Modernist Consciousness in Eliot’s Waste Land and Faulkner’s Sound and Fury
The early twentieth century underwent fundamental transformations in literature as modernist writers deconstructed the novel to find new ways to represent modernist consciousness. Indeed, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury are exemplary expressions of modernist literature, with significant theoretical insights into modernist consciousness through different analytical methods and cultural perspectives. While Eliot constructs a panoramic poetic vision incorporating multiple cultural paradigms to diagnose Western cultural crisis, Faulkner explores modernist consciousness through an intensive analysis of Southern familial decline. Both works testify to modernism’s capacity to capture the psychological and social complexities of modernist consciousness within their innovative techniques of form and content.
In The Waste Land, Eliot constructs a comprehensive critique of modern culture through the painstaking orchestration of fragments and voices. His now-significant beginning, “April is the cruellest month,” immediately establishes the undermining of traditional poetic structures that will be manifested in The Waste Land. This work moves through multiple perspectives — from Marie’s remembrance of childhood sledging to the typist’s mechanical evening routine — creating a complex tapestry of modernist consciousness. Through the juxtaposition of these voices, Eliot elucidates the post-World War I cultural crisis wherein “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” functions simultaneously as a formal principle and as a thematic statement on modernist consciousness.
Faulkner engages with modernist concerns in The Sound and the Fury primarily through the methodological focus on the decline of the Compson family. Here he employs his revolutionary method of stream-of-consciousness, especially in Benjy’s section, where temporal movement between past and present serves as a means of interrogating how minds consider time and memory. Indeed, in The Sound and the Fury, the significant line “clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” encapsulates the work’s complex treatment of temporality and consciousness.
The works differ significantly in their treatment of identity and tradition. The text emerges as cosmopolitan in Eliot’s hands, synthesizing Sanskrit, classical mythology, and Wagner’s operas — primarily reflecting both the richness and the fragmentation of cultural paradigms. Faulkner remains entirely in the particular and interrogates how Southern identity confronts modernist consciousness through Quentin’s overwhelming concern with family honour and through Benjy’s pure yet incomprehensible perspective on change.
Philosophically, both works engage with the crisis of meaning in modernist consciousness. Eliot’s response is to seek pattern and significance through mythological parallels, as exemplified by the Fisher King motif underlying the structure of The Waste Land. Faulkner demonstrates how traditional systems of meaning collapse under the pressures of modernist consciousness: the Compson family cannot adapt to transformed circumstances. Both works present modernist concerns with new ways of making sense of a transformed world.
The psychological paradigm is particularly evident in the treatment of time and memory in both works. Eliot’s poetic technique in lines such as “mixing memory and desire” reflects the fluidity of consciousness between past and present. Similarly, Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness passages elucidate how individual minds construct reality through memory, as demonstrated in Quentin’s section, where past trauma systematically interrupts present experiences.
Both works are reflective of American identity, though from distinct analytical perspectives. Eliot addresses the American experience from an international perspective, situating it within the broader Western cultural crisis. Faulkner examines the American South, interrogating how regional identity confronts historical change through the microcosm of the Compson family. In these works, one discerns how modernist literature engages with American identity in the era of societal reconfiguration. These works are fundamentally concerned with the powers of language to represent modernist consciousness. Eliot’s multilingual configurations and Faulkner’s experimental syntax supersede conventional literary expression. Their innovative techniques reflect modernism’s central project: to find new forms adequate to modernist consciousness.
