschean Super- man; he is unable to relate sexually and mentally. The only close relationship he had was to Caddy, but ever since she left him (in his view she betrayed him) he has lived the life of a hermit. He has no bond to humankind, and this lack of community in his life is a sym- bol for his lacking the will to power-that is, according to Nietzsche, the will to life. Quentin's only wish is to die. Death is the absence of sound, the absence of fury. Quentin senses sounds, whether human speech or animal noises, as absurd and meaningless. And with "time defined by his father as absurd and with his most meaningful inter-




personal relationship in time substantiating that cynical paternal counsel, Quentin has arrived at the conviction that sound in time really does signify nothing and that silence, outside time and death, is preferable to it" (Juergenson 120).

During his last hours, Quentin recollects more and more of his father's thoughts, which essentially prophecied a Nietzschean eternal recurrence without hope of finding a way out-that is, the kind of Schopenhauerian pessimism Nietzsche sought to counter or displace. As if Mr. Compson had been a clairvoyant, he informed his son that "man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune" (Faulkner 64). As it turns out, the nihilistic father was right with regard to Quentin's life. Quentin sees himself cursed by Fortuna and comes to see time as his arch-enemy. He tries to defeat it, to destroy it, but since he has to realize that he is not powerful enough, no Superman, he bids adieu to his life. This is the ultimate absence of the will to power. Nietzsche says in On the Genealogy of Morals that "Man would rather will nothingness than not will" (III, 1). In his view, according to Foster,

Christianity's life-denial was so extreme that it left literally'nothing'; but this nothing was willed...A more intense nothing arises from the absence of will, the incapacity to create any cultural form, even one whose essence is nothingness ... this total inability to give any form or interpretation to life is now seen as death- directed, opening the door to 'suicidal nihilism'. (100-101)

To Quentin, the "[p]eacefullest words [are:] Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum" (Faulkner 106). He walks calmly to the bridge between "silence and nothingness" (104), remembers once more one of his father's nihilistic insights ("all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not" [107]) until he cannot stand the thought of being trapped in this eternal circle anymore, and vanishes from our eyes.

Nietzsche has defined nihilism in terms of a loss of form. "As a result, perceptions of reality dissolve into a chaos of unrelated elements" (Foster 109). The German philosopher saw a way out of nihilism only by a re-establishment of relationships through



48 Marco Abel

the will to power. In The Sound and The Fury, however, the characters' relationships are characterized by antipathies, envy, hatred, and the absence of love. Caddy and Miss Quentin try to escape this trap but fail-Caddy becomes pregnant but remains lonely, and her daughter, Quentin, gets involved in a relationship for escape's sake, a darker repetition of her mother's fate-another crude stranger with a car. The three Compson brothers are all unable to relate to their surrounding: Benjy is mentally crippled, Quentin is sick at heart, and Jason is a cynic. None of them can find meaning in life nor can they give substance to the nothingness around them. And even in the Gibson family, problems with the will to life exist. At the end of the novel, Roskus has died, Versh and T.P. have left, Frony is a single parent, Luster cannot feel empathy with Benjy, and Dilsey seeks refuge in Christian- ity-that is, in afterlife but not in life. The novel is eerily empty of any form of real communion. We as readers are asked to search for the meaning of the novel.

That Faulkner manages to involve us shows that he is one of the true modernist writers, since "the modernist adopted the strat- egy of dismanteling forms in order to coerce the viewer or reader to reassemble them and thereby prevent him from remaining a passive bystander or consumer of art" (Broughton 64-65). But all we discover by interpreting the action of the characters is that Macbeth had indeed a good point in lamenting that

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! 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. (V.v.26-28)

Quentin, unable to face the prospect of eternal recurrence "to the last syllable of recorded time," is the fool who is lighted to death; Jason, a comedian-that is, an actor-who tries to deceive his surrounding but ends up deceiving only himself, is the poor player



South Atlantic Review 49 of whom we hear no more after his final attempt to catch Caddy's daughter; and Benjy, of course, is the idiot who tells us a tale, moaningly and desperately, that signifies nothing but the nothingness the Compsons' are surrounded by. In short, the Compson brothers represent time and life, the futility of the human condition as mourned by Macbeth and keenly observed by Nietzsche.

By providing The Sound and The Fury with a formal skeleton domi- nated by apparent confusion, disintegration, and dissolution-that is, by adopting Nietzsche's favorite writing device-William Faulkner has given fictional form to the German's main argumentative tech- nique: the paradox. Because he manages to involve the reader and make us active participants in the search for meaning, we ourselves become something similar to the Superman (if we do not give up in awe of the confusion of form and content), since we willourselves to some fundamental insights. These insights are nihilistic, but according to Nietzsche, nihilism can be overcome only by recognizing the present state of the human condition, for otherwise we cannot escape the fangs of a dreary eternal recurrence. Moreover, it is not only that we need to recognize this essential state of our Dasein- our state of being in the moment--but we have to accept it. Perhaps it is this insight, Nietzsche's idea of amorfati-loving one's fate- that inspired Faulkner to add, seventeen years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury, an appendix to the original project. After providing us with some further intimate details about the Compsons and the Gibsons, showing that their struggle with each other and the world continued, he finally closes the novel with the now famous words "They endured" (Faulkner 236). Many readers interpret "They" as an exclusive reference to "[t]hese others [who] were not Compsons" (236)-the Gibson family. But the very fact that Faulkner felt the urge to extend the original script so many years later suggests that all of the characters were still moving in his mind. They were not dead yet. And indeed, I propose that it is not only Dilsey's family that has endured, but in some ways also Jason, Benjy, Caddy, and all the other remaining characters, for they have found their place in our culture, in our heads, and in our hearts-all of them being part of our own personalities.

Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury has become one of the few outstanding novels of the modernist period that attempts to give a new form to a stuctureless reality. Massimo Riva has correctly pointed out, discussing the decline of conventional Victorian nar-



50 Marco Abel

rative techniques, that "Nihilism is a fundamentally ambivalent, paradoxical concept [and thus] might well be considered the'grand narrative' in the age of the end of 'grand narratives'" (979). As if Faulkner had a similar thought while composing The Sound and The Fury, he made every endeavour to find appropriate fictional devices as a means of representing new conceptions of reality, of demonstrating the working of the mind according to the latest psychological insights of Freud and Jung, and of incorporating the predominant philosophical ideas of his age-Friedrich Nietzsche's. By doing so, by handling the pen so skillfully and with a true writer's touch, Faulkner resolves the problem of nihilism by following Nietzsche's pre-existentialist assertion that we have to touch things in order to find meaning in them. And as readers, we can find meaning by discovering that in the lives of many of the novel's characters "one goal is [still] lacking" (Thus Spake Zarathustra 172)-the one for humanity. But whereas Nietzsche, being an eternal pessimist, inquired "if humanity still lacks a goal-is humanity itself not still lacking too?" (172), Faulkner, in the final analysis, optimistically replies: "No!" "They"-the author's artful wresting of aesthetic order and plea- sure and a complex tragic story out of his characters' nihilism- has indeed endured, especially the noble doomed girl with the soiled undergarments and the longing of everyone for some sort of transcendent experience or escape. The Sound and The Fury's boldly paradoxical title-which ought, if not heeded as paradox, to stop readers in their tracks-continues to signify.

Pennsylvania State University

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one goal is still lacking: the influence of friedrich nietzsche's philosophy on william...

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