Texas Speech Communication Journal

“Wonder. Go on and Wonder.”

Faulkner. The Sound and The Fury

I was a first-generation college student, and my Mom had it in her head that I should probably be a truck driver. With little knowledge of university culture, Mom thought driving a truck was a perfect career path for me. I always had “impatient feet,” as mom told me, and driving a truck was a logical choice for someone who was adept at and excited about traveling cheap and often, especially in the late 90’s when a gallon of gas was roughly $1.19. I could see the world that way. The idea, I admit, was briefly inviting.

As my high school career came to a close, I began to realize that I wanted something else. I wanted to travel and see the cultural landscapes of the United States, but I wanted to do it in something besides a semi-truck. I did not want to work in the same way my parents had in order to make ends meet. My Stepfather’s hands always reminded me of why my desire to work differently was important. They were rough, cracked, and scarred from pulling wire through attics in negative temperatures or 100-degree weather. I learned quickly that there had to be a better way. He was always the first to remind me of that. “Work with your head,” he said. So, I considered my options, which, at the time, felt scarce.

Liberty “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.” (Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury)

My cousin was attending Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia at the time, and the opportunity to travel across the country with family close was appealing to me. As he put it, “Anyone can get in. You just have to write a personal statement about your dedication to Christ and, of course, get a loan.” So, upon graduation, I worked as part of a cleanup crew on a construction site for an elementary school for a few months in the summer to save some money (which mainly consisted of me practicing my nonexistent karate skills on old sheetrock), sold my 1977 Chevy truck for two thousand dollars, and left Texas to start my collegiate journey in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

It was much harder than I had expected. In retrospect, my first generation college student identity started to become debilitating. Lowery-Hart and Pacheco Jr. remind me that “if FGS [First Generation College Students] want to academically succeed, they must stop focusing on their cultural identity as first generation” (p. 65). This was, of course, much easier said than done. I felt as if others had a recipe for success to which I did not have access. I lived on the fifty dollars a month that Mom could muster. I didn’t travel home for holidays. My cousin, who encouraged me to travel across the country, with whom I shared a bunk bed in a small dormitory, left college clinically depressed a few months into the first semester. After a long and lonely Thanksgiving break in my dorm room, I knew I had to regroup. I spent most of my time after his departure in the library trying to find books to read. Books from the library, it turns out, are free. I settled on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a book that I heard mentioned by a person who I considered to be smart, so I checked it out. I needed a savior.

I found myself lost three pages into the text. I could not seem to comprehend the narrative style. I was in no way adept in reading books written in non-traditional literary modes and stream of consciousness was a whole new animal. I had probably heard of the purveyors of the style, like James Joyce and Virginia Wolff, but that did not do much for the first encounter. So, reading Benjy’s nonlinear narrative, where quotation marks readily appeared for no reason I could then comprehend (which I later found to represent shifts in literary style) confounded me. I took the next logical step and found Noel Polk’s edited volume, New Essays on The Sound and the Fury in the hope that he understood what I could not. I finished the criticism, dictionary close by. To no fault of Polk, I was still ill-equipped to take on the “quintessential American high modernist text” that was The Sound and The Fury (p. 1).

However, my experience reading the book was probably much like Faulkner’s when he articulated, “I wrote this book and learned to read” (Introduction, p. 705). I read that book and learned to read. Burke describes this phenomenon as “equipment for living” wherein I maneuver to “direct the larger movements and operations in [my] campaign of living” (p. 257). Even though I was encountering disaster with Liberty, reading Faulkner helped me to make capital out of it (Burke, p. 257). My encounter with The Sound and the Fury allowed me to develop strategies for selecting enemies and allies (p. 262). My enemy became the fundamentalist Christian right who ordered me to avoid worldliness, an order that would eventually lead to incidents like Jerry Falwell Jr’s recent call for Christians to conceal and carry weapons to eliminate Muslims. I knew I could not live within such a framework of hate. My allies quickly became the more liberally minded sect of culturally conscious academics, a population that encouraged intercultural exploration and competency.

This enemy/ally dialectic was reinforced by my professors at Liberty. Growing up, I attended a Southern Baptist church with my father every other weekend. As a result, I was privy to the intricacies of Christian religious fundamentalism. But still, I was not prepared for the level of fundamentalism at Jerry Falwell’s prized university in the late 90’s. During my first convocation, I was surprised to hear Dr. Falwell speak about the ills of compulsive masturbation, secular music, and premarital sex. The terms were, of course, rhetorically grouped. I began to ask myself if I was at church camp or if was I a student of knowledge in the academy. The lines blurred often. In my freshman English class, I was tasked to identify secular bias in literary texts. My psychology professor, the area of study in which I had declared as an early major, railed about “homosexuality” and other forms of “mental illness” as simply “demon possession” that could only be cured through diligent prayer and a good relationship with God. Was my depressed cousin really demon possessed? Is that why he left? I sat through a semester of young earth creationist apologetics, a course in which the professor “proved” a seven-day creation period and a six-thousand-year-old earth. Carbon dating was “flawed” and dinosaurs were considered “off topic.” In my “philosophy” class, my professor took a day to talk about the problems with nihilism through a gross mischaracterization of The Smashing Pumpkins shirt he had seen around Lynchburg that simply said, “zero.” I had one of those unChristian shirts in my dorm room. I loved that shirt.

Needless to say, the rhetoric felt increasingly thin. I contemplated for a long time whether or not I was giving this entourage of fundamentalists a fair shake. In this contemplation, I started to skip class and listen to secular music in my dorm room while reading the classics. My resident advisor put a stop to the secular music, through, by issuing me a demerit. My love for Paula Cole cost me $40. I learned quickly that “[a]rt is no part of southern life,” as Faulkner said (Introduction, p. 410). I lived on $10 that month.

As time passed, I came to realize I was not the ideal Liberty student. I wanted knowledge about art, music, and literature, a true liberal arts education, an avenue to being a better, worldlier person. After perpetual droning lectures about the sins of “worldliness,” I sought admission to West Texas A&M University. To my surprise, I was accepted. I left Liberty for good in December of that year.

Change “When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.” (Faulkner. The Sound and The Fury)

The first day of classes at West Texas A&M felt good. Few would describe WT as a particularly liberal academic institution, but when compared to Liberty, it felt like U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s. My biology professor talked about evolution and mutation. My English professor, who was the first woman I had seen teach in a university classroom, talked Faulkner. We read Barn Burning, and I saw reflections of my experiences with social class in the South reflected in the text. I was elated to be learning about the complexities of culture. For my term papers, I wrote about Plath, Woolf, Hemingway, and suicide. I was not asked once to consider the biblical morality regarding these prominent figures taking their own lives. I was not required to mention their demon possession. I wanted more, and just as hometowns can be black holes for old habits, I needed something else to keep me going.

I had done a bit of forensics in high school and I decided to ask around about a forensics team on campus. After finding out the location of the university forensics team, I walked the halls of the communication department (a department I did not know to exist) to see if there was an opportunity to audition. I met a dynamic and convivial man named Guy Yates who welcomed me with open arms. Years before, Guy had taught at Caprock high school, the school from which I had graduated. Before I left his office that day, he set me up with a scholarship and a few performance texts.

I quickly learned that the college forensics circuit was nothing like the high school forensics circuit. Everyone was stellar. Each competitor had put in months of hard work into the study and performance of literature to achieve something memorable and beautiful. I did not have much competitive success that first year, but I found a home in Communication Studies that would keep me motivated to work hard in my classes and to continue to study literature.

Guy retired at the end of that semester after a long and successful career in forensics. A new coach, Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, took over the reigns. His style was different than other coaches I’d had. He was hyper-relational, and he encouraged me to select literature that spoke to me, and to my own struggles with identity. Russell introduced me to a whole new body of contemporary literature, a library of social and cultural voices that would transform my identity through performance. Russell asked me questions about my relationship to texts that I was forced to contemplate over several years. I still contemplate some of these questions today. I was suddenly thinking about sociocultural issues in ways that I had not previously considered. My interest was peaked, and I found a niche for a poor kid from the panhandle of Texas to develop that liberal arts consciousness that I was so desperately seeking.

My most meaningful performances were not always my most successful, and Russell reminded me that this was natural. I was to respect the artistic growth involved in the process and the performance and let the ranks fall as they may. Being quite competitive, I found my groove. The successes over the first year under Russell’s leadership kept me engaged in the activity. One performance that sticks with me is my work with Tony Carbone’s non-linear surrealist text, The End of the Beltline. Carbone’s piece of short fiction was my first encounter with contemporary postmodern literature. This time, I had a community of people around me who were interested in literary criticism and performance. So, I studied that text until I knew it inside and out. Through the performance of Carbone’s text, I found relationships, connections, and meanings within surrealism. I had new equipment for living. I learned to appreciate alternative literary modes and found performance to be an apt tool for analysis, criticism, and alternative sense-making strategies. Amidst the radical ideological shifts that I was experiencing in my academic and personal life, my world desperately needed some sense making.

Perhaps the most influential performance I had the pleasure to be involved with, one that had a long-lasting impact, emerged out of a bit of a gray area. The team was competing at a tournament in Austin, Texas. Russell approached my duo partner, Brandon, and I, and said, “We need to see a movie. Like, now.” The theatre was just a block away, so we found time between rounds to find out what Russell had deemed so urgent.

The film was called Twin Falls, Idaho. It was about the relationship between conjoined twins named Blake and Francis Falls. From the write up we read in a local Austin publication on the way to the theatre, we assumed it had all of the elements of a good duo performance. The drama seemed fairly high, and there appeared to be humor, tension, and maybe even a tragic death. In the theatre, Russell, Brandon, and I watched intently. With the fear of the Federal Bureau of Investigation imprisoning us for life, we transcribed the film, for educational purposes, of course. We divided up responsibility for each character’s lines, and through our carefully planned strategy, we managed to walk out with the script. The year was 1999, a time before scripts and screenplays were available online. What’s more, we knew we had one shot because independent films did not find their way to the panhandle of Texas.

As we soon found out, there were significant limitations to the script. It was episodic, the dialogue was sparse, and the performance of this film would be extremely difficult to pull off without a world-class costumer and makeup artist. There was a third character who played a fairly significant role in the script. How do you play conjoined twins on a duo interpretation stage? The unwritten rules said that we weren’t even allowed to touch.

We compared and combined transcription notes on the way home, an exercise in patience to be sure. Finally, we compiled an intelligible script. Brandon and I cut the script, memorized it in a week, and showed it to Russell. He said he loved it. But, he felt something still wasn’t right. “How can we embody the metaphor?” Russell asked. He followed with, “Let’s just use one book.” I said, “Um . . . I don’t think that will fly.” Brandon argued that it would disqualify us. Neither of us was having this one book nonsense.

That is when the brilliance of interpretation, and the limitations of the black book, began to challenge us. During that coaching session, I remembered something Jerry Falwell said during my time at Liberty. He said, the definition of Liberty is “freedom within limits.” I considered how the metaphor was apt if applied to the constraints of ideology. The limitations of the event, the rules (both written and unwritten), allowed us to brainstorm ways of devising creative freedom in our performances in forensics rounds, as well as in our lives.

There was a thoroughly abused binder sitting on the shelf. It probably belonged to a competitor of years past. The metal rings were falling out. Russell grabbed it off the shelf and pulled the rings the rest of the way off. He said, “Here’s your other book. Are you happy now?” We stared at him, confused, and thought, “How are we going to put a script in that book without the rings?” He explained to us that the ring-less book would fit perfectly behind the other, an embodied metaphor for Blake and Francis being fused together at the torso, having to share everything.

So, we stood close together, our bodies touching, and each held the book(s) with our outside hand. In the climax of the performance, where the conjoined twins separate through surgery, the binders came apart, each of us holding our own, an illusion, an embodied metaphor for meaningful interpersonal relationships and connections. Francis dies, and Blake declares, “The story of me is over.” Francis assures the audience, “The sad ending is only because the author stops telling the story. But it still goes on. It's just untold.” The rest, all the way to an AFA national championship, is history. Together, the three of us learned to push boundaries, take chances, and trust each other.

Epilogue “Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...” (Faulkner. The Sound and The Fury)

Following graduation, each of us went our separate ways. A few of us remain close, and each of us remains in the stories we share. Motivated by this notion of storying life with others, I went on to earn a Ph.D. in the study of literature, communication, and performance at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. I am now an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Missouri State University, a university that’s communication department in rooted in the teachings of Virginia Craig and Irene Leslie Coger, two foundational scholars in the study of literature and performance. I still try to push boundaries through research and other critical approaches to scholarship to make the world a more habitable place for students who are lost in understanding their identity in college and university contexts. I offer students connections to literature and theory as equipment for living.

I heard that a competitor from Liberty won an AFA national championship in POI last year. Rumor is, he coached himself and funded his own travel. I wonder if he ever spent time in the library with Faulkner, or any other authors to make it through, to expand his liberal arts consciousness. I like to think so. I like to think literature changed his life

References

Burke, K. (1988). “Literature as equipment for living.” In D. H. Richter (Ed.) The critical tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends, 2nd. (pp. 593-98.) Boston, MA. Bedford Press.

Faulkner, W. (1972). “An introduction for The Sound and the Fury.” The Southern Review, 8, 705-10.

Faulkner, W. (1973). “An introduction for The Sound and the Fury.” Mississippi Quarterly, 26, 410-15.

Faulkner, W. (2015). The sound and the fury. Canada: HarperCollins. (Original work published 1929).

Lowery-Hart R. & Pacheco, Jr., G. (2011). New directions for teaching and learning. 127, 55-68.

Polk. N. (1993). Introduction. In N. Polk (Ed), New Essays on The Sound and the Fury. (pp. 1- 22). Melbourne, USA: Cambridge.

Polish, M. (Director). (2006). Twin falls, Idaho [DVD]. United States: Sony.

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