This five week study starts next Monday, February 1st in Hampstead– at the Society for Analytical Psychoanalysts –but you do not need to be a psychoanalyst to join. Faulkner has this amazing ability to get deeply into the conversation that happens between people: what is said, what is suggested what is meant, what is submerged…his exploration in Sound & Fury of a family disintegrating amidst the tragedy of the old South is powerful and absolutely relevant to our world today. He examines gender relationships, struggles between parents and their outraged children, sibling rivalry & love, the weight of a grotesque history on individual identity and racial struggles.
A recent participant describes the study of Sound & Fury in the Salon:
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is often named as one of the best novels of the 20th century. Faulkner tackles complex and universal human questions through mesmerising and unforgettable characters. The brilliance of this book emerges in the Salon study group, where you have the liberty to dive deeply into Faulkner’s work, question and discuss with others. Not many novels will stand up to 20 hours of discussion, but it felt we could have continued for another 20 hours. The Sound and the Fury was one of the most difficult books I have ever read, but through the Salon study it was also one of the most rewarding and impactful.
Here is the description of the study:
In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he attempts to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury exposes a crumbling world through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness and symbolism as connecting fibres against interior realities that must competing for authority.
This study will draw upon participants’ questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer when discussed, enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s vision while those re-reading will find greater depth and resonance. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque but as the pieces start to fit together, the complex and careful become apparent planning that Faulkner uses and to what end? This is what we must grapple with our study.
“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.” ― William Faulkner
We will be reading from the Norton Critical edition of The Sound and the Fury.
To register, please visit the SAP site: the cost for the five week study is £95. http://www.thesap.org.uk/events/the-sound-the-fury-by-w-faulkner/
