SOURCE: Hedeen, Paul M. “A Symbolic Center in a Conceptual Country: A Gassian Rubric for The Sound and the Fury.” Modern Fiction Studies 31, no. 4 (winter 1985): 623-43.

In the following essay, Hedeen discusses William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a work of metafiction, and explores the affinities shared between Faulkner and William Gass.

Generally reflecting critical trends, most recent criticism of William Faulkner's fiction shares one general characteristic. It has moved away from reconciling his works with mimetic emphases on character, plot, and theme and has moved toward formalistic analyses that seek to place his works within his modernist aesthetic milieu.¹ Such criticism necessarily concerns itself not with Faulkner the regionalist, a writer primarily concerned with the South, the past, and tentative renderings of psychological realism, but with Faulkner the experimentalist, a true modernist, a writer who sought to subvert technically the conventions of realism and naturalism...