The derivation of Faulkner's title The Sound and the Fury from Macbeth's late speech containing its words is a vivid example of the inescapable polyglossia of literary language and of its illimitable horizons of reference, and is the most crucial first step in a writing career powerfully guided by intertextuality. Yet the derivation has been rather incompletely explored. Possibly the sense is that Faulkner's cribbing of Macbeth's words--like his use elsewhere of the Bible, and of texts by Shakespeare, Conrad, Keats, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Hardy, Poe, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, Hemingway, Melville, Suetonius, Vergil, Homer, Faulkner himself, and so on--has a local significance for his novel (where, let us say, the noise of one character and the fury of another constitute the terms of the title) which might not bear the weight of much critical scrutiny. Or, given Barthes' crucial extension of intertext beyond the merely influential and borrowed to the nameless and unidentifiable, The Sound and the Fury seems to proclaim its Shakespearean source too loudly to be truly informed by it (Barthes, 1971). Faulkner, after all, recalled Macbeth's musing on life as "a tale/ Told by an idiot" upon completing what would become the first section of his novel, in which he had written just that, a fact which seems to make the title little more than a fortuitous memory of Macbeth's words.¹ But the speech and its play have, I think, a far more complex relationship with The Sound and the Fury than one of local allusion, which helps control the novel's composition, design its discourse, and inaugurate its self-reflexivity. Furthermore, the title's undisguised usurpation of Macbeth hints at the intertextuality that The Sound and the Fury examines, not as an occasion for anxiety, but for observance and celebration.² With the words' gesture of indebtedness Faulkner remarks upon the struggle in all writing between intertextuality and originality, and welcomes rather than struggles with a precursor indispensible to his novel's creation. Thus they title a text that becomes Faulkner's initiation into writerhood.  
      Faulkner recalled the words from Macbeth's late soliloquy when they contained a rather unique appropriateness for him. They swayed his burgeoning text away from a short story in progress (possibly "Twilight"³ toward a novel in which twilight was but one image in a network of tropes, and not only a mimetic image but one that released the future novel into the many temporal complexities that "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," in soliloquized company with "all our yesterdays," might generate. The canonical status of their play also legitimized the "idiot" character that had lingered in his imagination at least since 1925, three years before the composition of The Sound and the Fury.⁴ And they supplied Faulkner with possibilities for further sections within his developing text: in "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ and then is heard no more" is the faint outline of Quentin, whose shadow is his nemesis, and whose suicide imposes eternal silence. Macbeth's lament for his dead wife, which inaugurates his speech, would resonate in Quentin's lament for Caddy, whose pregnancy and marriage symbolize her death to him; his "why couldn't it have been me who was unvirgin?" is, through this detour, Macbeth's "She should have died hereafter." And life's temporary strutting and fretting is similarly Quentin's, clothed as he is on his last day in a suit and hat which distinguish him from his peers, lending him an air of seniorial presumption that his roomate Shreve cautions him against.  
      In Faulkner's expansion of his text beyond Quentin's section we might glimpse Macbeth's vision of "the way to dusty death" lingering in the portrayal of Jason, also strutting, fretting, witnessing "the opposed forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that would be irrevocable" (p. 307) in a climate of "venomous particles, like dust" (p. 265). And the external narration of the fourth and final section would thrust into relief the impossibly myopic perspectives of the first three, and detect beneath Macbeth's "idiot" the original Greek idios, self or own, and thus Shakespeare's investigation of the illusion of indivisible selfhood that would find such a rich restatement in the novel, as I shall discuss. Each of the Compson brothers, incapable of liberation from his own visions of things, is an "idiot" in this sense, and due to his inability to maneuver sense data into a personal interpretation of it Benjamin is perhaps the character to whom the term, by the novel's cessation, paradoxically least applies.⁵ Thus the multiple subtleties of Shakespeare's "idiot" would enumerate themselves for Faulkner as he composed after the first section, and help guide the direction his text would take.⁶ In these ways (and there are many other such local connections I have missed) Faulkner's reading of Macbeth's speech reoriented and reinterpreted his own developing text.  
      This was a process seemingly catalyzed by the soliloquy itself, but it was also one in which his reading of the whole play is visible, perhaps most clearly in The Sound and the Fury's second section, composed immediately following the decisions of a title and the extension of the short story into a novel. For example, from the beginning of Quentin's final day, confirmed by the bell's incessant tolling and by the pricking of his thumb in his resolve to kill himself, he is in Macbeth's world of "the future in the instant" (I.iii.56), in which all action is foretold and ordained.⁷ "I go, and it is done. The bell invites me." (II.i.62) murmurs Macbeth as he leaves to kill Duncan and fulfill the "weyward sisters'" early prophecy. The same could be said for Quentin, whose suicide, intimately related to his own sister's waywardness, is settled upon earlier while conversing with his father, and whose victim is thus no external impediment but himself.  
      Like Quentin, Macbeth is driven by a vision of his own weakness into acts incommensurate with his previously stable vision of himself, and his murder of Duncan, which answers his wife's "Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valor/ As thou art in desire?" (I.vii. 39-41) is rewritten in Quentin's uncharacteristically brutal act whose impetus is his relentless self-disparagement. Spurred by his revisionistic history of failed encounters with Dalton Ames, his sister, and the whole Southern male code, Quentin is asking himself Lady Macbeth's question of her husband when he sees Banquo's ghost--"Are you a man?"--to which Macbeth's "Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that/ Which might appal the devil" (III.iv.58-60) is one answer, and Quentin's daring and appalling suicide an inversion of it. Macbeth's tortured charge to the ghostly Banquo to leave -- "Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mock'ry, hence!"--is followed by a return of his masculinity: "Why so, being gone,/ I am a man again." Quentin desires to escape his shadow too, a constant reminder of virginity and failure, and he asserts his masculinity with every conquering of it, "trampling upon its bones into the concrete with hard heels" and "into the dust."  
      Thus his picnic with Gerald Bland, Shreve, Mrs. Bland, Miss Daingerfield and Miss Holmes becomes a sort of mock banquet, in which Macbeth's vision of Banquo's ghost is reenacted by a vision of Dalton Ames usurping the present in Quentin's imagination, each vision so real to its projector that it permanently disrupts the festivity of their respective feasts. Macbeth, in regaining his manhood, goes off to bed with his wife; Quentin, further emasculated by the pounding he receives from Gerald Bland, removes himself from the scene, and from the whole endeavour to disentangle his mixture of sexual and platonic emotions for his sister. This inability of his imagination to release him from Caddy is in part a consequence of his need for a mother that the neurasthenic Mrs. Compson never provides him, and by extension the South's inability to relinquish its hold on an ante-bellum past. Mother, South, love and death are symbolically constellated in his section, a revision of Ross' sombre meditation on his divided Scotland near the end of Macbeth as a "poor country,/ Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot/ Be called our mother but our grave . . ." (IV.iii.164-66).  
      I trace these allusive hints of Macbeth in The Sound and the Fury tentatively, for they remain "evasive and insubstantial as soon as one attempts to grasp them" as Culler rewords Barthes (Culler, 102), and more suggestive of the play's influence on the novel's composition than proof of it. Yet the number of correspondences between The Sound and the Fury and the play summoned by the title is too large to be entirely coincidental. They imply that Faulkner read there of an engagement with the "parallel between crisis in the social formation and the subject in crisis" as Christine Belsey describes the play's focus--the inevitable fracture of the self that ensues when one "destroys his own capacity to participate meaningfully in the symbolic order of language and culture." (Belsey, pp. 89-90) Quentin, whose "single state of man" is so shaken "that function/ Is smothered in surmise and nothing is/ But what is not" (I.v.139-42) is perhaps the most vivid example of this self-erasure, dressed as he is in the "borrowed robes" (I.iii.108) of his seniors. Here, if his Quentin is a reliable trace, Faulkner employs Shakespeare's play very productively for his own writing purposes, moving beneath allusion to make The Sound and the Fury a reading of Macbeth that transforms the relationship between writer and text, originality and acknowledgement.  

      Macbeth consciously deceives himself about his own nature for the first three acts, ostensibly questioning the existence of the murderous dagger he will use against Duncan, for instance--"Is this a dagger which I see before me,/ The handle toward my hand?" (II.i. 34-5)--in a verbal attempt to disclaim his own desire for the deed. Through this self-fictionalizing or "knowing self-deception" (Scott, p. 168), so frequently evident in his soliloquies, Macbeth can simultaneously achieve his goal and cancel his feelings of guilt. Macbeth becomes entranced by the power of language to enforce this convenient abyss and, in moments such as the banquet scene where he repeatedly invokes Banquo's ghost while terrified of it, he is "testing and fearing the power of his own words." (Scott, p. 169) In his failed attempt to convince Mr. Compson that Dalton Ames is not the father of Caddy's child, Quentin recalls from the beginning of his section how he engaged in a similar experiment: "I said I have committed incest, Father I said." (p. 77)⁸ His repeated recollections of the knowing lie (it occurs eight times at least in the second section) unearth a fascination with the reality it purports to announce.  
      This attraction, which Quentin presents to himself merely as a convenient fabrication that will isolate him and Caddy together from unstoppable time⁹, is in fact an unconscious desire of his. One passage in particular reveals this. He and Caddy engage in a self-directed drama of murder-suicide after Quentin has obviously lied about his virginity:  
     I held the point of the knife at her throat . . .  
     it wont take but a second Ill try not to hurt  
     all right  
     will you close your eyes  
     no like this youll have to push it harder  
     touch your hand to it  
     but she didnt move her eyes were wide open looking past my head at the sky . . .  
     push it are you going to  
     do you want me to  
     yes push it  
     touch your hand to it . . .  
     her muscles gathered I sat up  
     its my knife I dropped it (92-3)  
     Here, in a passage composed immediately after the first section (and, we might speculate, immediately after the choice of title¹⁰), is Faulkner's remixture of Macbeth's highly sexual relationship with his wife and the revelation of his self-deceit. It also recombines Macbeth's murder of Duncan, a deed which "Tongue nor heart/ cannot conceive nor name" (II.iii.60-61) (and which has sexual overtones itself, not just marital but incestuous¹¹), into a new cauldron of murder, suicide and incest. It does not, however, culminate in a replay of his masculinity, but in Quentin's loss of erection ("its my knife I dropped it"), a crucial difference finally played out in the disparity between Macbeth's "o'erleaping" his own timidity to another plane of himself, and Quentin's leaping off the bridge. Macbeth, after all, moves from believing "'twere best not know myself" (II.ii.73) to an admission of his fractured nature; Quentin's self-fictionalizing is never so fully purged, and even suicide is an option filled with misinterpretation and false expectation.  
      Within this unresolvable self-dispersal Quentin is incapable of locating order in the world he has inherited, and so the South and its codes become unbearably plural, his sister's promiscuity remains unintelligible, and life itself eventually comes to signify nothing. But the more important consequence of the speech for The Sound and the Fury is inextricable from its meaning for Macbeth and its writer, and displays how Faulkner's interpretation of a text such as that one far outpaced the characteristic Shakespearean readings (or any others) of his time. Faulkner in the 1920's (had he cared to look) would have encountered critical treatments of the play that admitted no threat to the self's autonomy. A.C. Bradley, for instance, wrote of Macbeth in 1905: "The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalize, to conceive Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal . . . " (Bradley, p. 278; my italics) The kind of poststructuralist reading of Macbeth that participates in the making of The Sound and the Fury, in which selfhood, characterization, referentiality and significance are fractured by language, does not appear in criticism until the 1970's, when the well-wrought urn is crumbling or, as Faulkner put it (referring to one in Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, not Brooks's), worn "slowly away with kissing it." (Faulkner, 1973, p. 415) What Faulkner very likely read in Macbeth that reconstituted his own text is the fracture of the self's "single state" into a plethora of warring and emergent selves, and along with that the dispersal of stable meaning for any character and, even more, of the abandonment of stable "character" representation itself. Macbeth's "tomorrow" soliloquy can, for a reader like Faulkner, o'erleap any comfortable mimesis into a tenacious self-reflexivity, in which a tale told by an idiot signifies not so much the confusions of life as they present themselves to a (s)hellshocked king, or even "what he has become" (Kantak, pp. 42-56), as the inevitable result of signification itself, of which the play Macbeth is yet another construct.  
      The signified or subject in this case, both of Scotland and of language, is Macbeth, who disappears beneath the equivocations of which his own discourse is so relentlessly capable, to become a strutting, fretting vocal chord with names. From his first appearance, Macbeth stands in awe of "himself" and the language that both names and emanates from him. "I know I am Thane of Glamis,/ But how of Cawdor?" he asks incredulously in Act I (iii.71-2), and before his initial appearance on stage he is referred to by at least three different names, one a traitor's;¹² both passages are early indications that Shakespeare's duty is not to homogeneity of characterization, but to witnessing its self-interrogation and persecution by language. Macbeth's late soliloquy, while potentially his summation of self-recognition, is thus equally a confirmation of what the play generates from its inception--Shakespeare's understanding of the self-negating drama that all language writes. Macbeth does not simply comment on how life has devolved into being "a poor player" in a now illogical world, but more thoroughly on how "he" has "always" been (and must always be) merely a reconstructed idiot/self upon the stage in a Shakespearean globe/theatre who, when the brief candles die down, is heard no more by the departing audience.¹³  
      Faulkner, who began his literary career with aspirations to be a poet and later transmutes the desire into his poetic fiction, is recognizing the foregrounding of language as a critical activity in Macbeth, in which any pretense to the unequivocal and transcendent signified is erased beneath the deceptive brew of words that remixes and creates anew. His title for the text that will go on to demonstrate this is taken from the very point in Macbeth where the play's self-reflexive dimension is consolidated, where character and mimetic notions of significance are cancelled by the overwhelming mediations of language. That Faulkner would in a letter compare writing The Sound and the Fury to that of "a poem almost" suggests that he too recognized the privileging of language that the novel celebrates.  

      These readings of Macbeth suggest that Faulkner's interpretation of certain of its dimensions may have influenced his reconsititution of character, identity, and language in The Sound and the Fury. In much of the play, Shakespeare vibrates these dimensions to the point of instability, to which the soliloquy responds. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury no doubt inherits that instability from other texts as well, such as Conrad's and Dostoevsky's for instance, but the title's acknowledgement of the intertextual resonance, and the novel's layers of Macbeth allusions and reminiscences ultimately point to its greater importance as "the general discursive space" (Culler, p. 106) that makes his evolving text intelligible to him.  
      I want to leave behind Macbeth's varied influences for the moment, and magnify the residue of one of them--its mediation of language--for the novel commences with the act, and fact, of mediated perception. "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting" is Benjamin's opening recollection, and it announces the mediations of fence, flowers, language, and the uninterpretive consciousness of Benjamin himself. "curling flower spaces" and "fence" (manual script and language's barrier to the signified?) are mediations that completely circumscribe Benjamin's terrain of enclosed Compson property, which he believes separate him from Caddy, the elusive object of his desire. In this early scene that object is resurrected, and simultaneously lost, through the language the golfers use--"Here caddie"--an ironic moment that inaugurates the "economy of losses" (Matthews, p. 17) of the novel, for the homonym both invokes Caddy and displays her absence, the fact that she is, contrary to the golfer's command, not "here." It is nothing that is signified in this opening replay of so many of Benjamin's days, for golf is nothing to him, and the Caddy who is signified for him is absent.  
      This reading merely substitutes a linguistic object of representation for an external one, but it is a substitution that releases the novel's self-reflexivity. If this perspective on the novel's first page seems strained, or merely fashionable, consider how so much of the opening section requests this type of reading through its own frequent indication of text production. The letter sent to Mrs. Patterson and intercepted by her husband when Benjamin is the carrier is of course suggestive. Luster's failed quest for a golf ball, to trade for a quarter, to buy a ticket, to gain entry into the local show, seems an entrapment in an endless string of deferrals and exchanges.¹⁴ (By the novel's final section it has culminated in another mimicking of disrupted text production: Luster's frustrated attempts to reproduce music he heard played on a saw at the show.) This infinite abyss of signifiers is paralleled by the structure of recollection that Faulkner so carefully and defiantly arranges in Benjamin's narrative¹⁵, in which an external stimulus generates a memory for Benjamin that itself becomes another generator, and that one another, in a self-replicating composition of remembrances, looping around but never fully encountering their signified, Caddy.  
      When the one chance to break the mediating circle in which he is ensnared presents itself, Benjamin walks through the gate and "tries to say." That gesture leads not to liberation into some exterior reality that contains his sister, but merely to an encounter with her pale imitation -- the terrified Burgess girl. A restoration of his entrapped state ensues from this, violently intensified by his castration: "I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They're gone. You keep on like this, and we aint going to have you no more birthday" (p. 73). Benjamin's reflection displays a poorer version of himself, a reproduction as it were capable of no reproduction, in which his ideal self-image is distorted into grotesque difference and, along with Luster's comically ominous "no more birthday," self-negation. His castration is also emblematic of the negation of significance, if by significant we mean something that transfers meaning beyond itself, for he (like the Compson name) will have no legacy.  
      These reflections of self-consciousness and writerly insecurity that exist in the first section of the novel reveal Faulkner tentatively questioning the direction in which he wants his experimental fiction to proceed; a text like The Sound and the Fury, radical for its time, does not emerge unburdened by an anxious examination of its own medium of language and the writer who must employ it, a process which in the case of this novel becomes an indispensible principle. For Faulkner not only designs a section which invokes the deconstructive field of infinite displacement, incurable difference, and deferral. He also witnesses in his first character the act of writing, surrounded as Benjamin is by mediations and barriers, mute, peering through language to the unpossessable reality he seeks to recover, an ineffectual bearer of communication, sterile, lacking a legacy, "trying to say." The writerly desire for "cornice and facade [to] flow[] smoothly once more from left to right" (321) is so powerful in him, in fact, that the novel's resolution is designated by its achievement.¹⁶  
      Thus, though Quentin is usually considered as The Sound and the Fury's unique example of the artist figure to the exclusion of the other characters, the judgment is based on a stereotypical view of the artistic sensibility, and on yet another mimetic reading that bends the text to the expectations of a more conventional readership to which Faulkner was deliberately oblivious during the composition of this novel. Quentin displays the situation of the writer, but no more than his brothers do. The more crucial dimension of the novel is the manner in which it reflects upon the semiotic, deconstructive, and intertextual nature of writing itself, entirely outside the arena of the personality of the one who happens to be writing--something attested to, in fact, by the tremendously varied personalities of the brothers, each of whom is a kind of writer (and frequently reader, too) for Faulkner. If Quentin's section contains the most writerly of the characters in the novel, it is not because of his personality but because the section is most consumed by the question of incest, a narrative reflection of the incestuous nature of intertextuality, where the glance of the text in question turns away from an extra-textual subject to penetrate (or be penetrated by) another text.  
      Quentin is a character conscious of his own fictivity, attempting to author a text into which he can be comfortably written. His problem is that the world he lives in does not supply the kind of text he desires, structured with Gothic stereotypes, not Macbethian pluralities. He is a secondary participant in a world he has gleaned from texts of undisturbed symmetry, with which he hopes to rewrite the reality of his own life, a temporary manifestation of his father's assertion that "all tragedy is second-hand" (p. 116). He attempts impossibly to remake himself in the mode of a Lochinvar or a Lothario, and to reconstitute the asymmetrical world to accomodate his new self. Here he undertakes Macbeth's willing suspension of self-knowledge, by using language to sustain an image of himself that remains unacknowledged by anyone else.  
      Quentin's day, like a writer's text, is the site of clamoring and mutually interfering voices, the "bellow upon bellow" that Benjy produces at the close of the final section. His father's skepticism vies with the words of Revelation, John Keble's "Holy Matrimony" with Caddy's wedding announcement, the Song of Solomon with the words of Saint Francis of Asissi, black superstition with Christian belief, mythological fertility rites with images of condoms and aborted foetuses. Quentin is a construct of these polyphonic and incessant texts, and fails in the impossible attempt to write a new text that will silence them, a conventionally symmetrical text that undoes the asymmetry of time, of which he will be sole author, in which "things will just finish themselves."  
      The dominant voice whose influence he spurns is his father's. Quentin attempts to reverse its influence by convincing himself, and Caddy, that Mr. Compson is a child of his, and not the reverse--"I invented him created I him" (p. 122)¹⁷--and so become his own father, self-authored, unimperilled by any prior writer. Another contribution to Quentin's and Caddy's misfortune is made by Dalton Ames, whom Quentin likewise attempts to unwrite at his primal source: "If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived" (p. 80). His trace will ironically survive, interwoven with Quentin's name, in Caddy's daughter, another furious and illimitable intertext whose tracing of progenitors her grandmother seeks to disrupt by forbidding any mention of Caddy's name (already disassembled on the novel's first page). Indeed, Quentin is so overpowered by previous texts and voices that, like Benjamin, he has no possibility of innocent voice in his section, only mute recollections of many others', and thus single authorship of any ideal text becomes an increasingly imperilled, and ultimately suicidal, enterprise. The final act of his section, his use of Shreve's brush, is the last in a series of now inescapable borrowings, and it serves merely to smooth the hat that is likewise a conceit, that tops the vessel of polyphonic chaos that is named Quentin.  
      Jason is a "counterpoint" (Faulkner's term, Meriwether and Millgate, p. 147) to Quentin in innumerable ways: as a "character" he lacks Quentin's sensitivity and recognition of hypocrisy, and he employs the very language and assumptions that Quentin abhors. Too, he is untroubled by the asymmetry of time that unsettles his elder brother: his opening words reveal both a misogynist and a man for whom time conveniently runs in both directions simultaneously: "Once a bitch always a bitch . . . ." Like Macbeth, he is in the thrall of his own words, and continually points out not only his opinion, but the textuality of it, its status as utterance, and his authorship of it. ." . . what I say" completes this vicious epimone, a verbal reflex which is repeated throughout his section, and which suggests he is constantly in the act of overhearing himself, like an audience does a character's soliloquy or, as in Macbeth's case, like a character overhears himself.  
      If Faulkner sympathizes with (though, through this novel, personally subverts) Quentin's anxiety of influence, he creates in Jason the writer of a text for whom such anxiety is unfathomable, or at least an inadmissable weakness. Jason's contempt for any prior authority is implicit in every remark and recollection: he happily scorns the teachings of Christ, the experience of his father, the advice of his New York stockbrokers, the insights of his customers and boss, the wisdom of Job¹⁸, the combined authorship of his monthly fortune, and ultimately his entire heritage: "Blood, I says, governors and generals. It's a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we'd all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies." (p. 230) All this is within a discourse whose narrative, more plainly than those of his brothers, circles upon itself at its close to imply the insignificance of all the words in between: "Like I say once a bitch always a bitch" (158).  
      Jason's hypocrisy, which creates its own self-reflexive turn--"If there's one thing gets under my skin, it's a damn hypocrite" (pp. 228-9)--is the only possible stance of a writer deluded into accepting sole authorship of his text. He accuses everyone but himself of his hardships, whereas he is more truly the author of his own misfortune. Authorship, for Jason, is compromised by intertexts, and so he conceals them at every turn, hiding Caddy's letter to her daughter in a drawer, Caddy's cheques from his mother, Caddy's daughter from Caddy, the daughter's money from everyone (nicely staged, under the floorboards). He resolves "never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand" and he "never write[s] them at all" (117). Success is a liberation from intertexts and particularly their female authors, into originary writing which, like the pursued niece who is the sign of Quentin and Caddy, constantly eludes him, for his discourse is so clearly derived from verbal conventions and attitudes which he unconsciously parrots. "Do you think the farmer gets anything out of it except a red neck and a hump in his back?" (p. 191) he asks in apparent sympathy one moment for the farmer in the field who suffers a "red neck" from the sun each day; later he uses the identical words, formed by social convention, to unknowingly reveal the hollowness of that sentiment: ." . . Earl started yelling for me up front, so I . . . went and waited on the damn redneck." (p. 194) While seeking originality his words are inescapably designed by intertextuality. In an ironic twist, Jason's truly self-authored texts are the forged cheques he has burned, and his usurpation of the author/father role is acknowledged only by the prostitute Lorraine: "Dear daddy wish you were here. No good parties when daddys out of town I miss my sweet daddy" (p. 193). When Jason recognises "the opposed forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that would be irrevocable" in the fourth section, he does not simply recognize his "fate," but also his status as a poor player within a text that is larger than he, and previously authored, over which he has no control.  
      The fourth section of The Sound and the Fury supplies a provisional close to the furious attempts at original authorship which until then defeat Quentin and delude Jason into a feeling of authorial superiority. The two middle sections exhibited possible responses of the writer to the problem of influence, and when Faulkner attempts after their composition "to get completely out of the book" (Faulkner, 1973, p. 415) he is relinquishing delusions of authorial mastery for a Dilsey-like acceptance of any "authored" text as unoriginal, informed by and partaking of texts previous to it.  
      Here Faulkner's voice is traversed by an anonymous and conventional omniscient perspective, creating an astounding opening that, in a neat paradox, masterfully orchestrates the authorial absence. The description of Dilsey by this voice is a revelation of intertext. She is a dramatic creation who, making an entrance against a moving wall of grey light upon a stage smoothed "from the soles of bare feet in generations," is composed of "layer upon layer" of borrowed robes. Her flesh is created by the confluence of prior forces into which, and from which, she emerges. Her very substance partakes of others, creating a blend that, like oil not fully congealed, resists the fiction of completed selfhood: "The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of her cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil." Her "myriad" self is an historical remnant, a "ruin" bearing the indelible traces of its prior states. It is a "tissue[d]" combination of the child's astonished disappointment and the fatalism of an elder, a characterization that announces itself as a construction, and as an inversion of the natural to the point where it gives "the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh": "She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts . . ."¹⁹  
      The Easter sermon Dilsey attends is a study in the archeology of texts; it is a commentary by a black minister that is initially mediated by a white voice foreign to him and them, then by a black voice with a sermonly inflection which "succubus like" consumes its apparent author. It is the product of layers of previously heard commentaries, imprimatured with a confusion of Biblical episodes²⁰ delivered by a visitor to a two dimensional church, "a painted church, . . . the whole scene . . . as flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth."(p. 292) The detailed imagery of the sermon invokes the history of the Compsons as Dilsey has known it, making that history a narrative text for her, and she a participant in and reader of it: "I seed the beginnin, en now I sees de endin." The sources which create the intertext of the sermon--Luke, Matthew, Revelation, John, Romans, Corinthians--are thus recombined to write the Compson narrative of which Faulkner has already composed different intertextual versions in the three previous sections. Dilsey's epiphany is generated by her attention to texts, and by the ability to reconstitute them into a new one, a kind of auto-intertext that partakes of the novel's first three not quite congealed accounts of Compson life. In The Sound and the Fury, no more visionary moment is described than this one of the sermon and its brief aftermath. Although Faulkner is not explicit about it, it seems as if the motoring Jason, the character who would be author, is the one who spins his wheels in dusty insignificance on the margin of this intertextual scene, in pursuit of his niece, the elusive sign he wants singlehandedly to right: "A car passed along the road outside, laboring in the sand, died away." (p. 295)  

      As Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, his previous novel Flags in the Dust (to be begrudgingly reshaped and retitled Sartoris) was facing its own dusty death in publishing offices, as yet unaccepted. The book of poetry The Marble Faun with which he began his published career had received muted praise at best, and his first two novels, Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, were lauded in a potentially dangerous way as anticipating greatness but not embracing it. Sherwood Anderson's famous early encomium, which temporarily carried so much weight, nowhere included a testament to Faulkner's artistic ability, but spoke of him as "a man who will write the kind of novels that will sell." The remark strikes one as slightly less than benevolent, and the fact that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Dreiser, Dos Passos and others were "selling" while Faulkner, whose strength was ostensibly in that area, was not, doubtless troubled his confidence in himself as a writer. In fact, considering the very different type of fiction that these, the contemporary masters or masters-to-be, were writing, Faulkner no doubt had a very indistinct image of himself as a writer in the mid-twenties²¹, and the composition of The Sound and the Fury was the occasion on which he consolidated and secured that writerly self-image. The novel's expression of the inevitable nature of the self-reflexive text, the acceptance of intertextuality, the deconstruction of the signifier into an eternal system of displacement, and its conception of characters attempting to reclaim masterful authorship and witnessing instead, like Macbeth, their own fictional status, all point to how Faulkner was consciously reimagining himself as a writer.  
      Faulkner's reading of Macbeth was very possibly a crucial act in this process of self-creation, for it assisted each of these departures. The relationship between the act of reading and writing, the occasion of that intertextual moment which the novel would go on to describe so efficiently, was central to the composition of The Sound and the Fury and to the creation of all his subsequent novels. In a telling reversal, Faulkner would write in each of the two 1933 introductions to the novel of how its creation taught him "how to read," of how a text's birth is an assimilation of earlier texts "in a series of delayed repercussions like summer thunder." Even more revealing is his remark in a letter immediately after the novel's completion that it is "the damndest book I ever read." (Blotner, 1977, p. 211) It suggests his relationship to The Sound and the Fury was always that of innocent reader, not masterful author (that the customary division no longer even held), and that the novel's creation was such a "turning point" (Faulkner, 1973, p. 413) in the direction of his writing that it would provide the intertextual axis for his future novels, which would read it as an ur-text for writing to assimilate their own identities. When in 1933 he ruminates on the fate of art in the South, he uses imagery from The Sound and the Fury, discovering through it how "there is actually something to which the shabby term Art not only can, but must, be applied." In recalling it, that is, he sees how directly it confronts the process of writing and the possibility of signifying nothing, and how its magnetic Jefferson show is a lucid figure for that engagement:  
     But in the South art, to become visible at all, must become a ceremony, a spectacle; something between a gypsy encampment and a church bazaar given by a handful of alien mummers who must waste themselves in protest and active self-defense until there is nothing left with which to speak--a single week, say, of furious endeavor for a show to be held on Friday night and then struck and vanished, leaving only a paint-stiffened smock or a worn out typewriter ribbon in the corner  
and perhaps a small bill for cheesecloth in the hands of an astonished and bewildered tradesman. (Faulkner, 1973, p. 411)  
     The Sound and the Fury's show in Jefferson is resurrected in this passage, and hints of Jason and his thwarted search for Miss Quentin pervade it too, becoming explicit when "protest and active self-defense" so accurately recalls Jason's encounter with the "furious little old man" in section four, and when the "worn out typewriter ribbon" joins the process of writing with a parody of Jason's "invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock" (p. 313)²². It is an example of Faulkner's reading of The Sound and the Fury as an intertextual source for his later commentaries on literature's helpless proximity to insignificance.  
      This sense of The Sound and the Fury as a text which originates his artistic concerns and influences the novels he would later write underlies much of the nostalgia for it that permeates the two introductions. It became for him the elusive referent that Caddy is for her brothers, to which he would look back longingly and attempt unsuccessfully to rewrite for the remainder of his life: his image of its irretrievable birth replays with precision Quentin's image of irrevocable purity, "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandmother's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers." (Faulkner, 1972, p. 709).²³ It initiated Faulkner into writerhood more truly than the composition of any of the previous novels or poems had; it rose above them like a ruin or a landmark through its exploitation of the problem of originality into the solution of intertextuality. Prior to its composition, he had self-consciously laboured to write the novel "which will make my name for me as a writer" (Blotner, ed. 1977, p. 209) as he prematurely termed Flags in the Dust. Only by abandoning any hope of achieving that text, by "shut[ting] a door between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists" (Faulkner, 1972, p. 710), could he truly begin to write it: when the writing substituted Mr. Compson's insight (inherited from his father) that "victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools." ([Sound], p.) for the wish for unique mastery, for "the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion" (Bloom, 1976, p. 2).  
      The very text which announced and celebrated the intertextual foundation of its writing, then, both permitted the subsequent direction of his career and refused recapture; the composition of each novel after it would attempt unsuccessfully to duplicate the "ecstasy, that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the yet unmarred sheet beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing, waiting for release." (Faulkner, 1972, p.  707) The career that followed, in other words, obeys the reiterative agenda within The Sound and the Fury itself, that of writing "the same story . . . and each time . . . fail[ing]" (Meriwether and Millgate, p. 147). The sermonly rhetoric in the introductions strives to monumentalize the failure (and Faulkner would cringe at it later²⁴), but it also most sincerely shows how the relatively brief period of The Sound and the Fury's composition became, in retrospect, the moment in which he locates the genesis of his writing, and eclipses the critics' requests for the more conventional fiction of the time. There, at the site of imperilled significance, where achievement is exchanged for observance, anxiety of influence for emboldened indebtedness, he asked, as Lawrence Lipking phrases that initiatory point in a poet's career, "whether his work exists, whether it amounts to anything more than the sum of its parts, and whether it will continue to exist" (Lipking, p. ix). The alternative, invoked in Macbeth's soliloquy, was the possibility of future tales told by an idiot, unheard, creeping slowly toward their final syllable, signifying nothing.  

NOTES  
1. In Session 10 of the class conferences at the University of Virginia, Faulkner stated that the title came from the first section, which was Benjy. "I thought the story was told in Benjy's section, and the title came there. So it--in that sense it does apply to Benjy rather than to anybody else, though the more I had to work on the book, the more elastic the title became, until it covered the whole family." (Gwynn and Blotner, p. 87) Faulkner recalls his text shifting the appropriateness of the quotation, it seems, whereas I am arguing essentially the opposite, that his text accumulates responses to Macbeth's soliloquy, and to the entire play, in ways vital to its creation.  

2. Faulkner, in a 1956 interview with Jean Stein Vanden Heuvel, spoke of how the writer "will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done." (Meriwether and Millgate, p. 239) The identifiable literary sources for The Sound and the Fury are probably innumerable. See, for instance, Gresset and Polk.  

3. In 1955 Faulkner claimed that The Sound and the Fury "began as a short story, it was a short story without plot, of some children being sent away from the house during the grandmother's funeral." (Meriwether and Millgate, p. 146) Blotner (1974), argues that Faulkner refers here to his short story "Twilight" (pp. 566-567). Morrison speculates in a more detailed manner as to the genealogy of the novel's creation, and argues that the unpublished "Never Done No Weeping When You Wanted To Laugh" (later to become "That Evening Sun") is an equally qualified candidate. (pp. 43-45)  

4. In 1925 he published a short episode in the Times-Picayune entitled "The Kingdom of God" in which an idiot is described in terms very similar to, and in a few instances identical to, those of Benjamin in the third and fourth sections of The Sound and the Fury. See also Fredrickson, who uncovers the influence of Wordsworth's 1798 ballad "The Idiot Boy."  

5. It is inappropriate for other, less abstract reasons as well. For a cautionary argument against the validity of the term "idiot" in relation to Benjamin see McLaughlin, who argues quite convincingly that Benjamin's characteristics are autistic. In any case, the term "idiot" never appears in the novel; readers probably assume its relevance at least in part because of the Macbeth source, and also because Faulkner uses the term in reference to Benjamin in interviews.  

6. So far did Faulkner move beyond the initial concept of "idiot" in Benjamin's section that he later expressed concern over "whether he is believable as I created him. He was a prologue like the gravedigger in the Elizabethan dramas. He serves his purpose and is gone." (my italics) (Meriwether and Millgate, p. 245) Faulkner's interpretation is rather cavalier, as they often were concerning his own work, for Benjamin's role is crucial in the various gestures of cessation, transcendence, circularity, apocalypse, resolution, authority, enlightenment and doom that the last section supplies. For a discussion of similar provisionalities in traditional structure in Macbeth, see Calderwood, pp. x, 35-36, and 41.  

7. Quentin pricks his thumb on his broken watch near the beginning of the second section: "There was a red smear on the dial. When I saw it my thumb began to smart." (p. 49)  

8. The words recall the unequivocal equivocations that unsettle the pretense to verbal authority in Macbeth: if Quentin has committed incest, he has sinned. If he has not, he has lied. See Scott's pursuit of this concept in Macbeth, particularly pp. 160-164.  

9. As Quentin muses early in his section, "If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames" (p. 79, Faulkner's italics).  

10. In the manuscript stage this excerpt was part of a six-page passage which originally opened Quentin's section and then was placed in two other positions before finally residing where it now does, on p. 152 of the novel. See Morrison, pp. 46-49 for a complete account of its original placement and subsequent repositionings.  

11. As a deed without a name, the act is both murder and coitus. See Calderwood, pp. 89-90, for a discussion of how Macbeth's murder of Duncan might be seen not only as sexual but as incestuous. Calderwood points to arguments by readers such as Rabkin, pp. 105ff, that Duncan is a father figure whose murder is thus not only regicide but parricide. Calderwood offers the Freudian extension of this, that Lady Macbeth becomes a mother figure whom Macbeth incestuously possesses, thus "confirming his initiation from childhood into manliness." (Calderwood, p. 55)  

12. In I.ii the Captain records how "brave Macbeth . . . deserves that name,/ Disdaining Fortune." The name referred to, however, is neatly unspecified; it could be "brave" (and thus, given the outcome of the play, rather double), or "Macbeth" (but then simply "deserved" by dramatist's prerogative), or "disdaining Fortune" (but then the Captain, while correct, knows not whereof he speaks). "Disdaining," so close to dis-thaning, has the truest ring to me, in fact. And when Macbeth inherits the title "Thane of Cawdor," he inherits the title of "that most disloyal traitor" (I.ii.52), a statement whose truth suggests a greater stability in a name than in the character beneath it.  

13. Evans (pp. 133-4) considers this metadramatic dimension when he writes of "the 'double' quality of the theatrical signifier itself and the fact that the actor is not just what Macbeth has become but what he has been all along." Calderwood offers a discussion of the metadramatic in Macbeth too (cf. pp. 65-70), but in my opinion the best analysis is Willbern's, where he argues that Shakespeare gives the concept of "nothing" a positive treatment in his plays: "Shakespeare's theatre is finally only a momentary enactment of sight and sound and symbol, surrounded by silence and a bare stage, at the last returning to where it began, in emptiness and absence. Yet while it is there, in the playspace of creative nothingness, it is wondrous . . . " (p. 259). Central to every discussion of this dimension of Shakespeare's drama is the soliloquy Faulkner was himself so entranced with. Of course, Hamlet and the Romances contain these metadramatic dimensions too: Hamlet's "memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe" (I.v.96-7) opens such self-reflexivity early, and his later "a man's life's no more than to say 'one'" (V.ii.74) predicts the fictivity of singular self foregrounded in Macbeth's connection between "idiot," actor, and "life." And there are certainly many similarities between Hamlet and Quentin, for instance, that would suggest his play as a powerful influence on the composition of The Sound and the Fury as well.  

14. It is an intriguing symmetry that at the center of the geography (Jefferson) of a text whose intertextual center is Macbeth, is a "show" or, considering the scattering of authorial voice by the polyphony of Compson discourses, a kind of Bakhtinian carnival.  

15. Ben Wasson had edited parts of the proofs of The Sound and the Fury, and sent them to Faulkner in the summer of 1929. Wasson had tried to simplify the typography of Benjamin's section by adding spaces between Benjamin's recollections and removing some italics. Faulkner culminated his very defiant response to Wasson's changes by writing "dont make any more additions to the script, bud. I know you mean well, but so do I." (Blotner, 1977, p. 45)  

16. This sense of the loss inherent in script, and thus of script's potential for insignificance, is incorporated in the equation of writing with the movement from left to right not just of "cornice" but of "facade" in the novel's last sentence. Faulkner's recollections of The Sound and the Fury's composition frequently include mention of its reiterative or auto-intertextual growth, and of how the failure of each attempt to tell the same story occasioned a subsequent (and "failed") section. See Meriwether and Millgate, p. 147 ("I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed"), and p. 244, and the Mississippi Quarterly introduction.  

17. This reverie may be Quentin's parodic yearning for Macbeth's recognition that "none of woman born shall harm" him. It also recalls the parricidal overtones of Macbeth's murder of Duncan.  

18. Job, who works behind Earl's store, puts his criticism of Jason in the rhetoric of a parable: "you's too smart for me. Aint a man in dis town kin keep up wid you fer smartness. You fools a man what so smart he cant even keep up wid hisself . . . Dat's Mr Jason Compson." (p. 250)  

19. Faulkner, in The Sound and the Fury, describes Benjamin with similar adjectives: ." . . a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too . . . " (p. 274) This self that resists coherence and thus "idiocy" (paradoxically in Benjamin's case) is reflected in a positive fashion by their not being judgmental, egotistical or proud. Jason, who desires originality, is ironically announced as a replication, "a bartender in caricature." (p. 279)  

20. Shegog speaks of Jesus being asked to "lif up yo tree en walk!"; however, Jesus is never asked this in the Gospels. He is asked, however, to "Take up thy bed and walk" in Matthew 9 and 27. See Matthews, who argues that this "neatly substitutes tree for bed, an ironic tailoring of the statement for Caddy, for whom trees have been a bed." (p. 109)  

21. See Karl, pp. 225, 233 and 234.  

22. It also nicely predicts Barthes' familiar description of how reading encounters the foregrounding of language and the recession of significance in any text, where "structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but [where] there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning." (Barthes, 1974, p. 147)  

23. Quentin recalls this when speaking with Caddy at the branch immediately prior to the aborted murder-suicide incident: "do you remember the day damuddy died when you sat down in the water in your drawers" (p. 151). The neat confluence of muddy and damuddy generates the fateful "symbology of the soiled drawers" that Faulkner claims in the Mississippi Quarterly introduction he did not "realize then."  

24. In a 1946 letter to Robert Linscott, who had just located the introduction and sent it to him, Faulkner described it as "smug false sentimental windy shit." (Blotner, 1977, p. 235)