William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound by Ahmed Honeini (review)

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• William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound by Ahmed Honeini
• Lorie Watkins Massey

William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini. Routledge, 2022. 194 pp. $144 cloth, $41.59 paper, $41.59 eBook.

In this first book-length study of William Faulkner and mortality, Ahmed Honeini builds upon and challenges a long critical legacy that has treated Faulkner's writing as a way of denying mortality, of saying "no" to death. Honeini, through careful readings of six key works including The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; "A Rose for Emily"; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses, examines "how Faulkner's characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence." He argues, "The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to 'say Yes to death'" (i).

In distinguishing between Faulkner's personal and his characters' narrative perceptions on the subject of mortality, Honeini grounds his reading firmly in the texts that his study considers. The first three chapters focus on some of Faulkner's most well-known characters. Chapter 1 details how Quentin Compson embraces the idea of suicide in his section of The Sound and the Fury while never uttering the word "suicide" itself. Rather than focusing on a single reason for Quentin's actions, Honeini determines that a number of "contradictory … interconnected" reasons lead to his suicide, including the "exterior voice" of his father (21–22). Quentin, Honeini suggests, transcends language as he "ends his chapter with his decision made and with nothing left to say. The very fact of his death proves that he was able to successfully alter the definition of 'suicide' to suit his own intentions" (42).

Chapter 2 considers Addie Bundren's marginalized, posthumous narrative in As I Lay Dying in which she describes her entire life as a preparation for death. That death simultaneously rejects her identity as a Bundren and constitutes a "revenge" upon her family (52). Chapter 3 turns to another female character as it takes on the story that introduces most readers to Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily." Presented as a conflict between the old and new south, Miss Emily, of course, represents the old antebellum society that is already effectively "dead" by the time of the unnamed narrator's telling of her story. While some critics have suggested that the "rose" of the title represents the story itself, Faulkner's [End Page 272] fictional tribute to that bygone era, Honeini posits a different interpretation: "Given the extent to which the narrator attempts to discredit and destroy Emily in his posthumous account of her life, his offering of a rose to her in the title is as barbed and ironic a gesture as any utterance he issues throughout the story" (102–03).

Moving away from the focus on individual characters, chapter 4 juxtaposes two of Faulkner's murders (and murderers) by reading Percy Grimm's killing of Joe Christmas against Thomas Sutpen's death at the hands of Wash Jones. Before dying, Christmas kills Joanna Burden, and her "death stands, at one and the same time, as Joe's capitulation to the racist myths that he has long been subjected to and, moreover, a gesture through which he calls his life of dehumanisation and social estrangement to an end." Conversely, Wash Jones "rushes into oblivion with his scythe raised in defiance and rage, 'saying Yes to death'" after Sutpen fails to honor his "obligations" to himself and his granddaughter, Milly (108, 109). Honeini illustrates how both men embrace death after losing all reason for living, albeit in very different circumstances. Finally, chapter 5 turns to matters more theoretical in a consideration of how the final phase of Faulkner's career establishes "the distance which Faulkner places between himself as a white, southern writer, his white readership, and the African Americans" in "Pantaloon in Black" and "Go Down, Moses" who remain "unable to express their mourning and grief in their own words" (5).

This volume combines "two themes within Faulkner's work—death and literary voice" (14), and in doing so, it offers a new approach to reading both...