/lit/ - Literature

>>11916296
I've heard that quote before but I've never seen evidence for it (Other than the exact same paragraph word-for-word in a couple non-academic and non-sourced articles).

But that's besides the point, because whether or not Faulkner said that, it's right, just not in the sense you might think so. In fact, that's the entire point of the novel. A family lives in a time where their lifestyle and values have become obsolete.

But the South in the 1860s was so much deeper than just "the South of the 1910s-1920s, except with slaves." Infinitely deeper, as deep as life is wherever you live today (except much more romanticized), and in all likelihood the loss of slaves was tertiary (though one of the causes) to the loss of the lifestyle and values, the dismantling of the aristocracy, and the physical destruction of the South, for which Reconstruction was like a band-aid on a gunshot wound.

Such slavery-centric views of the South (ie as if that's the only thing Southerners cared about or worried about after the Civil War) are ridiculous. It's like saying Germans were down after WWII not because they lost both the war and many brothers-in-arms and family members or because their country was razed to the ground, but because they wouldn't be able to finish killing all the Jews.

The Southerners were not depressed or shattered because they felt guilty about owning slaves or wanted to continue owning them. They were shattered because the way that they, their parents, their parents parents, and so on lived life a certain (very romanticized) way and, after the war, this way of life had simply ceased to exist or even be possible, as is made clear through the novel. That's the inspiration for The Sound and the Fury.

The Nazi analogy was sort of low-hanging fruit however (about as low as claiming all Southern works have something to do with slavery if they tackle the coping of the destruction of their aristocracy).

Another historical period that mirrors the American South much more closely than anything else I can think of (except for the slaves) is the period of Japan from the Meiji restoration through the end of the World War II. The striking similarities and comparisons here are endless, and even go into literature. Like Southerners, many Japanese faced crises relating to the obsoleting of their way of life. At first, this happened much more slowly and insidiously through the westernization of Japan (see: Soseki and Ogai), but eventually it came to a head with their defeat in WWII, as the South's did after their defeat in the Civil War. Japanese literature of this period is also strikingly similar to Southern Gothic literature: for example, Dazai's The Setting Sun is almost a Japanese mirror image of The Sound and the Fury thematically. The sentiments in the works of Kawabata, Dazai, Mishima, and other period Japs are the same sentiments Faulkner explored in The Sound and the Fury.

The slavery thing is misguided low-hanging fruit for TSATF.