On the Catastrophe of Sartre’s Faulknerian Boredom

Abstract:Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1939 assessment of The Sound and the Fury laid the groundwork for subsequent philosophical engagements with Faulkner’s work. Specifically, Sartre’s claim that Yoknapatawpha is suffused with “boredom” because the entire Faulknerian universe remains absorbed in “stories” of “the past,” devoid of any sense of futurity, has become a mainstay of Faulkner Studies. This essay challenges the Sartrean and Faulknerian orthodoxy of reading novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as catastrophically backward-facing. By showing that Sartre’s dismissal of Faulkner’s “metaphysics” rests on Sartre’s own misappropriation of Heidegger, this essay argues that the Faulknerian “boredom” Sartre fastidiously rejects in fact constitutes the “engagement” and “action” Sartre privileges. Furthermore, Faulkner identifies Sartre’s “boredom” as a fundamental structure of narration. Against critics who seek a structure of timelessness in Faulkner, this essay defends a Faulknerian temporality of ruin, catastrophe, and boredom within narration and survival.