It took me a long time to gain any semblance of meaning behind Faulkner. It's one of the best novels I've read in a long, long time, and undoubtedly the most difficult. Benjy does not experience the world the same way we do, and understanding that proved a challenge.
I was sad for days when I finished the book enough times to understand most of it. I've never met anyone who can rip a family apart the way Faulkner can, and reveal the vice, the cruelty, and the isolation you only find within a family. There's no way out of it, either, no solution; just incest, murder, and suicide. Benjy is no answer; his image as a Christ figure is simply to show that Christianity is impotent (and to emphasize that, Faulkner castrates Benjy); the only people who cling to that primitive faith are old slave-servants (the younger generation, even the black generation, has no interest in Christianity at all). Whatever plagues the family, Christ has nothing to offer. All Benjy can do is cry.
There's more aspects in Sound and Fury than just Jesus and the family, naturally, but to my mind those are the most important. It's a deeply despairing book, a haunting one. Faulkner has now joined Nietzsche and (probably, assuming I ever get around to understanding him) Heidegger as the finest of the antichrists, mostly because (in Nietzsche's case, at least) they can't suffer refutation, only contradiction. At his best, Nietzsche is excoriating a corruption of Christianity - one that uses feigned humility and weakness as weapons, since otherwise the strong can't be overcome. It can't be denied that this form of Christianity has been prevalent, especially in our decadent age. It isn't the Gospel, it's not the Fathers, it's not Christian Tradition, but the roots of Christendom haven't been watered in centuries. Instead, there's been a woodening, hardening, ossifying process, reducing that beautiful tradition to a dead, recorded letter, in which case it is no longer life affirming.
Hence a Christian's response to the brutal challenge of Faulkner and those like him is simply to live beautifully according to the Truth Himself, to rediscover again and again the purifying fire of divine, merciful love, to look again at the very heart of what the Way of Life truly is. Only from that perspective, with that preparation, can a convincing counterargument - and even better, a counter-enfleshment in life and literature - be achieved.
I was sad for days when I finished the book enough times to understand most of it. I've never met anyone who can rip a family apart the way Faulkner can, and reveal the vice, the cruelty, and the isolation you only find within a family. There's no way out of it, either, no solution; just incest, murder, and suicide. Benjy is no answer; his image as a Christ figure is simply to show that Christianity is impotent (and to emphasize that, Faulkner castrates Benjy); the only people who cling to that primitive faith are old slave-servants (the younger generation, even the black generation, has no interest in Christianity at all). Whatever plagues the family, Christ has nothing to offer. All Benjy can do is cry.
There's more aspects in Sound and Fury than just Jesus and the family, naturally, but to my mind those are the most important. It's a deeply despairing book, a haunting one. Faulkner has now joined Nietzsche and (probably, assuming I ever get around to understanding him) Heidegger as the finest of the antichrists, mostly because (in Nietzsche's case, at least) they can't suffer refutation, only contradiction. At his best, Nietzsche is excoriating a corruption of Christianity - one that uses feigned humility and weakness as weapons, since otherwise the strong can't be overcome. It can't be denied that this form of Christianity has been prevalent, especially in our decadent age. It isn't the Gospel, it's not the Fathers, it's not Christian Tradition, but the roots of Christendom haven't been watered in centuries. Instead, there's been a woodening, hardening, ossifying process, reducing that beautiful tradition to a dead, recorded letter, in which case it is no longer life affirming.
Hence a Christian's response to the brutal challenge of Faulkner and those like him is simply to live beautifully according to the Truth Himself, to rediscover again and again the purifying fire of divine, merciful love, to look again at the very heart of what the Way of Life truly is. Only from that perspective, with that preparation, can a convincing counterargument - and even better, a counter-enfleshment in life and literature - be achieved.
