Briony the Author + Faulkner

So, I read back over my S+F paper right after I read over my Atonement paper, and got some interesting ideas. A similarity in the writing of Briony and Faulkner? Whether or not my ideas are at all valid, they're at least worth exploring in a harmless blog post.

Atonement's metafiction, and Briony's a made up character; she's not actually writing a book in real life (that is to say, she doesn't exist). But whether it's McEwan giving his thoughts on writing through Briony or just speculating on the creation of a novel in general through his fiction, some of Briony's ideas about writing are really legit.

The main idea that I'm referring to here is the idea that Briony is moving beyond plots and beyond characters in her writing, instead to "thought, perception, sensation." I quote my essay: "Briony became interested in 'the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll' and strove to capture the essence of 'human nature itself.'"

The parallel to Faulkner that I saw is evidenced by a Wikipedia quote: The last line [of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, "Signifying nothing"] is, perhaps, the most meaningful; Faulkner later says in his speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that people must write about things that come from the heart, or "universal truths".

So, they're both moving beyond the traditional beginning-middle-end novel. They could possible believe that these novels "signify nothing," that drawing attention away from the plot allows for a more sohpisticated, developed, commentary on life. Faulkner surely obscures his plot in Sound and Fury as much as possible. Briony's Atonement is told in a much more traditional manner, but, like SOund and Fury, raises larger questions about the reliability of the narrators and about "thought, perception, and sensation."

To stretch this comparison as far as possible, we could recall the comparisons of Briony's works to those of Virginia Woolf. I'm not too familiar with Woolf's works, but...Wikipedia is: "In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology." To me, this sounds more and more like Faulkner. There is no better example than The Sound and the Fury of experimentation with stream-of-consciousness. And, we can't deny that Faulkner's writing places plot second to his explorations with the underlying psychological and emotional motives of characters. Variations of fractured narrative and chronology? I think so.

Just my thoughts.