Modernist Gothic

Light in August 

by William Faulkner

“a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”   ― William Faulkner, Light in August

Light in August, written by William Faulkner in 1932, is a difficult yet important piece of Southern Gothic and modernist literature. Faulkner's writing is characterized by a disjointed structure and an intricate prose style, which address weighty subjects like racism, identity, and the lasting effects of the American South.

Through the character of Joe Christmas, a man of ambiguous racial heritage who is shunned because of what others believe to be his Black ancestry, the book examines the terrible effects of racism. It also delves into themes of identity, the struggle between fate and free will, religious fanaticism, and the past's persistent influence on the present. A key point is made by contrasting Lena Grove's unwavering, nearly transcendent journey for her child's father with Joe Christmas's tragic journey.

Faulkner's writing is frequently characterized as dense and challenging, with lengthy, convoluted sentences and a non-linear narrative. Using a technique known as stream-of-consciousness, he alternates between the viewpoints of various characters and time periods. The reader must gradually piece together the story's mosaic of events, which are told in multiple voices and through flashbacks. If you succeed in this process, the rewards from reading and rereading Faulkner are immense.


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Top Ten Books for 2023

 Annual Top Ten Favorites

 Top Ten Favorite Books of 2023

Since January 1, 2023, these books have been my favorites.  They span a wide range of reading genres, from non-fiction to fiction, from lengthy to short works, and from the Classics to modern literary fiction.  The inclusion of Samuel Beckett's Trilogy is one example of an exception, and the pairing of Cormac McCarthy's two last novels because they enhanced one another is another. If I were to enlarge my list, I could have included more novels from this year, which was a really rich reading year.  Even though the other works were excellent, these ten will be with me for a long time; in fact, I reread the Faulkner and Ellison volumes. 

The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. I read these together as one book in the final months of the year and they stand out as the most powerful novels I have read in a long time. They have joined the other classics on my top ten books of all time. 

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

Landscape: Memory by Matthew Stadler

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Passenger / Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

All Down Darkness Wide by  Sean Hewitt

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

The City of God by Augustine of Hippo

The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Reading William Faulkner

                        Signposts for Understanding 

                                                 Absalom, Absalom!

                        by Willam Faulkner

“What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?" 'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”   ― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

How can we understand the message of Absalom, Absalom!, if there is one? I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's dictum that "the process of understanding is clearly, and perhaps primarily, also a process of self-understanding."(Arendt, p 310) Reading this novel requires such a process on the part of the reader that adds to the inward aspect an emphasis on close attention to detail and to the incarnate nature of the prose. I would like to suggest a some signposts that were apparent to me as I read this text; thus follows comments on a few passages and themes that contribute to the meaning and power of Absalom, Absalom!. 

While the narrative seems out of joint from the beginning, one encounters a story revealed through discussions by characters who are, for the most part, looking back through time and memory to events that continue to resonate in their lives. This process is one that provides only partial and prejudiced information. Yet the memories will remain with them till their death or, in the case of Shreve and Quentin, into their being in a cold dark room at Harvard.

The novel begins in the dark on a "hot weary dead September afternoon", with Quentin Compson visiting Miss Rosa Coldfield. The darkness from the opening pages, perhaps suggestive of a lack of clarity or mist that blurs the story, pervades the chapters of the novel; thus we find Miss Rosa, as imagined by Quentin on the opening page of the fourth chapter, "waiting in one of the dark airless rooms in the little grim house's impregnable solitude."(p 70)  Even in the opening of chapter six we find darkness combined with death as Quentin and his roommate Shreve at Harvard receive a letter from Quentin's father that infects the room with "dead summer twilight---the wistaria . . .attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across this strange iron New England snow."(p 141)

Faulkner crafts the novel with magnificent prose that recalls mythology and history as material for the tales that encompass the modern narrators' lives. One example of  this mythology can be seen in the naming of Thomas Sutpen's daughter, Clytemnestra, followed by this telling passage:  "I have always liked to believe he intended to name her Cassandra, prompted by some pure dramatic economy not only to beget but to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster."(p 48)  But Faulkner also bent language lower, toward the soil, until it'd lost any pretense of plot and was on the verge of incoherence. He would twist language until it encompassed the agony and sadness of is―-the unique moment exploding in its defenseless exposure, flashing incandescently before vanishing into the nothingness of was.

The novel's "current time" begins with Quentin's visit to Miss Rosa in September 1909 and concludes with Quentin and Shreve repeating the Sutpen story in their Harvard dorm room (January 1910). The novel's "past time" covers the rise and fall of Sutpen, his family, and his plantation in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi (June, 1833 – February, 1884), as well as key events in Sutpen's upbringing. 

Yet these times are mixed together in the telling, and as seems to be suggested in the actuality of the lives of the participants. The best description of the process of the characters' lives (and perhaps our own) is provided in Chapter Four:  "You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others are all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter . . ." (pp 100-101)

The “loom” can be seen in one of the key relationships in the novel, that of  Quentin Compson and Shrevlin “Shreve” McCannon. We can enter their story, Chapters 6-9, via the connection with the dark to which we are introduced on the first page of the novel. For the opening paragraph of Chapter Six (referred to above) highlights the light as seen in the “snow on Shreve's overcoat” and “his ungloved blond square hand red and raw with cold,”.(p 141)  This light and the contrast with the dark leads us toward the closeness of Shreve and Quentin. This closeness is brought home with references to them as “twins” and “brothers” (pp 236-7) that share a “closeness” (p 288). I suggest that this mirrors the closeness of the other pair of “brothers”, Henry and Bon.(p 237) As with all such aspects of this complex narrative there are references to the relationship of Shreve and Quentin that separate them that are as great as the distance between Alberta and Mississippi.(p 236) It is not surprising, but just as complicated to fathom the meaning of  “love” as they talked - for their twin identities yielded  to their sharing with each other, “since neither of them had been thinking about anything else;”.(p 253) The lives of these two “brothers” are both as close and as far apart as can be imagined, yet it takes their intertwined existences to bring the novel to a climax.

One of the most important realizations I experienced in this reading of the novel was best described by another great American novelist, Wallace Stegner, who wrote:

"This novel . . . is in one respect the most realistic thng Faulkner has done. It  reconstructs historical materials as any individual in reality has to reconstruct them---piece-meal, eked out with surmise and guess, the characters ghostly shades  except in brief isolated passages. As in life, we are confronted by a story whose answers even the narrator does not know, whose characters he (and we with him) guesses at and speculates upon, but does not attempt to explain fully."・(Stegner, 1936)

I think that this approach along with the magnificent if sometimes ornate prose and deep psychological acuity demonstrated by both characters and settings combines to produce a powerful novel that successfully captures a time and culture for its readers. Ultimately, it is up to each individual reader to look for signposts and decide for themself what level of understanding they have attained.

_________________________________________________________

Arendt, Hannah, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)”, in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954. Schocken Books, New York, 1994.

Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! Vintage Books, New York, 1990.

Stegner, Wallace E., New Technique in Novel Introduced・ Salt Lake City Tribune, November 29, 1936, p. 13-D

Ripples of Memory

Absalom, Absalom! 

by William Faulkner

“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm”  ― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!



Memory. That is remembering the past, your family, the culture of family and place. That is in and of the essence of this memorable novel. We find it in the wisteria:

"Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity's myriad components? That is the substance of remembering---sense, sight, and smell" (p 115)

This is a story of a man, Thomas Sutpen, and other men and women whose lives formed the history of a place and a time--a sometimes dynasty, as told by several narrators including Miss Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson (whom you may remember from The Sound and the Fury).
The memory of the events surrounding the ferociousness of Thomas Sutpen is told through fabulous stories, conjecture, discussions, and arguments. It encompasses the history of generations, the strength of women to survive, and the impact of slavery on their way of being.

Told with the poetic beauty of Faulkner's magnificent prose this is a novel to be read and reread; savored as you meditate on the meaning of these people and events and how they resemble those you may remember from Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. Above all it is about Faulkner's idea of the South and that of his characters, especially Quentin, the young Harvard student who proclaims:

"'I don't hate it,' he said. I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!" (p 303)

Sartoris Family Stories

The Unvanquished 

by William Faulkner

“A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen——” “Are not worth anything?” “No. Not anything.—Listen.”   ― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished




While The Unvanquished began as a collection of short stories that had been published elsewhere, there is enough continuity among the stories for the whole to stand reasonably as a novel, even though the vignettes can be read separately. Perhaps the best story was the final one, An Odor of Verbena, that Faulkner wrote specifically for this novel.

The Civil War is "present time" although the narrator, young Bayard Sartoris, is recalling events that happened many years earlier. His story begins as Colonel Sartoris comes home for a day to warn his family that Yankee soldiers are nearby and to help build a stock pen to hide his animals from the Yankees. A few days later, a Yankee soldier rides onto Sartoris land. The colonel’s twelve-year-old son Bayard and his companion Ringo, a slave on the plantation, shoot at the soldier. The boys hide under Granny’s skirts when more soldiers come to search the property for them. Granny denies that any children live on the property, and a colonel orders the rest of the men off the land while eyeing Granny’s skirts. The stories all feature the relationship of Bayard and Ringo, while Granny and Drusilla are also important characters.

Later, advised by Colonel Sartoris, Granny leaves for Memphis because of the dangers of the war. Joby, the Colonel’s servant, drives a wagon carrying Granny, Ringo, Bayard, and a trunk filled with silver that was buried in the yard for safekeeping. During the journey, Yankee soldiers steal their mules and Bayard and Ringo chase them unsuccessfully on a “borrowed” horse. Colonel Sartoris finds the boys and takes them home, capturing a Yankee camp on the way. Joby and Granny also make it back home with the help of “borrowed” horses, and the trunk containing the silver is again buried in the yard. Yankee soldiers come to capture Colonel Sartoris. Granny, Ringo, and Bayard drive six days to Hawkhurst, Alabama, to recover their trunk, their mules, and the runaway slaves. On the journey, they pass hundreds of former slaves who are following the Yankee troops to freedom. At Hawkhurst, Granny’s niece, Drusilla Hawk, joins the group, and the four of them travel to the river, where Yankee soldiers have built a bridge. After crossing, the soldiers hurry to destroy the bridge so the people who have followed them to freedom will be unable cross. The Sartoris wagon gets pushed into the river, and the four travelers make it to the other side, where the Yankee troops are now stationed.

Granny asks to speak with Colonel Dick. She asks for the return of her mules, her trunk, and Loosh and Philadelphy. Colonel Dick gives Granny a written statement from the commanding general dated August 14, 1863, that validates the return of 10 chests, 110 mules, and 110 former slaves who are following the troops. The document allows them to pass safely through any Yankee troops they might encounter and also to petition them for food during the journey home.  The story continues with episodes featuring Granny and Drusilla. The differences between the traditions of the Sartorises and other established families and entrepreneurs like Ab Snopes (the Snopes family is explored in detail in the three novels known as The Snopes Trilogy) are highlighted. These and the previous stories also emphasize the tension between the cultures of the established Southerners and marauders, many of whom were Yankees.

About eight years later, Bayard is in his third year studying law in Oxford, Mississippi. Ringo comes to him to report that John Sartoris has been killed by his rival, Ben Redmond. On the forty-mile ride home, Bayard reflects on the last few years: his father’s marriage to Drusilla and the code of violence to which they adhere, his father’s railroad venture with Redmond, their run against each other for political office, his father’s humiliating taunting of Redmond, and his father’s recent decision to turn against killing and meet Redmond unarmed. Bayard knows Drusilla and the men in Jefferson will expect him to avenge his father’s death. Bayard  realizes that killing is not a satisfactory solution. Determined neither to kill again nor to be a coward, he goes to Jefferson the next day to meet Redmond unarmed. Redmond shoots twice, intentionally missing Bayard, and leaves town. Bayard returns home and finds that Drusilla has gone to live with her brother but has left behind a sprig of verbena for him.

The Unvanquished provides a view of the Civil War and some of its consequences from the perspective of young Bayard and his extended family. It is a serious assessment of the Southern legend, and a declaration of independence from the past. The characters are deftly portrayed and the stories well-told.

Friends unto Death

Last Orders 
by Graham Swift

“Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat.”   ― Graham Swift

Today is the birth anniversary of Graham Swift who was born in 1949.  This is his Booker Prize-winning novel from 1996.  Some have noted similarities between it and  Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but that does not detract from its quality which has been evident in Swift's writing since his earlier success with Waterland (a novel that was short-listed for the Booker).  While I found it a bit slow at first, it eventually evolved into a captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request--namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. None could be better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies--insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war.

The narrative start is developed with an economy that presents (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth with a minimum of melodrama. The group is uncomfortable at first as evidenced by weak and self- conscious jocular remarks when they meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader gradually learns why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does--or so he thinks. As you might expect there are stories shared with topics like tales of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms. There is even a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling sea waves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Graham Swift is able to avoid artificiality by listening closely to these lives and presenting realistic voices that share stories of humanity with the proverbial ring of truth.

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Two by O'Hara

John O'Hara was born on this day in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1905. He went on to lead a very successful career in journalism. However, O'Hara's real passion was in fiction writing, and he wrote 374 short stories and 18 novels throughout his lifetime. He was particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.  He also wrote a few screenplays before his death in 1970.  Here are two of my favorite of his novels:



Appointment in Samarra 

by John O'Hara

“When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.”  ― John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra


The title for John O'Hara's first novel was taken from a short parable by W. Somerset Maugham which forms the epigraph for the novel. While it is a parable of death the novel is more of a slice of life as O'Hara does for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, what William Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines. O'Hara does it in a realistic and worldly fashion, without Faulkner's taste for mythic inference or the poetry of his prose. I can sometimes see signs of O'Hara in the novels of Updike or Roth.

The first chapter of Appointment in Samarra puts you into the head of Luther (Lute) Fliegler, an employee of the Cadillac dealership that is owned by the protagonist, Julian English. Lute is a regular guy with a wife and three kids and is, along with his wife, basically happy. Julian is a man who is perpetually hungover, who has squandered what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership and a wife who loves him, but he would rather spend his time drinking and philandering. This short novel outlines his decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas Day , showing him in the throes of too much spending, too much liquor compounded by three calamitous missteps. Each calamity is all the more powerful due to its extremely petty and preventable nature. In Faulkner the tragedies all seem to be comparable to Greek tragedy, even when they're happening among the lowlifes. In O'Hara's novels the commoners get there come-uppance and it is as if they could be you.

O'Hara is very clever. He subtly lets his characters talk about Julian's actions while Julian worries about them to a point; all the while they are never described in any detail resulting in their assuming an even more potent power over his existence. But with all of his worrying I found it difficult to understand his reaction to the events of three short days. During a holiday party at his country club, one filled with people Julian did not like and girls he describes simply as "sad birds", Julian has an unexpected chat with the local Monsignor. In it he sums up his life with these words:

"I never was meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer, Father," said Julian. "That sounded to me as though--you're not a frustrated literary man, by any chance, are you? God forbid."
"Oh, no," said Julian. "I'm not anything. I guess I should have been a doctor."(p 92)

Perhaps this interchange should not be unexpected because Julian could never be that honest with anyone he really knew well, least of all his own Father, the doctor.

O'Hara captures the town and its people with his prose and with a few essential details makes their place in the small town society transparent. His style is very readable and I found this similar to other of his novels, even the long ones like From the Terrace, it was difficult to put down.



From The Terrace 

by John O'Hara

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”  ― John O'Hara


This massive novel is rooted in eastern Pennsylvania. The story centers on the character of Raymond Alfred Eaton whose life follows the pattern initiated by the rebuffs and rejection and the purposeful neglect by his father, the guilt associations with the death of a young girl and an older woman, and the escapism of his mother. Samuel Eaton, head of his own iron works, turns against Alfred with the death of his first drives him to an inner loneliness and defensiveness which prep school and Princeton help, first, to intensify and then diminish. Contacts with the world of wealth through Lex Porter, the Navy in World War I, and the money he sent him to New York City for a fling in airplane production after his marriage to Mary. His association with the powerful private bank of MacHardie & Company insures that the marriage will continue in spite of his fling with a mistress, and his term an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in World War II leaves its mark with the death of his first son, so that when divorce from Mary is finally accomplished he becomes a man who, in failing himself, has also failed others.

O'Hara was an expert in the analysis, of social and sexual tribal rites. Never more than here did he indulge his analytical talent and, through the various relationships involving Alfred, portraying physical intimacies, business machinations, governmental attitudes and other forms of social behavior. Through all the states of love -- hate -- pity there is seldom any state of grace, and an overwhelming sense of explicit reportage makes this sometimes appear to be a too revealing mirror, in which a present anguish is reflected in its cumulative influential past. Not dissimilar to the nuances of John Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle, this novel rewards the reader who enjoys a microscopic view of social life.

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Blood of the Fathers

“With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.”  ― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses



Go Down, Moses 
by William Faulkner


Go Down, Moses marks the end of William Faulkner's period of greatest creativity. In this novel built out of interconnected stories he addresses themes that connect with and overlap those in other of his works of this period, particularly The Hamlet. The idea of time - past, present and future - is connected throughout the novel by blood; the bloodlines of the family. Faulkner's book of stories is named for the last one in the book.  There are only seven of which one, "The Fire and the Heart", extends to novella length. Previously published in popular magazines, like Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly these stories are more accessible than some of Faulkner's more intense novels.

"to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy's present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening," (p. 165)

The blood of the fathers, their 'curse', becomes one of the themes in the first three stories: "Was", "The Fire and the Hearth", and "Pantaloon in Black".

"Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." (p. 107)

The relations between the races and the nature of the family in these stories are also important for Faulkner. The hearth suggests connections with the Anglo-Irish culture from which the McCaslins originated. After all the McCaslin's heritage is one of tension and guilt bred into them like DNA in their genes. The initiation of the young into this culture is presented in "The Old People" when Ike becomes a man, and is repeated in "The Bear" (this last story has resonance all the way back to The Odyssey of Homer in which Odysseus undergoes a not dissimilar experience). There is also the theme of man versus nature through the contrast of the natural man with the social man of civilization. I also sensed a resonance with the Rousseau-like view of the world in the emphasis on getting away from civilization in The Bear. This can also be read in the tradition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, we see in Go Down, Moses Faulkner's mythic world of Yoknapatawpha County that we first met in Sartoris as it once more presents its people, their land, and their ghosts. How they relate to our world today is up to the reader to decide.

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First View of Yoknapatawpha

Sartoris
by William Faulkner



“[…] the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.”  Faulkner, Sartoris, Part I, ch. 2



Sartoris is the first novel Faulkner located in Yoknapatawpha County where he would go on to set fourteen more novels. In it he introduces the Sartoris family but the Snopes are also present in this early novel. It seems that he began to find his own voice in this novel, improving over his two earlier offerings (Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes).

He tells the story of a Southern family of the 'romantic' type, exhibiting chivalry and courage in a haughty and sometimes vain style. Bayard the younger, his grandfather is also a Bayard, comes home after the Great War and succeeds in demonstrating a recklessness that is more in tune with the times than traditional Sartoris family life is comfortable with. Thus there is the tension between tradition and modernity that permeates the novel. Faulkner's inimitable prose style is beginning to emerge and there are paragraphs of pure poetry in prose. Though not so many as would appear in works following. The combination of story and soul, action and intimations of the future provides a satisfying introduction to the South as seen from a porch in Yoknapatawpha County.

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Dublin Journey

Ulysses 
by James Joyce

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.”  ― James Joyce, Ulysses

The plot and theme of James Joyce's Ulysses center on life as a journey. Joyce based the framework of his novel on the structure of one of the greatest and most influential epic poems, The Odyssey of Homer. In it Homer presented the archetypal journey of life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist, Odysseus (Roman name, Ulysses), encounters many perils–including giants, angry gods, and monsters–during his voyage home to Ithaca, Greece, after the Trojan War. In Joyce's Twentieth Century novel, the author also depicts life as a journey, in imitation of Homer. But Joyce presents this journey as humdrum, dreary, and uneventful. Joyce's Ulysses is a Jew of Hungarian origin, Leopold Bloom, who lives in Dublin, Ireland. His adventure consists of getting breakfast, feeding his cat, going to a funeral, doing legwork for his job, visiting pubs or restaurants, and thinking about his unfaithful wife. His activities parallel in some way the adventures of Homer's Ulysses. For example Bloom attends a funeral in a chapter entitled "Hades"; paralleling an episode in The Odyssey in which Ulysses visits Hades, the land of the dead (or Underworld) in Greek mythology. Bloom's unfaithful wife, Molly, represents the faithful wife of Ulysses, Penelope. A young aspiring writer, Stephen Dedalus, represents the son of Ulysses, Telemachus, who searches for his father. Although Dedalus is not Bloom's son, Dedalus nonetheless is depicted as searching for a father figure to replace his own drunken father.

But why, when almost everyone who has heard of this book and many others who have read Ulysses, would so many say it is "difficult"?
Perhaps it is a difficulty that is an inescapable aspect of the human condition and as such, when presented as literature, is accessible to humans. Perhaps it is a difficulty that may be overcome by simply reading the text, enjoying the story, and waiting for the moments, christened "Eureka" moments by Claudia Traudt (Instructor in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at The University of Chicago), where the text will become more understandable, part of your soul, if not less difficult.

Reading it reminds me of my own experience reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, another notoriously difficult book. After at least three readings and countless partial attempts one summer I found myself finally "in the zone" with the text suddenly alive and the voices of the characters, their streaming consciousnesses, clearer than ever before. "Eureka!"
This takes work and both serious reading of and listening to the text. It is a text that echoes and reechoes Homer's Odyssey. One example of this jumped out at me when references to the sea from Ulysses brought to my mind the image of Odysseus sitting on the shore of Calypso's island pining for his home. The result of reading and rereading this great text is that its fundamental humaneness comes to the fore and you can celebrate the greatness that is Joyce's Ulysses.

Ulysses by James Joyce.

William Faulkner

On September 25, 1897, William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. His family had accumulated a great deal of wealth before the American Civil War. However, his family like many Southern families had lost all of its financial power during the conflict. His parents would move to Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner would use Oxford as the basis for the fictional town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County.
While he wrote both poetry and many stories Faulkner is best known for his novels.  His first novel, Mosquitoes, was published in 1927.  Here are three of my favorites of the many novels of William Faulkner I have read:

The Sound and the Fury

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”  ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury


The Sound and the Fury, which describes the bitter, incestuous dealings of a Mississippi family fallen on hard times, is one of William Faulkner's best novels. It is also one of his that is more difficult to read, at least for me.   I found it took several readings over many years to finally follow the different narrative voices.  However, though it is a stylistic tour de force, it was a profoundly rewarding read. The book, essentially the story of Caddy Compson, unfolds in four sections, centered in turn on each of the three Compson brothers — Benjy, a mentally disabled man; Quentin, a depressed, neurotic Harvard student; and Jason, an avaricious jerk — as well as on a black servant named Dilsey. All the brothers are obsessed with the dishonored Caddy, the slutty Compson sister, and with the family honor. The latter is a theme that recurs in Faulkner's work and seems part of the world that he created and placed in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Using a "stream-of-consciousness" style the story flows from these characters. 
The scope of the book is so broad that, like a Shakespearean play, it can sustain any number of specialized interpretations.  One may consider the idea of time:
 “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.”(The Sound and the Fury) 
While I like the idea expressed by Sartre that it is a metaphysical novel concerned with time, there is a lot more to it than just that.  Most interpretations touch upon the notion that the novel dramatizes a deterioration from the past to the present.  The impact of the past on the present is another theme that is recurrent in the novels of Faulkner.  The complexity and multiplicity of themes and potential interpretations is part of what made this one of the novels I have read and reread over the years. It is a powerful and amazing novel--one that I will never forget.

As I Lay Dying

"I know her. Wagon or no wagon, she wouldn't wait. Then she'd be upset, and I wouldn't upset her for the living world. With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood waiting for her there, she'll be impatient. I promised my word me and the boys would get her there quick as mules could walk it, so she could rest quiet."  - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying gives the account of one family's mission to bury their mother in a distant city.  Written shortly after the somber The Sound and the Fury, this short novel  presents human existence as an absurd joke.  Addie Bundren claims her final resting place should be near her relatives in Jefferson, Mississippi as opposed to at home. Told from the perspectives of 15 characters--including Bundren family members and local residents, the constant change in point of view can make for an uneasy read. Much of the action and relationships must be inferred from this "stream of consciousness". Faulkner uses this technique to his advantage; the reader gets inside the mind of each character. For instance, Vardaman (the youngest Bundren child), rambles near-nonsense after his mother dies; but we see a shift as he calms throughout the journey.  Thus this story present death as its subject with the central image of the human corpse.  The furious passions and furious activity that result contribute to the intensity of this novel.  Building on an accumulation of incongruities this becomes one of Faulkner's greatest works, a small novel that is very powerful.

The Snopes Trilogy

The Hamlet is the first of the "Snopes" trilogy, completed by Faulkner in 1940 and followed by The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).
The Hamlet follows the exploits of the Snopes family, beginning with Ab Snopes, who is introduced more fully in Faulkner's The Unvanquished. Most of the book centers around Frenchman's Bend, into which the heirs of Ab and his family have migrated from parts unknown. In the beginning of the book Ab, his wife, daughter, and son Flem settle down as tenant farmers beholden to the powerful Varner family.  These novels portray a saga that stands as perhaps the greatest feat of Faulkner's imagination. The Hamlet, the first book of the series chronicling the advent and rise of the grasping Snopes family in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, is a work that Cleanth Brooks called "one of the richest novels in the Faulkner canon." It recounts how the wily, cunning Flem Snopes dominates the rural community of Frenchman's Bend - and claims the voluptuous Eula Varner as his bride. The Town, the second novel, records Flem's ruthless struggle to take over the county seat of Jefferson, Mississippi. Finally, The Mansion tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin Flem. "For all his concerns with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man," noted Ralph Ellison. "Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics."

Two Poems about Time

Sonnet #12

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer's green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

from Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Movement

"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead

as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels;

only when the clock stops does time come to life."

- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Time is dead -- frozen in a place we

cannot reach, forever placed beyond

our being.

Time is place -- being our

desires and fears, passions and tears.

What is the source of our being?

Can we know what we are as the birds depart,

gone with the leaves?

We are left with the frozen crystals of ice --

a replacement for life.

The perfection of a a triangle is like our being.

But where can we find that perfection?

Is it only an imaginary construct?

We see in movement

the source of being, place and time.

Do not we change,

and in our changing become?

We become the thing we were not before.

We create our being. We are alive

with motion and change and being.

from Geography Lessons, January 1994 (2004) by  James Henderson

On the Seriousness of Comedy

But Seriously, Folks: 

Why Comedy is No Laughing Matter

"G.K. Chesterton once rebutted a critic who 'thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because [he] thinks that funny is the opposite of serious.  Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.'" (from the introduction to the lecture)

Yesterday I had another enjoyable and edifying noon hour attending the monthly lecture in the First Friday Lecture Series presented by the University of Chicago.  The first speaker of the new year was Michaelangelo Allocca,  Instructor and Chair of the Basic Program of Liberal Education, presenting the topic "But Seriously, Folks: Why Comedy is No Laughing Matter." 
Beginning with a quote from G. K. Chesterton on the distinction between what is "serious" and what is "not funny" the talk presented by Mr. Allocca was wide-ranging in its defense of the seriousness of comedy and the comic in literature of both serious and not so serious sorts.  After an anecdote from the Dalai Lama in support of Chesterton's claims the talk provided examples from the Bible to demonstrate the existence of humor in what is generally thought of as a serious work.  What followed were both philosophical and literary citations that further demonstrated the importance, if not seriousness, of comedy.  While readers' perceptions may lead to misinterpretations it was clear from the lecture, and from my own reading, that Plato's Socrates often turned to humor in his dialogues, while literary examples abound in both comic texts like Fielding's History of Tom Jones and tomes generally thought to be more serious like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights.  Certainly the use of humor is essential in Shakespeare  to provide comic relief in tragedies from Macbeth to Hamlet.  
The psychological aspects of humor were also explored as noted above that there are often differences in the viewer or reader's perception of what is funny.  Maybe they just do not get it?  And sometimes the joke is on the narrator - with the resulting anxiety an aspect of the humorous moment.  The result is we may be left with the conclusion that "some day this will be funny", or not?  In my own experience my first reading of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (as a requirement of high school English) left me with the conclusion that it was a dull and serious novel.  Years later as an adult rereading the same novel I found that, while it was still serious, it was no longer dull but had taken on a humorous sheen as it was filled with comic moments.  In the passing years it had "become funny".  One other personal note: two of my favorite authors, both noted for the seriousness of their writing, concluded their careers as novelists with supreme comic novels - namely Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man and William Faulkner's The Reivers.  Perhaps this too underlines the importance of comedy in literature.
When defining comedy one may turn to the classical authors, for example Moliere who claimed that the comic was based in incongruity.  Certainly it has this aspect and perhaps some bit of the illogical or the irrational or even the absurd. One may also turn to Aristotle's Poetics which, although it is focused on tragedy, does have some things to say about comedy.  The result of all these considerations of comedy and its seriousness was an entertaining hour of literary and philosophical reflection: Serious, yes;  but filled with laughter.


Here is a final thought from the pen of Henry Fielding:
"hath anyone living attempted to explain what the modern judges of our theatres mean by that word low; by which they have happily succeeded in banishing all humour from the stage, and have made the theatre as dull as a drawing-room!" (Tom Jones, V, 1)

Kafkaesque or not?

Some Novels of Jose Saramago

“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”  ― José Saramago, Blindness



José Saramago, Portugal's only Nobel winner (1998) was born on this day in 1922. In an interview several years before his death in 2010, Saramago said that he thought the best place to start for anyone unfamiliar with his unusual novels would be Journey to Portugal, his 1981 travel book (If this book is as good as Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk I would agree, but unfortunately I have not read the Saramago work). Perhaps he's right, but I am more familiar with his novels, especially The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Blindness, and All The Names. 


 All The Names is the story of a middle-aged civil servant  named Senhor Jose, who works as a clerk in the Central Registry for births, marriages and deaths. He is the only person named in the story–all the remaining characters in the novel are referred to by their titles or descriptions: The Registrar, the woman in the apartment, and so on. It is an interesting literary device, given the title of the book, but not surprising if you read this as an allegory.  Senhor Jose, still a bachelor in his fifties, lives a quiet life with no social life, or family to visit. At his work and the hierarchical structure and discipline of the institution does not allow for personal exchanges of any kind. He has spent a lifetime alongside co-workers that know nothing significant about him. In order to maintain a connection with humanity, he clips articles out of newspapers and magazines and keeps his own personal registry of stranger’s lives. He secretly cross-checks his files with those of the official labyrinth files at the Central Registry. One day the filing card of “an unknown woman” sticks to the other files he has surreptitiously borrowed for his hobby. The file of the unknown woman begins to haunt his life. In response he steps out of his lonely existence to try to track her down and , in doing so he becomes a sleuth and a forger and much more. The tension through the novel builds as we begin to learn more about the unknown woman and this tension exhibits itself in Senhor Jose, who comes under the suspicion of his boss. The remainder of the novel takes on a Proustian stream-of-consciousness internal monologue with the reader drifting in a sort of haze of metaphor and allegory that is the most beautiful consequence of this novel. It has been compared to a Kafkaesque experience. 


In the novel Blindness Saramago uses a quotation from the Book of Exhortations as the epigram: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe". Near the end of this novel, when the blind people are getting their vision back, he has one of his characters remark:" I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (p 292). These two quotations suggest the political and philosophical intention of the novel.  The greatest problem with an allegorical novel like Blindness is that it grants too much freedom to the reader. It allows too many interpretations. Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. The story begins when the first blind man loses his vision in his car while waiting for a traffic light to change. The man who helps him get safely home goes back and steals his car. The next day the wife of the first blind man takes him to see the eye doctor. Within a few days, the wife of the first blind man, the car thief, the doctor and all of the patients in his waiting room also go blind. The only character in the novel that miraculously avoids the affliction of blindness is the doctor's wife. Saramago's writings have often been discussed as an example of "magic realism". However, it has been suggested that Blindness has more in common with Kafka's allegorical novels than it does with works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie. The fundamental problem posed by allegorical novels is how to locate their political and social meaning. Saramago provides his readers with few clues to guide interpretation. 


 My favorite of Saramago's novels is The History of the Siege of Lisbon in which Raimundo Silva, a proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house alters a key word in a text to make it read that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any assistance from the Crusaders. After doing this he is inexplicably encouraged by his supervisor, Maria Sara, to rewrite the entire history of the siege. From this kernel the novel develops into a complex meditation on the meaning of both history and words as well as a romance and parable of life under authoritarian rule. Saramago's prose style does take some extra effort to adjust to with long paragraphs and serpentine sentences, but it is worth the effort and, like Faulkner and others with complex prose styles, repays the reader who perseveres. While I have not read all of Saramago's novels this one stands out among those I have read as his best.