How Faulkner exposes the failure of history

Written by: Elliot (25-U1); Edited by: Steven (25-A4)

Designed by: Samantha (26-U1)

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It was 2025, and I was already tired.

Endlessly, my Internet feed was inundated with conspiracy after conspiracy. Amid the memes and shitposts in my feed, viral videos about the “Great Replacement” were nudged forward by my algorithm. Importing the Third World, the videos said, was turning the West into the Third World. “Debates” on abortion, religion and “the fall of the West” hit millions of views as figures like Charlie Kirk or Steven Crowder shot to Internet stardom on the back of cheap shots at bewildered college students.

And I was not the only one caught in this deluge of delusion. Video essays and news reports covering online radicalisation have exploded in popularity, trying to explain the inflammatory content bombarding our feeds.

The origins of these controversies demand reflection. All of them were founded on ideas of history and past wrongs and grievances. But we live in the Internet Age. Wikipedia alone has millions of articles about thousands of societies and their histories. How could there be so much to learn at our fingertips and so little of it read by those debating contemporary issues influenced by the past? Has history failed us somehow?

To be clear, I do not mean that learning history is futile. It is a valid and rewarding study (even if H2/H3 may make you think otherwise), and the soft skills you develop from it — analytical thinking, media literacy, clarity of thought, economy of writing — are crucial for any field of work. There is only a “failure” of history insofar as we invest faith into the “success” of communities founded upon historical narratives, and said faith then is lost or broken — “failed” — by history’s revealing that it does not fully support the narratives we identify with.

That said, the question remains. Why do we have so much history available for reading, and still invest into fringe theories that rely on distorting history? I did not have to seek academia for the answer. On my desk was a copy of William Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury. It was this novel that produced some insight on the matter for me.

Faulkner is not fun to read. The Sound and the Fury is especially difficult. While its plot is simple — the three brothers in the Compson family, Benjamin, Jason, and Quentin, attempt to make sense of the impact that their promiscuous sister, Candace, left on their lives — Faulkner’s non-linear writing slips between past and present as he wishes, and the various narrative voices only destabilise the narrative authority of any of the brothers. One may lie where one misremembers; another might fabricate recounted events. Yet, as I struggled through this triad of troubled men as they recounted the decline of their family, I recognised in the early 20^th-century South a reflection of our own time: one where history is distorted by our idolisations and failure to engage with it faithfully.

The novel begins from the perspective of Benjamin Compson, a 33-year-old, mentally disabled man living on the decrepit Compson family estate. Benjy (as he is nicknamed) cannot tell past from present, and slips between the two depending on his emotional state. He recalls the past almost objectively; yet he can neither understand its implications nor evaluate what it means.

There is something to be said about how Benjy perceives the past. On one hand, the complex social phenomena of his time — as exemplified by the racism against the Compsons’ black servants, Candace’s sexual awakening, and the slow decline of the Compson family estate — are observable to the reader. Benjy does not understand these fragments’ significance; he reacts viscerally to them at best, and more frequently treats them as background dressing in his environments. Yet we, like Benjy, cannot understand these memories in isolation. They must be rearranged and understood within the context of their broader narrative to become significant; even when his memories are properly arranged, Benjy only provides an incomplete account of Candace’s fall into lust and the Compsons’ decline.

Faulkner famously said (in a different novel) that the past “was not even past”. Benjy is this maxim made manifest; the past, even nigh-objectively, is still decontextualised, fragmented, and has its ultimate meaning lost among the fragments. This fragmentation persists despite Benjy’s wishes to ignore it, intruding into his life as much as history does ours. How many times have our social media pages shown us that the decontextualisation or warping of narratives – the Great Replacement movement’s ignoring of Jim Crow laws and the myriad contemporary policies that restrict the developing world’s progress, the anti-immigration movement’s reduction of African history to “mud huts and spears”, the deliberate misinterpretation of climate temperature graphs over the past three centuries – has revealed our inability to understand history in full? Attempts to understand it reveal the limits of the models, statistical or social, we use to understand it; attempts to harness it for rhetoric quickly descend into fighting fact with fact, and misreading with misreading; and, in doing so, we remain limited in truly using the past to understand the present. Like Benjy, we do not understand the fragments we are seeing.

Perhaps it is personal bias that draws me away from the second-oldest Compson. Jason Compson was not as interesting as his younger brother. To a contemporary audience, he may seem barbaric – racial slurs are his casual slang, and verbal and physical abuse of his elderly mother and niece mere routine – but beneath this bitter exterior, Faulkner concealed a worldview tainted by a failed historical narrative. As I read through Jason’s chapter, I saw revealed a middle child raised on narratives of the Compsons’ success, narratives born from a history of slavery and exploitation. I read his disillusionment with his family’s sacrifice of his future in exchange for a chance at aristocratic prestige (the Compsons sell their last plantation pasture to send their eldest son to Harvard; he commits suicide just a year after enrolling); and I recognised, in Jason’s anger, a phenomenon all too contemporary.

Jason Compson’s abuse of his niece, Ms. Quentin Compson, and their mutual resentment and despondence was too eerily reminiscent of US political debates on involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict: two factions seeking escape from a historical narrative fast losing support – the former, the myth of Southern aristocracy’s ability to survive a modernising South, the latter, Israel’s right to exist and exercise self-determination. Today, when a sense of entitlement can be validated by historical warrants, history is a tool: a call to annex a neighbouring country’s territory can be justified if historical events, arranged into a suitable narrative of liberation, unity, or justice, allow justification. Yet the disillusionment produced by these narratives’ inevitable failure begins a vicious cycle of bloodshed. If Benjy showed me how history could not be reliable in offering us a stable account with which to understand the past, Jason was a manifestation of how, if one believed in this unstable account for too long, and watched it fail, belief could degenerate into violence.

Yet it was the eldest brother that horrified me most. Quentin Compson (not Ms. Quentin; Jason’s niece was named after Quentin Sr.) was not revealing anything about the instability of history, or disillusionment from defunct historical narratives. What was visible was the void that existed when historical beliefs, narratives, and ideas could no longer hold weight, but no alternative presented itself.

Quentin is a complicated narrator, vacillating between measured, lucid prose and dissolution into nigh-incoherent, rambling memories of his past. The eldest Compson had once believed in the narratives of the South: the white man had ultimate authority, virginity was the marker of women’s virtue, and power defined a man’s worth as a patriarchal protector. Above all, these values were timeless and everlasting. It was only after Quentin watched his sister, Candace, lose her virginity at fifteen, his family’s reputation crumble under the scandal of her promiscuity, and his nihilistic father sell the Compsons’ plantation that made him realise that his Southern values were not impervious to time. By the time the Compsons enrolled him into Harvard, Quentin was approaching a horrifying revelation: time was eroding what he believed were objective marks of moral purity.

He would not survive this revelation. Quentin would drown himself by the end of his chapter; yet of all the Compsons, he stuck out most to me. Why was he so obsessed with history? Did he not see the self-destructive nature of his moral absolutism? Why suicide when he could have at least tried to act? Yet it was a reality I was living in. Across the political spectrum, people compare their patchwork understandings of history, remarking how the world had lost some form of moral compass. There is a pervasive need to suggest that, at some point in history, we were more moral or virtuous in our art and culture than we are today. Despondent over the present, we then self-destruct and retreat inward, engaging in circular discourse on race, supremacy, and power. And with the global rise of populist and extremist parties, from the US to Hungary to Japan, we seem more determined to rebuke them as proof of our slipping away from a golden, democratic past than to take action against them. This past is almost always defined in opposition to today – more democracy, more pragmatic economic policy, less violence, less stress. We don’t commit suicide the way Quentin does. We do, however, ignore time like him, and all the urgent calls to activism that time is forcing us to confront. 

For this reason, I saw Quentin as the most damning of the brothers. I can live with a world governed by Benjy’s principle. I am fine that history is impossible to objectively grasp. It is impossible for one person to know an event exactly as it happened decades, even centuries, after the fact. Furthermore, it is impossible to avoid a biased understanding when select portrayals of the event lean the reader more toward one interpretation than others. I could stomach Jason’s disillusionment and its cycles of violence. Watching wars or famines continue without the power to end them is painful, but these conflicts might be solvable with international cooperation and diplomacy. Quentin negates decisive action entirely; action itself is viewed as meaningless and ineffectual. Nostalgia for a golden past corrodes into an obsession with reclaiming it. Longing for the past erases our rootedness in the present. A belief in the moral certainty and eternity of our narratives produces disillusionment once they inevitably reveal their transience.

As I emerged from The Sound and the Fury, the brothers helped me realise a crucial flaw in how we used history. The world was being failed by the faith placed in it. Narratives based on decontextualised fragments of dates and actions, one-sided historical accounts, and discredited physiognomy theories blossomed in the darker parts of the Internet, while disillusioned, angry men and women drifted into extremist ideologies to validate their views on past injustices. History could not guarantee that it could be interpreted; nor could it guarantee that, if interpreted, it would not be co-opted into violent rhetoric.

That is not to say that I am a cynic. I believe we can find a way to navigate this chaos — there are always ways to make measured evaluations of history, always entities that seek to act, not remain paralysed — yet that is only possible if history is widely disregarded as a foundation for doctrine, and embraced as a study for understanding the past. Until we can learn to detach history from ideology — if we can do so at all — The Sound and the Fury will remain just a click away.