With this flu I have been fortunate enough to catch, I feel a little bit like Addie Burden in her final days. I am certain I am not, however, dying, and I hope to return to school tomorrow and get back to the class' discussion.
In the meantime, some brief thoughts on Faulkner before I write a longer more focused post.
I have always been a little leery of Faulkner. Firstly, my father is something of a Faulkner fan, and as a general rule, nerdy children of academic types tend to make it a point to dislike or simply avoid their parents literary tastes. Or at least I did. I also, in my slight bias as a Northerner, never had any problems passing over Faulkner's stories of the American South in favor of narratives with settings and characters I found more familiar. I now see that I have been missing out. Thank you Mr. Mitchell for putting Faulkner on the reading list and giving me the reason to override my slight aversions and read As I Lay Dying.
I generally reserve these words for time-tested favorite authors. Nabokov. Joyce. But now Faulkner can be added to my personal list of "men who write like gods". His prose is... delicious. His metaphors are creative and alive without ever feeling forced or ridiculous. When you think about it As I Lay Dying told any other way would be the hum-drum story of a dumb or crazy failure of a Mississippi farmer and his overabundance of poorly-raised offspring dealing with the unfortunate death of his ailing wife. It would not be the literary masterpiece Faulkner created.
I find myself especially drawn to Darl--as a character perhaps, but specifically as a narrator, because it is in his words that the novel's prose becomes most interesting. Darl's descriptions are the perfect mixture of unschooled Mississippi farm boy and seemingly-claivoyant prophet. I don't know. I get really excited about reading Darl's chapters, and much of that excitement is just for the language he uses.
Anyway, I hope everyone else is enjoying Faulkner as much as I am. More posts of a more organized nature later.
I agree with your view of Faulkner as a very good writer. I, however, am not as drawn to _As I lay Dying_ as you are. The book is ok, although I am not fond of most of the characters. Anse is a bumbling, lazy fool, Addie is downright weird, Vardaman is an annoying little sh*t, and Jewel is a selfish brat. I don't have any qualms with the other characters; I share many of Cash's interests and like reading Darl's chapters, trying to understand where he gets his information from. Yet, the biggest reason why I'm partial to the book is the way Faulkner is able to incorporate all of the various characters. They each have their individual traits and none seem archetypal or fake.
ReplyDeleteI really like the way the Faulkner uses Darl to tell the stories of things that happened before the present time in As I lay Dying. Darl is probably the most objective of the characters that narrate and I can always trust him to say something weird but interesting. A lot of times his words are confusing, especially when he is talking about his existence and how is isnt is but was - or something along those lines. He is pretty fun to try to interpret.
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