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CHAPTER – 2 THEME OF INDIVIDUALISM

“Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal

freedom have been deemed by Americans not only their choicest, but

(their) peculiar and exclusive possession”.1 Individualism is the main

important theme in the novels of William Faulkner. Literary works reflect

the main ideas of American mind. An American theme that is seen in

various works of literature is individuality.

From the Renaissance to 1848, the concept of the individual grew

stronger. New ideas emerged, movements occurred, and prominent

figures arose. Voltaire believed in laws which protect the freedom of the

feeble against the ambitions of the Storng and Diderot, along with other

philosophers, published the Encyclopaedia. Copernicus was the first to

derive a heliocentric theory. Vasco da Gama’s traveling to India led to the

claiming of India for Protugal. Political philosopher John Locke

maintained that people set up civil governments to protect the three basic

needs of life, liberty and property, and if those rights aren’t fulfilled, the

people would have the right to revolt.

Individuality is expressed in three different literary works of three

writers, Robert Frost, Kate Chopin and Thomas Paine. These writers aid

us in developing an open mind about what the American people should

expect in society. Following others doesn’t guide one in any way because

it does not allow one to express one’s innermost feelings. Throughout of

these three writers, individualism is expressed in various ways. Although

all three writers do illustrate the idea of individualism.

“Individualism”, writes Susan Love Brown “has been a dirty word

ever since the French coined the word “Individualismc in the nineteenth

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century to label the horrific phenomenon that had overtaken their country

in the form of bloody revolution based on such radical ideas as individual

rights and the rule of reason.”2

Eventually everything in the book responds to the story’s

necessities. The Novel (L.A.) as a whole moves forward chronologically

(rather slowly because little of it narrates the immediate action at hand),

and each of its discrete parts tends backward, from accomplishment to

source. Lena enters the book pregnant; one learns how she got pregnant

and begin a search for the father. The readers then see Hightower in deep

isolation and examine the events which led to that isolation.

Similarly, in Kate Chopin’s short story The Story of an Hour, the

central theme of individuality is also expressed. When Mrs. Mallard

received the news of her husband’s death, she was in a deep state of grief.

After she realized that she would now have freedom, she began to rejoice.

Even though she loved her husband and will weep for him again, one

thought comes to her over and over again: “free, free, free”.3

Mrs. Mallard realizes at that instant that her life from now on is her

own to live as she chooses; no more will she have to give in to the needs

and wishes of her husband. She experiences a sense of independence to

be who she wants to be without having to worry about her husband. This

reflects the idea of individuality because Mrs. Mallard “Would live for

herself”.(Chopin, 548) She was delighted to be able to make her own

decisions and be “free! Body and soul free”.(Chopin, 548)

In contrast, Thomas Paine’s, The Crisis, Number 1 expresses the

theme of individualism in a different way. “I love the man that can smile

at trouble: that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by

reflection”.4

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Thomas Paine illustrates the idea that those who are free and can

look at themselves and see that they live their own life without anyone

else, have courage. People, who decide to be independent and not follow

anyone else, demonstrate their bravery. Paine expresses his thoughts on

giving upon something. He feels that we should strive for what one wants

to do “for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the

coal can never expire.”(Paine, 125) Therefore, the readers can see that

American themes do imitate the essential thoughts of the American mind.

Most American people illustrate the American theme of individualism

and it plays a major role in shaping world today.

Individualism is perhaps the primary concept that, transcending

such categories as race, gender, class, age and region, unites Americans

across time and space to give coherence to the national experience. From

the earliest beginnings of the republic to the post-modernist present, the

rights of the individual citizen and his or her place in the scheme of things

has been of primary importance to American philosophers, artists,

political theorists, theologians and others concerned with articulating

national values and principles. Communitarian ideas rise from time to

time to challenge individualism, but none have yet been successful in

seriously weakening its hold on American culture. Incorporated into

American, philosophy of individualism becomes in the popular mind the

very essence of what being an American means. In this course, this

chapter will examine the individual in American intellectual, legal and

political traditions.

In American Literature, greatest struggle has been to find and

discover one’s own self through the concept of individualism. This is a

philosophy that places high value on the freedom of autonomous

individuals. Self reliance is also a key. By analyzing four literary works,

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the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Awakening by

Kate Chopin, Billy Budd by Herman Melville and The Fountain Head by

Ayn Rand, different portrayals of individualism are introduced. Although

the different time periods and settings of these novels cause the authors to

delineate this philosophy in different ways, one idea remains constant

throughout each of these works. It is the idea that society is flawed and

that individualism is the ideal goal of humanity, with only the social

restraints of the world in the ways.

It’s a commonplace of philosophy that the term “freedom” is

multiply ambiguous, having one group of senses in the context of

metaphysical debates, and another. On a fairly standard account of the

distinction, free will pertains primarily to mental acts internal to the

agent, which are beyond the power of others to control, while political

freedom consists in the absence of restrictions on overt actions, while lie

within the jurisdiction of government and can be violated by the acts of

others. In all of his work, Faulkner used new techniques to express his

views of man’s position in the modern world. In his early works,

Faulkner viewed with despair, man’s position in the universe. He saw

man as a weak creature, incapable of rising above his selfish needs, later

Faulkner’s view changed and he saw man as potentially great, or in

Faulkner’s own words, “Man will not only endure, he will prevail.”5

Light in August (1932) is a novel about the spirit of righteousness.

Possibly it is in this book that Faulkner is closest to Hawthorne. A source

of the spirit of persecution, as developed by both writers, puritanical

righteousness, the inability or refusal to forgive human frailty, the placing

of duty above charity. Protestantism as treated in Light in August is grim

demanding, “stern and implacable.”6

In Light in August one can see that past is central individual

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freedom or compulsion is primarily determine by a character’s success or

failure in dealing with his past – is coming to terms with the unspoken or

frequently, the inarticulate residue of what he has known, believed or

done. And this past more or less determines his present.

The novel narrates events of the deep or intermediate past, and all

of this is manifested in the pasts of individualism: Joe, Joanna and her

family, Lena, Hightower, the Hineses: Each of these is rendered in a

different way and comes upon rather unexpectedly. The readers move to

Joe’s past earlier than they expected. Lena’s past is continually present

because she is pregnant – everyone infers a simple past for her and that is

not far from the truth. Joanna tells Joe about her past in the middle of the

book’s arbitrarily timed but strictly chronological tracing of his past. The

narrative deals with four levels of time: preset, imperfect, the deep past,

and intermediate level between the historical chronicle of the deep past,

and an intermediate level between the historical chronicle of the deep and

the almost – immediate of the imperfect.

This pattern of individual parts the arbitrary eruption of past into

present, is set within an even more puzzling chronological scheme in the

whole. Light in August defines such order. It opens with a narrative

neither puzzling in its content nor expositional in its intent: the essentially

static action of a character who later seems rather tangential: one can

move by what seems to be an accidental train of narrative association

through Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower to Joe Christmas. There is

frantic and unexplained action. Then one can backtrack into the past of

Joe Christmas, a character who has not concerned for the first quarter of

the book. One can finally find connections between those disparate

elements, a character who has not connections between these disparate

elements when one can are more than halfway through, and then they are

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not conventional connections but only happen stance encounters. The

Lena thread is tied up, the Christmas thread is brought to a dramatic end,

we pause for more character exposition with Hightower, and then Lean

and Byron move out of the book. Disjunction here goes for beyond just a

confused chronology or overturned conventional expectations.

Hightower’s past continually rises to the surface to haunt him in

the present and to allow Faulkner to connect him with Joe and Joanna on

the level of plot. Finally there is the contrast between sense of time and

distance at the beginning and at the end of the book. The novel opens in

Lena’s journey, timeless and distanceless because of her nature and her

present condition. Ponderous moving and apparent nonmoving here are

contrasted to inexorable, inevitable movement at the end. From the

pursuit of Brown through the death of Joe the book is compulsively

driven to its conclusions, emanating from The Player’s movements and

culminating in Griman’s killing of point which precedes our first

encounter with him nearly made and move back to look for the sources of

his madness. The burning house appears in the narrative before the crime

does, Byron’s weekend concerns appear without an explanation for them

(Faulkner never really gets back to this), and Christmas’s wanderings just

prior to the killing of Joanna are traced before we see any of the causes

for his fitful “thinking” or his psychosis.

Lena has given birth before is narrated, and now Christmas is dead

before the end. The readers are given a yet more remote past for

Hightower – the backward look itself looking backward. One might well

except to find such omissions and reversals at the beginning of the novel

since Faulkner’s opening move is so frequently suspense by omission.

But those individual patterns which contain adaptations of rigid abstract

systems tend to become malign when they combine with others.

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Hines’s compulsive poision and his and McEachern’s private and

individually manufactured hells of Calvinism contribute to Joe’s eventual

poisonous combination with Joanna. Hines returns and triggers

malignancy in others. But to say that Joe’s crime is the product of his

reaction of their Calvinism is simplistic. Personal adaptations of almost

any institutional or abstract from can be equally poisonous: the Calvinist

work-ethic, prostitutions motherhood (or faster motherhood). Community

pride, racism, benevolent uplift, moralistic self-degradation. Each is more

or less benign in itself, but when cultivated by rigorous personal

adaptation and met with just the right combination in another individual,

any of these can lead to evil.

Joanna’s carpetbagger and reformer instincts far from evil in

themselves, become evil when they rather than her human feelings

determine her relationship to Joe. They interpose external forms (even as

McEachern and Hines interpose their individual adaptations of

Calvinism) as a substitute for human flexibility. The form of automatism

promoted by abstract ideals, the hardening of responses and feelings into

habits or reactions, is one of the chief subjects of the biographical

digressions. Joe, throughout his affair with Bobbie, takes on more

automatic patterns of behaviour: to avoid being looked upon as an

outsider he takes on protective coloration which will make him less

conspicuous in the dinner; he develops affections in smoking and wearing

his hat which bring him closer to Mame and Max. But these are

secondary adaptations and he the experimental subject for the primary

adaptations and automatic in Joe a stock response to every contact until

he finally finds all the shapes of his past – of kindness, of feeding, of

love, of evangelical attempts at redemption, of racial attitudes – in his

body of one woman and can kill them all once and for all by taking off

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her head.

To this belief in her martyrdom, Joanna Burden sacrifices all her

natural impulses, thereby creating a bifurcated individual. Thus, Joe sees

her as,

a dual personality: the one the woman at first sight of whom in the lifted candle . . . there had opened before him, instantaneous as a landscape in a lightning flash, a horizon of physical security and adultery if not pleasure; the other the montrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking barn of heritage and environment with which he had to fight up to the final instant.7

His entrance into her life signals an overt conflict between these

two aspects of her being. The sex-starved body conquers for a time “the

mantrained habit of thinking”(LA, 154) and expresses itself in a desperate

and imperious need to experience every possible sensation and every

possible emotion that physical love can suggest. Acting at of a world of

fantasies, she quickly passes “through every avatar of a woman in

love.”(LA, 194) the lover’s pursuit, secret trysts, baseless accusations and

jealousy, seduction, and even rape.

Faulkner’s desire for unity and coherence in the pattern is not as

strong as is his desire for truth to individual response. When Byron comes

to that moment of reassessment, his mind works in its own way, one not

so much marked by a literary mode common with Lena’s, the similarity

of his “thinking” patterns to hers, as it is by individual and immediate

response to his situation. His pursuit of Brown in Chapter 17 and 18

demonstrates some of the same volitionless movement as Joe does at

point of decision, something of that same mental numbness which

follows points of realization “And then, just outside the cabin door where

he had stopped, he heard the child cry once and something terrible

happened to him”(LA, 212)

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This is the echo of Joe’s fears as he “waited for what came

next”,(LA, 350) and the echo is repeated again for Byron in Chapter 18 “his

insides were afraid that ……..something terrible would happen.”(LA, 394-95)

For Byron the present is his involvement with Lena (signaled in the

text by the repetition of “Byron Bunch Knows this”). For Hightower

Byron’s past is that enigonatic cause of his week and hegira. The town

sees Byron’s present as his job, and they don’t know or care if he ever

had a past. One never finds out much about the past, and he abandons it

completely when he meets Lena and is thus able to break of whatever

obligation it had imposed upon his present.

The surface similarity between Byron’s and Joe’s premonitions, far

from enforcing the dominance of a common fate or even a common

consciousness, suggests instead that even fate is individual. Byron’s

premonition does not prove true. What came next offers him a path for

escape because his realization is not tragic but almost comic. It involves

the adjustment of a dream to conform with present reality.

“It was like for a week now his eyes had accepted her belly without

his mind believing. ‘Yet I did know, believe’, he though. ‘I must have

knowed to have done what I have done: the running and the lying and the

worrying at folks…. Yet still he did not believe.”(LA. 377)

Byron has planned, assessed, calculated all hermetic thinking

directed to the end of serving and saving Lena. The narrative presence

steps in with a metaphor for this, “He was working fast, yet thinking went

slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow

and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above

a brewing storm. If I had known then he thought.”(LA. 371)

Joe’s thinking is hermetic by contrast it is internally, not

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vicariously, compulsive. Byron has moved to complete his relationship

with Lena, but it fails to satisfy his premises or resolve his identity. Thus

for him the process cannot end with simple realization: he must carry the

realization back to his former assumptions and change them.

In Light in August Faulkner has given us a story loaded with social

significance. What the novel tries to depict is that the southern folks are

shadowed by evils inherited from a pre-war social system and ideology.

In the novel we have four main characters who above all others are ridden

with the ghosts of slavery days. Faulkner rebtes Joe’s tragic alienation to

universal issues and to predicaments of the human spirit that transcend

the agonies and frustrations of the transcend the agonies and frustrations

of the American south and special problems of troubled twentieth

century.

The plot of Sartoris is the violent, self destructive actions of young

Bayard Sartoris after his return home to Jefferson following World War I.

Bayard through his past and present human and natural environment, but

incidental actions and Faulkner’s evocation of the Southern landscape

seem to loosen the grasp of the main plot. There is however, a central

perspective from which to view the entire novel. That perspective

depends upon two kinds of time, for its full meaning “(1) psychological –

the individual’s awareness of time and (2) natural – independent of the

individual and identified with the cyclic pattern of the seasons.”8

Both are present in Sartoris as distinct time continua, and function

as structural motif’s joining the major plot with those stories, incidents

and scenes not immediately evident as integral.

The structural principle, which produces the novel’s coherence and

allows fullest appreciation Faulkner’s portrayal of young Bayard, is the

contrast between psychological individualism and natural time.

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Young Bayard’s past experience in the war and the heroic-male

tradition of his family dominate his responses to life in the present. The

names, John and Bayard, are repeated through the succeeding generations

of the Sartoris family, inviting a comparison between Colonel John and

his brother, Bayard, who fought in the civil war, and John and his twin,

young Bayard (great grandsons of Colonel John), who fought in World

War I. Through the years following the Civil War, the escapades of

Colonel John and Bayard become a tradition of heroic deeds that end in

death. While young Bayard watches, young John imitates their heroic

gestures by senselessly getting himself killed in an airplane during battle.

Although taught by tradition to believe their deaths heroic, young Bayard

also views them as meaningless: this ambivalence motivates his violent

actions in Jefferson and his own death. Because young Bayard sees in the

record of family events his own doom, the past becomes his inescapable

present.

As the seasons follow the eternal pattern of creation and

destruction and as those around young Bayard continue their daily pace

of living, he recklessly speeds to his death. Hyatt Waggoner suggests

Bayard uses speed as a ‘way of forcing out of consciousness what he

cannot allow himself to think about.”(Sartoris, 228) His excessive speed while

driving his car and the dangerous ride on a wild stallion do support

Waggoner’s statement. But Bayard does not always move so rapidly.

When he leaves Jefferson and the immediate influence of his home

environment, he rides slowly on his horse Perry through the winter

countryside. Later, as the Negro drives him on a wagon to the train

station, the movement is steady and slow through the same landscape.

But when he leaves this area, he resumes his previously violent gestures

and finally commits suicide piloting a dangerously defective aircraft. His

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death is but an unheroic in these changes in motion is the difference

between psychological and natural time.

Although Bayard rides through lies barren in its winter blanket of

cold – reflecting his response to life, his grandfather’s recent death, and

his own sense of doom – its present conditions is temporary until spring

returns. In contrast to Bayard, nature is a source of joy and excitement for

the MacCallums as they hunt foxes and return to the warmth of their

fireplace and fellowship of their home. As Bayard approaches their cabin

‘a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight’.(Sartoris, 119)

In harmony with themselves and nature, the MacCallums

symbolize and alternative to Bayard’s present response to life: but during

his stay there he remains rigid and shivering with cold, his thoughts in the

past with his dead grandfather and brother.

Except in the following instance, Bayard seems out of place in the

natural landscape: shortly after his return from the war, he tries to divert

his mind from the past by working the land. During the spring he planted

things in the ground tended them, and . . . “came in at mealtimes and at

might smelling of machine oil and of stables and of the earth, and went to

bed with grandful muscles and with the sober rhythms of the earth in his

body……”(Sartoris, 350)

To the reader that it is not as important to be accepted as it is to

stand up and support what one believes in, even if it results in social

censure.

As I Lay Dying is a tragic and comic story. The nihilistic mood

expressed in Shakespeare’s lines- “Life “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full

of Sound and fury, signifying nothing”- that shapes The Sound and the

Fury is also the mood of this novel, but here the meaninglessness of

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existence is view as a macabre joke. As I Lay Dying is both a simple and

puzzling book. Structurally and stylistically it exhibits Faulkner’s

amazing virtuosit. Concentrating on a character at a time, fifteen of them

in all, the action breaks in sixty sections. One of the major themes in the

novel explores the meaning of being, the individual’s awareness of his

own identity. The theme simply stated presents the mystery of “I Am

against the unfathomable state of “I Am Not”, “I Was”, contemplation of

death, non-being, provokes meditation upon the reality of being: who am

I? What am I?”9 Right after the death of Addie, for example, Vardaman

runs into the barn and goes into the stall which holds Jewel’s horse.

It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into

an unrobed scattering of components – snuffing and stampings: smells of

cooling flesh and ammoniac hari, an illusion of a coordinated whole of

splotched hide and strong bores within which, detached and secret and

familiar, and is different from any is. “I see him dissolve-legs, a rolling

eye a gaudy splotching like cold flames-and float upon the dark in fading

solution: all one yet neither; all either yet none”(ALD, 379).

In the barn, too, ‘Dewey Dell undergoes a similar experience that is

tempered for her pregnancy:

… away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked through my clothes. I said you don’t what worry is. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether I can cry or not I don’t know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.(ALD, 384)

The dependence upon emotional attachments and upon the identity

of others sense of identity is stressed in Darl’s references to Jewel. Darl

knows that Addie is dead, but Jewel does not: therefore Jewel, Darl

muses is what he is not. The identity that Jewel knows in his relationship

with his mother no longer exists, through he does not yet know it. But

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Darl, knowing that Addie is dead, know that Jewel “is what he is

not”.(ALD, 464) Lying in bed in the strange room, Darl attempts to moor

himself to reality by identity because it belongs to no one. No longer does

it, nor to him and Jewel who are only carting it. But it does, in one sense,

belong to them, because he and Jewel can hear the wind and rain shaping

the wood to their ears when they are awake. Once they are asleep, though,

it is not, “Since sleep is not and rain and wind are was it is not.”(ALD, 350)

Darl concludes that the Wagon is because when he is asleep and the

Wagon is them his mother will not be. “And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren

must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a

strange room. And if I am not emptieing yet. I am is”.(ALD, 396)

The dependence of self-identity with something outside of self is

also illustrated by Vardaman’s identification of his dead mother with a

dead fish. The child is accustomed to the death of fish and animals, and it

is only means of dealing with the reality of his mother as was. Addie’s

death has so affected Vardaman’s sense of being that he must continually

identify with those around him: “Jewel is my brother . . . Darl is my

brother. . . . I am. Darl is my brother.”(AID 409)

By its very nature, the internal monologue provides limited

perspective, and one can move from mind to mind. One can realize the

disparity between reality and the individual’s perception of it.

In the novel each character is so individualized, his monologues

reveal only his personal view of an event. Ameditation on himself as an

unfortunate man, for example, is clearly substantiated by the view in the

thoughts of Vernon Tulle and Darl. But there is more to Anse than they

have observed. He may say when his wife dies, “God’s will be done…..

Now I can get them teeth”(ALD, 336) and reveal himself a self-centre,

callous person, but one has no reason to doubt the sincerity of his feeling

35

as he tenderly touches the face of his dead wife and clumsily attempts to

smooth the quit coving her body. One can know that he depends upon his

neighbours for help, but we also see him refusing the loon of a wagon and

mules to bring Addie’s body to the graveyard in Jefferson as he promised

her he would. Throughout the journey, he displays an independence and

fortitude that surprise his neighbours.

There are no villains and heroes in As I Lay Dying. The

complexities and the contradictions of the human personality are exposed

and explored, and the ultimate result is the reader’s awareness of the

amusing and tragic incongruities between the individual’s vision of

himself and his neighbor’s views of him.

Cora Tull, for instance, who is a neighbor of Addie Bundren,

solicitously sits by the bedside of the dying woman. Though she is acing

the role of sympathetic friend, Cora has no thoughts but for her own petty

problem. She has used eggs to make cakes that she could not sell, and she

is disturbed by the possibility that her husband will point up her failure.

The self-righteous Cora is not amenable to any view of herself as less

than perfect and her failure with the cakes has made her vulnerable. No

sympathy for Addie is registered in Cora’s monologues: She is certain

that the “eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her,

because Addie has not lived according to Cora’s own moral code.”(ALD,342)

“Out of Faulkner’s sharply realized portraits of individual men and

women, there gradually emerges a view of man which involves making a

crucial distinction between the social and moral definition of his

nature.”(ALD, 345) The former simply places the individual in certain

exclusive categories, the later restores to him his identity with all

humanity. The one provides a formula for morality and enforces it with

law, the other leaves moral action undefined and therefore unfettered.

36

In short the social definition of man predetermines the individual’s

response to experience by creating an expectation of conformity to certain

codes which govern the behavior of each social unit. The moral definition

of man predetermines the individual’s response to experience by creating

an expectation of conformity to certain codes which govern the behavior

of each social unit.

In the novel, As I Lay Dying Death the center of notion makes life

a gigantic joke. The joke is dramatically rendered by making the reader

conscious of the incongruities, both particular and universal, of existence.

It is this denial that constituents the immorality of his personal and that

wounds Rosa so deeply. Sutpen’s death three years later cannot assuage

her feeling: in fact, “that what she can’t forgive him for: not for the insult,

not even for having jilted him: but for being dead.”(ALD, 170)

Nothing but some kind of Act, some kind of revenge that would be

an assertion of the individuality he denied her could soothe her wound.

With Sutpen dead, the balm can never be applied. The parallel between

Stupen’s experience fifteen and Rosa Coldfield’s at twenty is striking.

Sutpen’s experience not only illuminates for him the reality of the

social structure, but also reveals the insignificant role of the individual in

the overall pattern of existence. In the quoted passage, in which Sutpen

sees himself as a nameless progenitor who knocked at a door, is

embedded an important Faulkner a concept of time and humanity.

Faulkner conceives of time as indivisible, continuum. A particle of

time comes into momentary identity as say, the third hour of the sixteenth

day of the eleventh month of the one-thousand nine-hundred and twenty

seconds years A.D. At the end of its existence as a separate hour, it

recedes into the continuum of time. The human being, like an hour of

time, is born into individual identity. He is merely a particle in the

37

continual flow of humanity. He dies, but the race continues, what

individual man does, during his hour, becomes a part of history. The

individual ceases to exist, but history does not: history is the

manifestation of human continuity. It is the continuum, out of which the

individual ceases to exist, but history does not; history is the

manifestation of human continuity. It is the continuum out of which the

individual person emerges, the way the hour emerges out of the

continuum of time. History, the actions of those who came before, is the

heritage of each single identity.

To Sutpen, wealth and respectability are tools toward this end. His

goal is the assertion of his individuality in a society based upon

ownership of property. Arieli writes:

Individualism supplied the nation with a rationalization of its characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and aspirations, It endowed the past, the present and the future with the perspective of unity and progress. It explained the peculiar social and political organization of the nation unity in spite of heterogeneity and it pointed toward an ideal social organization in harmony with American experience. Above all, individualism expressed sathe universalism and idealism most characteristic of the national consciousness. This concept evolved in contractistinction to socialism, the universal and messianic character of which it shared.(ALD, 250)

Since any social system or moral code tends to replace internal

morality with external controls, the only healthy relationship between

man their society is one of mutual suspicion and unreleased vigilance.

Only such an attitude can ensure the continued existence of a critical

revolution of the farmer’s behavior and the latter’s conventions. If this

balance is destroyed, the result is either anarchy or social and

governmental dictatorship. Because it completely obliterates freedom,

because it reduces individual, the second is more dangerous. Faulkner

levels some of his bitterest and most forthright criticism at this

38

accelerating process of regimentation which he describes in almost all of

his novels.

The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s fourth novel, published in

1929 by Jonathan Cope and Harrison Smith, established Faulkner as one

of the few writers who may safely be accused of genius. The Sound and

the Fury is regarded as Faulkner’s finest work.

In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner seems to show the picture of

modern American society like T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden. Modern society

has grown into an asylum where all men are individual. Where, all are

insensitive, just symptoms Man is suffering from the sense of alienation.

Either, human beings are weak, too weak to face the situations and,

therefore commit suicide like Quentin, or promiscuous like Caddy or

great materialist like Jeason, nihilist like Mr. Compson or self centered

like Mrs. Compson or insane like Benjy. This novel may be called the

Testament of the modern world. It deals with hollowness, artificiality and

nihilism in the society. Through the story of the decline and disintegration

of the Compson family, which sometimes had been very glorious, it

presents the picture of humanity declining from its past glory.

The title, The Sound and the Fury indicates the clue of the book

and brings out the picture of modern American society. The title of the

novel is immediately pertinent; it seems as we are reading what is literally

a tale told by an idiot. The title, The Sound and the Fury is coming from

Macbeth’s speech in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth-

“Life is but a walking shadow,

×××××××××××××

It is a tale,

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury;

Signifying nothing.”10

39

Macbeth utters this speech when he is on the height of pessimism

after the death of Lady Macbeth. These lines can be taken as a clue to the

meaning of the novel. This statement may be applied to modern

American society also where life has become a tale told by an idiot,

which has nothing significant and fruitful and only sound and fury.

The Sound and the Fury seems to have been written by Faulkner in

a mood of anger and despair. Underlying the book is a sense that all

children are betrayed in fundamental ways by their parents and left to

flounder helplessly in a world where they can find no succor. Every

member of the Compson family is in some degree either a victimized

child or a betraying parent.

Benjy presents individualism. Faulkner chose to open the novel

with the section belonging to Benjy, the thirty three-year old imbecile

whom he called “truly innocent, that is, an idiot”,(SF, 218) and declared his

authorial concern about “just where he could get the tenderness, the help,

to shield him in his innocence”.11 Faulkner has occasionally been

criticized for a decision to begin with a foray into the chaotic mind of a

mental defective but the choice was brilliant one, both artistically and

psychologically.

Benjy is psychologically a child, barely more than an infant, and

his simple responses give one view of things.

Benjy of his mental deficiency and of the heedless selfishness of

most of the members of his household: Quentin, despite his intellectual

powers, of his psychic inability to break out of early adolescent sexual

attitudes created by those same familial inadequacies. A feeling of

endless movement is created by Benjy’s memories of being shunted in

and out the house and torn from his accustomed places for sleeping and

eating during the period after grand mother’s death- undoubtedly based

40

on Faulkner’s remembrance of the upheaval after the death of Damuddy

in 1907- and of the physical and emotional uproar surrounding his sister’s

wedding, no less clearly based on the author’s reaction to the marriage of

Estelle.

Benjy’s section includes just about every crucial piece of family

“data” that the later portions amplify. Through his wounded sensibility

and uncomprehending eyes one can see the physical decline of the

Compson place, its decay imaging the emotional disarray of the family

itself.

The second section of the novel is narrated from within Quentin’s

mind on the day when he commits suicide, i.e. June 2, 1910. The thoughts

he expresses are those of a highly literate intelligent and sensitive young

man. Quentin Compson is Faulkner’s image of a man aware of his

dispossession but unable to endure or transcend it. Living an extreme of

exacerbated consciousness. Quentin cannot dispose of the problems

thrown up by that consciousness. Without an ordering code of belief he is

left entirely to the mercy of his perceptions and these bring him little but

chaos and pain. Quentin lives in the past. It is the past which obsesses

him and from which he sees no way to extricate himself. Quentin, who is

speaking in the last section, is living the last of his life.

In the novel, The Sound and the Fury, Quentin, first memory upon

walking is of his father giving him Grandfather’s watch with the

observation that it is, as he says, “the mausoleum of all hope and desire;

its rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto

absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no

better than it fitted his or her father’s. I give it to you not that you may

remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment

and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”(SF, 76)

41

Time, and time consciousness contradict human experience, as the

reference to reduction and absurdum indicates. It is in Mr. Compson’s

phrase, excruciatingly apt that Quentin’s interior monologue begins with

this appeal to contradiction, which obsesses Quentin as much as time

does. In fact, one obsession is implicit in the other. The association is

made overt again when he sees watches in a store window, displaying “a

dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory

assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one

another.”(SF, 85)

What strikes Quentin about the boys quarreling at the bridge is that

their voice is “insistent and contradictory and impatient.”(SF, 117) He has

assimilated his father’s habit of thinking in terms of conflicts between

assertive, irreconcilable opposites, as in Mr. Compson’s arithmetical

definition of men “as the sum of his climate experience…..Man the sum

of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an

unvarying. Nil stalemate of dust and desire.(SF, 124) Again two things—

dust and desire- a ‘nil’. Similarly, to prove to Quentin that Caddy’s

virginity was always an illusion, Mr. Compson reasons by contradiction:

“Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore,

contrary to nature”.(SF,116)

Quentin and his father tend to experience difference as

contradiction, multiplicity as a stalemated war between impure properties.

The whole novel traces the fault lines of this mental set. A universe of

antagonisms is formed, all divided and subdivided as awareness focuses

on each, into further bifurcations of A and mat-A.

This universe appears in the blanket social distinction between the

quality and the non-quality. The first category is further divided by Mrs.

Compson’s obsession with the status of Compson’s versus that of

42

Basecombs, the latter family divided into her ne’er-do-well brother

Maury and her son Jason, her “Salvation” and a true Bascomb. The

binary set informs her belief that “there is no halfway ground that a

woman is either lady or not”(SF, 180) structures Jason’s efforts to apply his

commercial scheme of credits and debits to all areas of human

relationships. It is resplendent in the moment when he believes his life

will reach a heroic climax: “He could see the opposed forces of his

destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that

would be irrevocable ………. There would be just one right thing,

without alternatives: he must do that”.(SF, 307) In this binary universe., as in

Hegel’s idea of tragic collision, all distinctions become divisions. Subtly

or overtly, the daily craving is Jason’s lust for clearly opposed forces, the

one right thing to do.

The Compson children seek to escape from the passivity of their

suffering, a condition ironically produced by the binary world view

traditionally suited to heroic action. The central, insidious cause of their

debility is that this same orientation threatens to alienate them from their

own experience. The attempt to reclaim the personal dimension of their

lives consequently is a deeply purposeful Act, a nascent counter to

passivity. For Quentin, the crucial issue is his passion.

Faulkner also presents Oedipus complex in his novel. Oedipus

complex also creates the conflict situation for a person. Individualism

represents inner conflict in a person.

The Sound and the Fury has been offering up the solution to the

novel’s present (1928) line of action: the conflict between Jason and Miss

Quentin. The triumph of justice implied by Jason’s loss and humiliation

has been giving a certain comic and even melodramatic turn to the quality

of much of the third and fourth sections. Without this final glimpse of

43

disorders, the last half of the novel might otherwise be felt to be a severe

diminution of the emotional engagement of the first two sections. The

final episode by its sheer shock manages to recall much of the subjective

intensity expressed through Benjy’s and Quentin’s consciousness earlier

in the book. It restores the novel all the more poignantly to its tragic

beginnings.

It was characterized by a belief in emotional liveliness, uninhibited

imagination and spontaneity in both art and personal life. Sir Francis

Drake brought fame to his country and himself by being the first man to

circumnavigate the world. In central and eastern Europe, literacy

romanticism and early nationalism compliment each other. Although it

was initially an ideal, individualism evolved into something practical.

Years later, The Glorious Revolution replaced one ruler with

minimum bloodshed and helped eliminate the collectivism of the British

laws. The emergence of prominent individuals during this time period

was significant. If the concept of individualism has never materialized,

may be living in the Dark Ages.

In Intruder in the Dust, contest between Zack and Lucas, the two

individuals, has been settled and within the personal world of human

relationships, Lucas has achieved a lasing triumph. Yet insofar as both

men are inextricably involved in society and tradition, the problem of

racial double standards remains unsolved within that larger world of

society inhabited by the two races. Lucas is still faced with the issue

which he himself has raised. The most that can be expected in such a

situation is a stalemate Lucas achieve.

Nevertheless, in that fleeting moment when the two man grapple

for the gun, the shibboleths of caste and colour are forgotten. Roth’s

affirmation of these same shibboleths ironically reverses that movement.

44

He, unthinkingly, follows the old established mode of initiation into

manhood and society only to discover too late that they are not identical.

As children, he and Henry enjoy together the perfect freedom and

innocence in which the raw material of experience is explored but not

forced into any ethical or social code. Both accept, as did their parents in

their childhood, the interchangeability of homes, beds, kitchens, and even

parents. However, when Roth relegates Henery to the pallet, himself

claiming solitary possession of the bed, he exchanges spontaneity for

calculation and affections for principles. For the first time, his movements

are planned in advance. There is deliberation in the way he paces his

walking so that the Negro by never quite catches up with him and in the

way the times his undressing to allow Henry to lie down on the pallet so

he can take solitary possession of the bed.

When Lucas, after being imprisoned, offers him this opportunity,

Chick is once more forced to choose between social conformity and

individual moral responsibility between his race and his own distinctive

manhood. His first instinctive feeling is that the choice does not have to

be made or that at least it can be postponed. Physical absence can

preserve his freedom from implication in Lucas’ death and the violence

of the mob. Like Isaac, Chick keeps repeating “I am free”.12

A Fable (1954) is a philosophical book expressing in form of

morality of Faulkner’s matured and comprehensive ideas about human

character and human life. Essentially, Faulkner despites a fundamental

dualism in the nature of man which produces continuing conflict and

tension. The generalissimo in the novel defines the dualism: “We are two

articulations… [of] two inimical conditions….I Champion of this

mundane earth...you Champion of an esoteric realm of man’s baseless

hopes and his infinite capacity….no: passion-for unfit…”13

45

Man’s greed and rapacity, his drive for self, aggrandizement,

produce wars and the military. The self-interest of his personal life is

reflected in his society. Egoism isolates the individual from his fellow-

men and it isolates nations from nation. All that is necessary to obliterate

the military says that the group commander is the “simple effacement

from man’s memory of a single word ………Fatherhood.”(AF, 54) The

military hierarchy throughout, A Fable, is cited as the enemy of man, but

even as a symbol of man’s rapacity. The military reflects man’s dual

nature dedicated to self-preservation and the extension of its mundane

power and glory, it also expresses the human capacity for sacrifice and

honour and fidelity. Faulkner’s overall view of human existence is not

optimistic. His basic view, as it is presented in this novel, is that the

forces of self-interest have always dominated and will continue to

dominate, but, at least, these forces will not rule supreme. These

antitheses in the human being are ineffaceable and the struggle will never

cease. In the final scene of the novel, the corporal’s disciple is horribly

scarred and maimed, and his is beaten by the mob, but he cries out. “’I’m

not going to die. Never”.(AF, 437)

At the very heart of the Yoknapatawpha novels A Fable is the

problem created by the conflict between the inflexible modify of society

and the ethics of the individual based on experience, grounded in specific

situation, and usually incapable of formulation beyond the simplest of

maxims and platitudes. Isaac McCaslin and Chich Mallison, each acting

according to his consciences and risking the certain disapproval of

society, anticipate the corporal in his role of rebel.

William Faulkner’s novel, The Hamlet has received less critical

attention and perhaps less critical intelligence than any other of his major

works. The reasons for this neglect are rather easily stated. Published in

46

1940, Faulkner’s only significant novel between Absalom, Absalom! In

1936 and Go Down Moses in 1942, The Hamlet differs considerably from

the novels of the major phase, 1929-1936. It comes at a point in the

development of the Yoknapatawpha cycle when the early conflict

between legend and reality which so disturbed Quentin Compsan had

been largely resolved and it is concerned with themes that had earlier

been of peripheral interest.

The milliea of The Hamlet, though it differs from that of

Faulkner’s other works, is nonetheless part and parcel of Yoknapatawpha

country, and the same is true of the novel as it relates thematically to the

cycle. After disosing in Absalom, Absalom! of Quentin Campsom’s

tortured search for reality, Faulkner turned from his major theme, that of

man’s relations to the land. The years from 1936 to 1942 are in a sense

transitional ones during which Faulkner seems to have been formulating

the credo of Isaac McCaslin, many of whose ideas are implicit in The

Hamlet. A sense of the richness and inviolability of the land pervades

much of Faulkner’s earlier work, especially the Indian stories, Absalom,

Absalom! And Old Man. The Hamlet does not become the dominant

interest. Here, in the symbols of Eula and the cow, the conflict between

Flem and Ratliff, Faulkner relates the minor theme most significantly to

the major one. Only as he learns properly to value emotion, to venerate

nature, will man recover his integrity and achieve a meaningful

relationship with his fellows.

In Pylon the most scathing remarks are directed at an individual,

Colonel Fein man, who is depicted as a crooked politician, who has

developed sufficient wealth and influence to have the new lakeside airpot

named for him and who has set the air show to celebrate its dedication.

His status and qualifications are, on an early page, but succinctly in a

47

conversation between Jiggs and a bus driver. Jiggs a stronger to the city,

suggests that this man must be a big son of a bitch, to whom the New

Valois bus driver replies, “He’s a son of a bitch all right. Iguess you’d

call him big too”.14 The driver has another laconically eloquent answer to

Jiggs’s suggestion that Feinman gave you guys a nice airport, anyway. It

is somebody did.

In The Unvanquished, the conflict between the code and the

individual who suddenly questions its validity is perhaps best revealed in

the final scene. To meet the expectations of George Wyatt and the other

men of Jefferson and to vindicate his “honor”, Bayard must kill

Redmond. The code demands a death for a death in the case of a Sartories

as well as a Gowrie.yet Bayard feels that there is another precept which

transcends the code, that “If there was anything at all in the Book,

anything of hope and peace for his blind and bewilder spawn which He

had chosen above all others to offer immortality, Household not kill must

be it”.15

In a sense, Bayard avoids choosing by affecting a compromise. He

confronts Redmond, but to adhere to his own convictions, he does so

unarmed. Simultaneously he preserves Sartoris honor and his own

integrity.

Women individuality is another feature of Faulkner’s fiction. The

fate of the woman is to be pole reflection of her husband. Thus, Ellen

Coldfield loses all individuality when she assumes her role of wife of

Sutpen. Living “from attitude to attitude against her background of

chatelaine to the largest, wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most

fortunate”.(Unvanquished, 69) It is only during the absence of the father and the

husband that the woman exercises her latent and repressed strength and

asserts her own identity. The civil war brought to the fore a number of

48

indomitable women capable of guarding and preserving the achievements

of their men. Drusilla Hawk in The Unvanquished is the extreme example

of the emancipated woman emerging from the shadowy background of

sheltered femininity. Usually, however, it is only the older women who

shows this strength and determination. Miss Jenny Sartoris, Miss Rosa

Milalrd, and Miss Habersham came readily to mind as instances. It is as if

the common’s individuality can only be expressed after the termination of

her function as a childbearer. Only then can she rise, as Absalom,

Absalom! notes, “to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch,

arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crane the pride and destiny of her

family”.(AA, 69)

Ruby Lamar, Laverne Shumann, and Charlotte Rittermeyer are

related to this group even as they constitute departure from it. Though

they are deeply involved in the sexual and emotional aspects of life, they

are more sharply individualized. And though all three have children, they

bear no resemblance to that great earth-mother, Eula Varner. Charlotte, in

particular, attempts to terminate her bandage to nature and childbearing.

Each of these women is attempting in her way to develop her own

individual and human potentialitites. In this, they are anticipated by

Margaret Powers of Soldeirs’ Pay, who recognizes that she has upset

men’s fixed ideas about women, have discovered, “That love and

suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what

you have to pay for it”.16

Out of this knowledge come a certain kind of integrity and a certain

firmness of purpose that elevates them above the society which rejects

them.

The Campsons would frustrate the individualism it exposes by a

binary orientation that in effect denies self-esteem. Despite their aversion

49

to anomalys, the Composons live this fundamental contradiction. Yet

they neither subside into numbness nor yield their stubborn hold an

individual personal value. They continue to grasp both individualism and

a self-defeating way of founding it. Although tragedy within, their world

is secondhand.

It is according to the founding principle that the individual is a

theater of others that Caddy exists in her novel because, in the

profoundest sense, she exists in her brothers and they in and through her.

As representations of death, Caddy and her novel portend that to

say No to death is never to forget it but always to evoke the reality of the

very thing to be resisted, as an overtone in a world conceived

dialogically, a world of talk and sound. Faulkner’s next published novel

is the imagination of his desire turned into an ironic marginal condition.

In this state, one is unable to survive death or to complete it, precisely

because one’s death like one’s survival, vulnerably depends upon others

and the stories of their lives.

In this respect, the provenance of “individualism” resembles that of

“egoism” and “capitalism”. All three terms were coined with the explicit

intention of tarnishing each target by association with something

obviously perverse, irrational, and evil. In each case, the coiners’ strategy

consisted in what Any Rand has aptly called package dealing. Subsuming

fundamentally dissimilar items under a single word, and then using that

worked univocally to convey the illusion of similarity between the items.

The standard story in mainstream political theory holds that white

“individualism” has same legitimate attractions, it is most respects a

“problematic” ideal. But so is collectivism. Therefore, we’re best off

rejecting the ‘Simplistic categories’ of individualism versus collectivism

in favors of a more sophisticated terminology that transcends them both.

50

This “Sophisticated insight is typically applied with a double standard,

however, and theorists often forget the supposed attractions of

individualism in their more moralistic moments, dredging up its Jacobin

connotations of individualism in their more moralistic moments, dredging

up its Jacobin Connotations when they need to make a polemical point.

The result typically sounds something like this passage from Christopher

lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. This book describes a way of life that

is dying the culture of competitive individualism, which in its decadence

has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all

against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of narcissistic

preoccupation with self.

As Machan points out, despite the lip service given to the ideals of

individualism, it is precisely this diabolical conception of it that informs a

good deal of contemporary political theory. Though theorists tell us that

they are only interested in living the concept some “nuance”, the nuance-

giving is often led, as if by an invisible hand, to the task of

delegistimizing individualism by packing it with hedonism, narcissism,

anomie, social Darwinism, or Jacobinism. The plausibility of such

manners rests on a refusal to give the term a definition, coupled with in

insistence in using it to conjure up images of social or psychological

dislocation.

51

REFERENCES

1 Bryce James, The American Commonwealth, (New York, The

Modern Library, 1988) 72.

2 Susan Love Brown, Various Subgrouping of New Left Identity

Politics, (London, Paragon Press, 1964).

3 Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour, (London, Paragon Press 1998)

546 here after cited in this chapter.

4 Thomas Paine, Theme-Individualism Literary, (New York,

University of Virginia 1978) 548, here after cited in this chapter.

5 Fant Joseph L. and Robert Ashley, Faulkner at West Point, Jackson

(University of Mississippi, 2002) 119, hereafter cited in this

chapter.

6 William Van O’Connor, William Faulkner Pamphlets an American

Writers 3 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1959) 22

hereafter cited in this chapter.

7 William Faulkner, Light in August (New York, Random

House,1932) 176; hereafter cited in this chapter.

8 William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York, Random House 1928) 170

hereafter cited in this chapter.

9 William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York, The Modern

Library, 1930) 375; hereafter cited in this chapter.

10 Wolfit Sir Donald, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

(London, 1958) 942.

11 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Chatto & Windus

London 1929) 82 hereafter cited in this chapter.

52

12 William Faulkner, Interuder in the Dust (New York, Random

House 1948) 392.

13 William Faulkner, A Fable (New York, Random House 1954) 347-

48 hereafter cited in this chapter.

14 William Faulkner, Pylon (Random House, New York, 1935).

15 William Faulkner, The Unvarquished (New York 1937) 249

hereafter cited in this chapter.

16 William Faulkner, Soldier’s Pay (Random House New York 1926)

48.