The Sound and the Fury on film

It's odd. Out of all the William Faulkner novels you would consider to take to the screen, The Sound and the Fury might well be bottom of the list. Strangely, I have fancifully fantasised about my own  adaptation. As it happens, James Franco's adaptation is already in production. He beat me to it.

How can a book you have to read twice to understand make a good film? Literary novels, on the whole, generally make poor films. Literary conceits/devices are difficult to emulate. It is usually the pulpier books which improve on the screen. It is only when you get an auteur who is equally brilliant on his own right - think of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg and Vittorio de Sica - that the film can make its source justice. I am not too convinced Franco - incidentally, I hardly knew anything about him before - has the pedigree to see this through.

It would seem that the only natural thing to do would be a linear recreation. Apparently, the 1959 adaptation did just that. The plight of the decadent Compson family, who find their fortune and emincence turned on its head, is a universal theme. It shares parallels with Orson Welles' masterful The Magnificent Ambersons. Whilst the book's technique is literary, the themes can easily be transplanted into the big screen.

Not to mention, the book has startling images that leave an indelible dent on the mind of the reader. The book germinated with a mental image Faulkner had of an innocent dread-locked girl dangling from a tree, with her brothers gazing from below. He called it an image of 'purity.' From there developed the conflicted, even incestual, relationship all three Compson brothers have with their sister. Similarly, there are images of Benjy screaming which would make stellar cinematic moments. When he clings to a fence, inarticulately beseeching his sister to return. The ending of the book, where he screams with all his force has the potential to become on the most searing endings of the history of cinema. They are very loaded moments which are not that difficult to dramatise. They hark back to Shakespeare's phrase, the novel's namesake, 'Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'.

The opening chapter, narrated by the mentally impaired Benjy, has a cinematic quality of a montage reminiscent of Terrence Malick. Yet one of the most distinctive aspects of the chapter is that it is about Benjy's defamiliarising and idiosyncratic language. There are a number of oxymorons and tautologies which characterise his unusual perceptual process. For instance, he repeatedly describes the smell of colours. The use of a voice over would never work, namely because Benjy cannot speak.

The second chapter is the most difficult of all. Again, Faulkner uses language very in a very specific way, this time recreating a mental breakdown through disintegrating syntax. Most importantly, the chapter is pretty much a treatise on the nature of metaphysical time and the decline of social patriarchies. There also a series of ruminations about his family. You cannot dramatise any of that. If he were to discuss these themes with his peer Shreve, it would feel stagy. There are a sequence of images of Quentin with an errant child which would work well cinematically, but placed after a delirous Malick-like montage it would turn the film into a cluttered mess. I think that this chapter would make a good film in its own right if it were treated in an austere way. We could follow Quentin introspecting, travelling on a train, the recurrence of ticking clocks, etc.

The third chapter I guess is less problematic than the two chapters above.  Following Jason in his perambulations would work well, I guess. Yet, once again, the chapter is very subjective. Jason's unlikeable traits are as much evinced by his razor-sharp language as they are by his actions.

The fourth chapter is the most cinematic. I already described how well the ending would well. One of the most pivotal roles of this chapter is that it ties all everything together. Everything coheres in the end and you return to the preceding chapters until everything makes sense. A film would struggle to pull that off because most of the ambiguities and asperities the reader encounters beforehand are to do with Faulkner's opaque language. The ending in the film would not resolve everything, it would just make matters more confusing.

Yet I would certainly attend a screening of this whenever it comes out. Faulkner is my favourite writer and it would be intriguing to see these neurotic, brooding characters on screen.

Music and literature

Music and literature, in many ways, seem antithetical. Whereas music is a non-representational form, literature is. Literature connotes concrete meanings. Music, as Stravinsky controversially once said, cannot really express anything other than itself. It is pure form. If a pop/rock combo claim that their latest album is a social critique, that has much more to do with the lyric sheet than with the musical arrangements.

I think that music trumps everything in the end. When literature approaches its greatness it is usually when it is like music. My favourite novels are those which are ambiguous, open-ended and self-negating (in the sense that there are elements which do not fit and which contradict each other). The feelings it elicits are close to music: what does it mean? In the case of modern/post-modern literature, you can analyse the text and offer an interpretation. The text itself has no single meaning. Music can be analysed in terms of its use of harmony, metre, motifs etc., but semantically you cannot impute a meaning onto it.

When you listen to music, you do experience those kind of mystical moments.   In many ways, science is also driven by a desire to unravel the mysterious. Quantum mechanics is especially exciting in that its field of study keeps growing and growing. Even its experts scarcely know half as much as about it as we lay-men. Yet, whatever desires lead to its practice, science classifies and codifies. The ultimate aim is to solve the mysteries which make us scratch our heads. What can music ultimately say? Not as much as literature and certainly not as much as science. When I listen to J. S. Bach pieces I feel an overwhelming urge to grab hold of something and I am unsure what it is exactly. Literature should try to elicit those reactions.

Words in many ways are inadequate. Samuel Beckett wrote 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.' Words often try to ascribe meaning to a world without meaning. There is no God; everything is one big mistake. If this is the case, who should care about that big teeming novel I'm keen to write? Who should care about the writing by the masters - Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, etc. - when their insights are ultimately the attempt to make sense out of this meaningless wasteland called Earth?

Sadly, literature has not borrowed from music all that much. There are not that many novels about the lives of composers. The masterpiece on the subject is Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, based on the life of Arnold Schoenberg. This is the consummate novel about music in that it captures the ineffable, psychological and spiritual torments associated with it. Anthony Burgess wrote a novel - I haven't read it - about the structure of Beethoven's Eroica symphony in which he mimics the sounds of the music through language and onomatopoeia.

Before I got into writing, my desire was to become a composer. Sadly, time dragged on and on until it became too late. Composing is a lot of hard work. Also, I do not really have the kind of mathematical aptitude required. I turned to writing. Just as J. G. Ballard includes frustrated pilots because flying was his adolescent desire, my stories are crowded with frustrated composers. If I have never been able to write music, at least I have been able to pay tribute to it in some way. I have written stories about Alfred Schnitkke (my only published piece; available to purchase on the navbar to the right), Carlo Gesualdo (titled 'Desperate Lives'; available on the navbar to the right) and Olivier Messiaen.