Committed to Public Care: Reader, Author, and the Community in the Reception History of The Sound and the Fury

Olga Kuminova

Despite the common view of the novel as a genre for the solitary reader, the reception history of The Sound and the Fury suggests that modernist novel is best appreciated by a community of readers. The first American reviewers of Faulkner's novel, in spite of being experienced novel-readers, stood baffled and alone in front of the enigmatic text, and expressed frustration at its obscurity, its manifest "refusal" to communicate. The modernist novel was as yet an unfamiliar genre, and its first readers had no recourse to a familiar set of reading conventions to help them tackle works of this type. The Sound and the Fury, in particular, is a very challenging, introverted communicative gesture, where especially the first two sections seem addressed to no external consciousness, and deliberately unhelpful to a first-time reader. This extreme "individualism," even autism, of the text leaves the reader no choice but to reach out for support of an interpretive community -- which soon began to form around The Sound and the Fury.

Faulkner himself took a great part in shaping such a community, by publicizing his novel in interviews and university lectures, and collaborating with editors to make it more accessible to the common reader. Today the first-time reader is in a much better position to do justice to this novel, if s/he belongs to the readerly, critical and scholarly community that shares a tradition of reading modernist novels in general and this one in particular. Yet even with such a reader, Faulkner's text is not guaranteed the warm, selfless, empathic reception that Faulkner seems to have been anxious to solicit.