Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

[Lover]

I am but 70 pages into my copy and already I love it. The story or, as I like to think of it, history is intriguing in and of itself. However, the way Faulkner masterfully weaves language and image into a ritualized dream-space is what makes the book captivating.

Take the opening sentence:

"From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

At once the words call to mind distinct imagery (no, beyond mere mind's eyesight into a holistic and powerful visceral response) and the haziness that always accompanies the experience of the nonexistent insidious force of the potent, imaginary past. The sentences merge into a gnarled and layered style that is pure delight and perfect for the novel, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorites.

I will not be entirely sure until I finish it, but I am considering doing my term paper, which can be about another work or closely related group of works of one of the authors studied, on this novel. Suggestions on my paper would be appreciated.

Finally, if you have read or are reading the novel, what do you think of it?

[kinesj]

I am but 70 pages into my copy and already I love it. The story or, as I like to think of it, history is intriguing in and of itself. However, the way Faulkner masterfully weaves language and image into a ritualized dream-space is what makes the book captivating.

Take the opening sentence:

"From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

At once the words call to mind distinct imagery (no, beyond mere mind's eyesight into a holistic and powerful visceral response) and the haziness that always accompanies the experience of the nonexistent insidious force of the potent, imaginary past. The sentences merge into a gnarled and layered style that is pure delight and perfect for the novel, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorites.

I will not be entirely sure until I finish it, but I am considering doing my term paper, which can be about another work or closely related group of works of one of the authors studied, on this novel. Suggestions on my paper would be appreciated.

Finally, if you have read or are reading the novel, what do you think of it?

It's my all time favorite novel, if there is anything you'd like to discuss upon finishing just let me know via this thread.

[Austin Butler]

Likewise! You are in for a very, very good read. I'd recommend picking up Faulkner: A Literary Companion by Nicholas Fargoli. It's a compilation of reviews of Faulkner's novels by his contemporaries. It's interesting to see how people react them; some are elated, horrified, plain confused. My favorite review about Absalom! Absalom! in which the reviewer talks about how they way the characters receive information, fragmented and conflicting, is the way we receive information in real life. Enjoy.

[Rores28]

I am but 70 pages into my copy and already I love it. The story or, as I like to think of it, history is intriguing in and of itself. However, the way Faulkner masterfully weaves language and image into a ritualized dream-space is what makes the book captivating.

Take the opening sentence:

"From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them."

At once the words call to mind distinct imagery (no, beyond mere mind's eyesight into a holistic and powerful visceral response) and the haziness that always accompanies the experience of the nonexistent insidious force of the potent, imaginary past. The sentences merge into a gnarled and layered style that is pure delight and perfect for the novel, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorites.

I will not be entirely sure until I finish it, but I am considering doing my term paper, which can be about another work or closely related group of works of one of the authors studied, on this novel. Suggestions on my paper would be appreciated.

Finally, if you have read or are reading the novel, what do you think of it?

I've only read As I Lay Dying, but you're definitely making me want to pick up faulkner again

[Dialectic]

I'm just about to finish Light in August and I absolutely love it. Faulkner is the master.

[dfloyd]

but so are the other three American Nobel prize winners. People tend to glorify their favorite authors around here: calling this one the best or that one their favorite. Until you have read all the major works of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck plus those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would have been the fifth American Nobel prize winner if he had lived, you should reserve your opinion.

[kinesj]

but so are the other three American Nobel prize winners. People tend to glorify their favorite authors around here: calling this one the best or that one their favorite. Until you have read all the major works of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck plus those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would have been the fifth American Nobel prize winner if he had lived, you should reserve your opinion.

There are numerous American authors worthy of reading who never won a Nobel prize, to limit oneself to Nobel winners would be quite limiting.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

I'm currently reading Absalom; Absalom! as well, just atarted Chapter 4. This is my first reading of Faulkner, a decision spurred on by the recent discussions comparing Faulkner to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. A response, from one of those past discussions, described Faulkner's writing as "turgid". After looking up the word (I only lasted three years under the 12 inch rule of Catholic Nuns before going Public) I found that description to be accurate, certainly in the opening chapter. There were moments in that first chapter I thought; "what the hell is this?". Not one to give up so early, I feel as though I'm beginning to get a grasp on the cadence. All in all, I am enjoying it as of Chapet 4. The "geneology" included with my copy is a life saver.

.

[country doctor]

i'm currently reading absalom; absalom! As well, just atarted chapter 4. This is my first reading of faulkner, a decision spurred on by the recent discussions comparing faulkner to fitzgerald and hemingway. A response, from one of those past discussions, described faulkner's writing as "turgid". After looking up the word (i only lasted three years under the 12 inch rule of catholic nuns before going public) i found that description to be accurate, certainly in the opening chapter. There were moments in that first chapter i thought; "what the hell is this?". Not one to give up so early, i feel as though i'm beginning to get a grasp on the cadence. All in all, i am enjoying it as of chapet 4. The "geneology" included with my copy is a life saver.

.

roar!

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

People tend to glorify their favorite authors around here: calling this one the best or that one their favorite. Until you have read all the major works of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck plus those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would have been the fifth American Nobel prize winner if he had lived, you should reserve your opinion.

Reserve his opinion of what? That he thinks Faulkner is a great writer? Why would reading Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Lewis, or Hemingway change that opinion?

Also, what's wrong with having a favorite author? :lol: :rolleyes5:

[DavidW]

This is my first post here outside of Introductions.

One of my favorite passages of all-time comes from Absalom, Absalom!

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time 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 all trying and they don't 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 can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”

It's been over ten years since I last read the novel. I remember feeling as if the passage above just popped up out of nowhere when I first read it. Faulkner could have inserted those lines any number of places in the novel. He chose the right place for it, though.

There are also some great sequences that took me by surprise like the famous one having to do with a back door. I don't want to spoil it for those still reading it and won't say anything else about that.

I plan on rereading this novel and The Sound and the Fury soon.

[Ron Price]

This post below is probably my longest, the longest of my approximately 175 posts here at this Literature Network Forum over the last eight years since I first joined in the winter of 2004--five years into my retirement from a 40 year working life.

I've just immersed myself in Faulkner again, as I have from time to time since discovering him in 1990. I hope that my immersion turns out to be useful to readers here, even if what I write below is a little too long. Just skim and scan my post, if you find my paragraphs somewhat long-winded. I worked on this piece below over a two day period just as spring was entering my Antipodean world. I hope my efforts will be of some value to all the Faulkner enthusiasts who come to this thread.-Ron Price, Australia:iagree:
------------------------------------------------
WILLIAM FAULKNER AND ME
An Unmerited Grace

Part 1:

As I was settling-in to my first year in the last technical and further education college I would teach at in Australia, teach in that beautiful city between the Indian Ocean and the Darling Scarp, a low coastal escarpment, in one of the most isolated cities on the planet, Perth Western Australia, I learned about William Faulkner.

A new biography had just been published in 1989 linking the life and the art of that famous novelist(1897-1962). I had ten years to go before retiring from a forty year working life of which thirty were spent as a teacher. It was about time, I think to myself now in retrospect, that I finally discovered this wonderful writer.

Faulkner died the year, indeed, the very summer, that I began my travelling-pioneering in the small town of Dundas for the Canadian Baha’i community at the centre of Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. He received the Nobel Prize for literature when I was four years old living beside Lake Ontario. Needless to say, I knew nothing of him then and nothing until I taught English literature in 1990 when his slim novel As I Lay Dying was on the curriculum.

I knew nothing of this famous writer until those fin de siecle years immersed as I had been all my student and teaching life in the social sciences, raising three children during more than two decades in the institution of marriage, trying to deal with the rigours of bipolar disorder which had kept me busy since my late teens, and having to deal with responsibilities in the several Baha’i communities and with demands from other volunteer activities in the towns where I had lived over the years.

Part 2:

That biography of Faulkner was reviewed by Micheko Kakutani(1955- ), a Japanese-American and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic. He is now and was then a leading literary critic for The New York Times. I did not read his review(1) until yesterday by which time I was myself a full-time writer and a poet and had been retired from the teaching profession for more than a decade.

In a period of less than ten years Faulkner had written: ''The Sound and the Fury'' (1929), ''As I Lay Dying'' (1930), ''Light in August'' (1932), and ''Absalom, Absalom!'' (1936). Faulkner irrevocably changed the geography of American literature in those entre deux guerres years. Not only did he magically transplant the modernist innovations in literature from Europe to his native ground, but he also made the postage stamp-sized piece of Mississippi, whose soil he called home, yield fresh and enduring myths. They were myths that would define both the predicament of the post-Civil War(1861-64) American South and the condition of the USA as it entered the turbulent 20th century.

Faulkner was, in Frederick R. Karl's estimation, ''the closest figure to the French novelist and playwright Honore de Balzac(1799-1850) that America had produced,'' ''the first of the American moderns in fiction.'' Joseph Blotner, the former University of Virginia faculty member who made a career of turning lives into art, had given readers a voluminous biography of Faulkner back in 1974, the year I began to teach in the field of post-secondary education in far-off Tasmania. But, as I say above, I was immersed in a number of post-secondary school subjects and they did not include English literature---until 1990.

Part 3:

Blotner gave his readers two volumes of minutely detailed facts about a man who was arguably the greatest of 20th century novelists. I say, arguably, because without a doubt there were others whom I won't go into here. That first serious study of Faulkner, in the mid-seventies, did little to illuminate the connections between Faulkner's life and his art. Blotner's two volumes did not provide a satisfying critical appraisal of his work, nor did they attempt to untangle the secret workings of his imagination. Mr Karl's magisterial 1989 biography triumphantly succeeded where Blotner failed.

Karl was also the author of the highly acclaimed biography of the novelist Joseph Conrad(1857-1924), a biography which was also an ambitious study of modernist literature. Mr Karl draws upon his familiarity with modern literature to move casually through Faulkner’s life examining the literary, historical and psychological forces that shaped his fiction. Although the book occasionally repeated itself, looping back on ideas much the way Faulkner's own fiction did, it nonetheless provided those interested in this famous writer’s life with an organic picture of his life-narrative. It was a picture that praised Faulkner’s achievement even as it revealed the sources of his violent, fractured art.

The portrait of Faulkner that emerged from Karl’s volume, published nearly 25 years ago when I was heading down the back-track of a 30+ year teaching career, is that of a deeply conflicted man, a man torn between an old-fashioned Southerner's love of the past and a modernist's wilful dedication to adversarial innovation. In his finest novels, of course, Faulkner would succeed in wedding these two impulses. He would use an arsenal of avant-garde techniques: nonlinear narration, abstraction of character and place, as well as shifting points of view: (i) to outline in clear and sharp detail the irrationalities of history and (ii) to show America's sad but ineluctable loss of its Edenic past, if it was Edenic.

Part 4:

In day-to-day life, Faulkner was considerably less fortunate in reconciling such contrary instincts. Afraid that his Mississippi neighbours regarded writing as a vaguely effeminate activity, he cultivated a hard-drinking, good-old-boy facade. He also distanced himself from his family by changing the spelling of his name, originally William Cuthbert Falkner. He adopted a variety of masks. He even created the phony persona of an English-born, Yale-educated Royal Air Force pilot with a plate in his head and a bad limp acquired as a result of being shot down during the war.

In Mr Karl's view such deceptions were linked to Faulkner's transforming imagination, and his need to constantly recast reality in a more perfect, a literary, form. These deceptions were also his way of creating a screen behind which he could hide. They were defensive measures to protect the solitude he needed in which to create.

Shuttling easily between Faulkner's life and his fiction, Mr Karl sketched-in this famous writer’s life-span beginning with his childhood in Mississippi at the turn of the 20th century. Karl gave his readers, just at the time as I was myself beginning to teach English literature, as I say above, to matriculation students in 1990, an understanding of the social attitudes that prevailed, as well as a sharp picture of the novelist's own violent family past. He showed us how the young Faulkner temporarily lost his future wife Estelle to a more socially acceptable rival. We saw him cultivate the role of a 19th-century Symbolist poet as he took-on, and lost, a succession of menial jobs. We watched Faulkner slowly assemble the necessary skills and confidence to embark upon his vocation.

Part 5:

The years of WWI, Faulkner’s late teens and early 20s, were actually spent in Canada not far from where I grew-up....as the eagle flies. These years served as a kind of watershed, leaving him with ''material to change his life and fill at least two novels.'' His subsequent apprenticeship with the American novelist Sherwood Anderson(1876-1941), his attempts to work out autobiographical material in novels like ''Mosquitoes'', and his gradual assimilation of lessons learned from Eliot and Joyce---all this is seamlessly depicted, as is Faulkner's sudden discovery, with ''The Sound and the Fury'' in 1929, of his own wholly distinctive style and voice.

By the early 40's, however, the innovations and superb narrative control that distinguished such works as ''Sound'' and ''Absalom, Absalom!'' gave way to increasingly flawed and hackneyed writing. Indeed, the Nobel Prize, which he received in 1950, came at a time when Faulkner knew his best work was behind him. He was by then, by his early 50s, entering a long slide toward suicidal depression.

As Mr Karl sees it, the waning of Faulkner's writing ability came not from his growing fame and wealth, but from the confluence of several factors. Writing for Hollywood, he argued, caused the novelist to grow increasingly moralistic. His lack of ''any coherent world-view which could be sustained by an intellectual approach'' - that is, ''the ability to draw on reading and broad ideas in the manner of European novelists'' –all this left him with few resources to fall back on, after he had exhausted his original material.

Part 6:

In addition, Mr Karl suggested that the novelist's inability to extricate himself from a sexually and emotionally barren marriage undermined his confidence and will. ''So much of Faulkner's energies were going into countering his married state, in trying to carve out an area of happiness or something to sustain himself with, that he was constantly diverted,'' writes Mr Karl. ''His work may well have fallen off for other reasons such as: financial needs, too much soaking in alcohol, the natural expenditure of his original body of literary material. There is little question, though, that his home life was part of that deterioration.''

As he approached ''the bottom of the barrel,'' Faulkner himself marvelled at the literary gift he had once possessed. ''I don't know where it came from,'' he said. ''I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Micheko Kakutani and his review of the 1000+ page biography entitled William Faulkner: American Writer A Biography by Frederick R. Karl, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.

I have my suspicions, William,
where my gift came from---that
unmerited grace Annie Dillard(1)
called it which came much later
to me in life than yours. Each of
our vessels had different amounts:
thimble-full to the gallon-measure
you enjoyed, creating an industry.(2)

Alcohol and my home life will not
lead to deterioration in my writing-
life….The rigours of a BP1D may(3)
get me, inshalla, and only time will
tell as I head for 70 & the last years
of late adulthood……2012 to 2024.

1 Annie Dillard(1945- ) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction.
2 There is a whole industry now involved in Faulkner Studies.
3 bipolar 1 disorder. I think it unlikely, indeed, not possible that any suicidal depression will ever engulf me as it has done in the past due to new medications now available.

Ron Price
2 September 2012

[ennison]

I think As I Lay Dying was the first Faulkner I read. It was for me at seventeen an eye-opener. But it was Soldiers' Pay that got me into him. It's still one of my favourite novels.