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January 14, 2008
Wow--Chew on That!
After a break to read Pillars of the Earth and The Undercover Economist (about which, perhaps, more later) I'm back to Absalom, Absalom! and the fragrant (or reeking) climes of Yoknapatawpha County, and the rise, decline, and fall of the Sutpen family, with Quentin Compson and his father (Intrusions of The Sound and the Fury). And here's what I stumble upon:
from Absalom, Absalom!
William FaulknerYes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more travelled father, the existence of the eight part negro mistress and the sixteenth part negro son, granted even the morganatic ceremony--a situation which was as much a part of a wealthy young New Orleansian's social and fashionable equipment as his dancing slippers--was reason enough, which is drawing honor a little fine even for the shadowy paragons which are our ancestors born in the South and come to man- and womanhood about eighteen sixty or sixty one. It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know.
And doesn't that last line explain a good deal of Faulkner?
Nevertheless, I revel in it, in a way that I cannot seem to do with Hemingway, Steinbeck, or other contemporaries (except perhaps Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie).
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For the Quote Books
"I decline to accept the end of man. . . . I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
--William Faulkner
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
"Old Times There Are Not Forgotten. . ."
In a way that I've not experienced elsewhere, the past seems to live on in the South. I think it probably lives on everywhere, but for some reason there is more willingness to acknowledge it in the south--event the south of today. And so this quotation from Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
And the truth of this is sometimes conveyed to us through the Church's sense of the communion of the Saints. They are not past, they are present, our helpers today in time of need, our examples, and our guides. The Church understands this, the south understands this, but we can feel it being tugged out of our hands by the pervasive chronochauvism of "progressivism." While we have progressed greatly in some ways, we are encumbered by the shackles of our fallen nature and every step forward in one arena is an invitation to backslide in three others.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 15, 2008
Two Sentences About Racism
I realize that I haven't offered much in the way of Catholic observation for some time, not through lack of desire, but through lack of any insight that would project beyond the boundaries that encase this flesh. I have a myriad of observations that are meant for Steven, but few that seem to have any substance to share. They would, upon being presented to the world, become as ghosts, thin, substanceless things, unfit for either the living or the dead.
And so instead, I take my observations where I find them. And where I'm finding them of recent date is Faulkner, and so it is with this marvelous, insightful, and in some sense heartrending passage. It is difficult reading, but bear with it. The narrator is Quentin Compson's father, but the person being spoken of is the son of one of the characters and one of the instigators of the fall of the house of Sutpen.
from Absalom, Absalom!
William FaulknerYes, sleeping in the trundle bed beside Judith's, beside that of the woman who looked upon him and treated him with a cold unbending detached gentleness more discouraging than the fierce ruthless constant guardianship of the negress who, with a sort of invincible humility slept on a pallet on the floor, the child lying there between them unasleep in some hiatus of passive and hopeless despair aware of this, aware of the woman on the bed whose every look and action toward him, whose every touch of the capable hands seemed at the moment of touching his body to lose all warmth and become imbued with cold implacable antipathy, and the woman on the pallet upon whom he had already come to look as might some delicate talonless and fangless wild beast crouched in its cage in some hopeless and desperate similitude of ferocity (and your grandfather said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me'" and what did He mean by that? how, if He meant that little children should need to be suffered to approach Him, what sort of earth had He crated; that if they had to suffer in order to approach Him, what sort of heaven did He have?) look upon the human creature who feeds it, who fed him, thrust food which he himself could discern to be the choicest of what they had, food which he realized had been prepared for him by deliberate sacrifice, with that curious blend of savageness and pity, of yearning and hatred,; who dressed him and washed him, thrust him into tubes of water too hot or too cold yet against which he dared make no outcry, and scrubbed him with harsh rags and soap, sometimes scrubbing at him with repressed fury as if she were trying tow ash the smooth faint olive tinge from his skin as you might watch a child scrubbing at a wall long after the epithet, the chalked insult has been obliterated--; lying there unsleeping in the dark between them, feeling them unasleep too, feeling them thinking about him, project about him and filling the thunderous solitude of his despair louder than speech could: You are not up here in this bed with me, where though no fault nor willing of your own you should be, and you are not down her on this pallet floor with me, where through no fault nor willing of your own you must and will be, not through any fault or willing of our own who would not what we cannot just as we will and wait for what must be.
"And your grandfather did not know either just which of them it was who told him that he was, must be, a negro, who could neither have heard yet nor recognised the term 'n-----', who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum cell which might have been suspended on a cable a thousand fathoms in the sea, where pigmentation had no more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle shades, where the very abstractions which he might have observed--monogamy and fidelity and decorum and gentleness and affection--were as purely rooted in the flesh's offices as the digestive processes.
I'll be the first to admit that it is tough going, and a book full of sentences like that requires an enormous mental effort to stay focused on the train of thought. And that effort is repaid time and again in both humor and pathos. Faulkner brilliantly limns the lives of three people involved with this small child, and at once sets the whole story on a different level. The child is the child of the man Judith (mentioned at the beginning of the sentence) desired to marry. This is the man that almost singlehandedly brings down the Sutpen dream, pulling from Sutpen's grasp the Absalom of the story. And it is a story ultimately about the consequences of our sins and actions in the world--how nothing is without its due weight and gravity--its tremendous loaded karma. All actions are spiritual actions, carrying weight not only in this world but in the hereafter, and not only in the hereafter, but in the War in Heaven that is waged on a daily basis. Faulkner encompasses this, understands this, has so thoroughly internalized this that he has chosen this convoluted and seemingly endless prose style to bring it home to us. There is a weight about our actions that we have no say in--except that if we fail to recognize it, we will fail ultimately in all of our dreams. One wrong choice can multiply out of all reason--truly. But it is the accumulated weight of wrong choices that force us in to yet more wrong choices--sin begets sin in a cycle unending unless by grace and sacrament we put an end to it.
That is the glory of the Catholic faith. Faulkner's sinners are trapped in the calvinist Gothic world in which whatever redemption may be available waits beyond the actions of the present. The weight of the past bears down on everything and crushes even the slightest movement toward grace. The elect are the elect and they are few indeed and doomed as all are doomed.
And yet, mysteriously, because there is redemption, Faulkner, dark and deep, is also deeply humorous and deeply compassionate and deeply joyful. There is always hope about Faulkner even among the ashes and the burning houses and the murders and the bigotry and the weight of the past and the press of the present and any other distractions and diversions there may seem to be. I read Faulkner and I am not depressed, but I am impressed with his solid grasp and deep understanding of the nature of humanity and of how people see one another and how they relate to one another.
Absalom, Absalom! is a difficult book, a very difficult book. And yet, it is one of those books whose difficulty is rewarded many times over for the patient reader. It is one of those books that few people try, but that many would do themselves better service by making the attempt. Everyone who reads this blog in a day is capable of reading and understanding the book, and unlike many of the things on which we spend our time, reading something of this power and this virtuosity is time well spent and deeply rewarded, both in the satisfaction of hard intellectual work and in the insights that the author shares with the willing reader.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Literary Heirs and Pretenders
It is with some amusement that I view the round-robin literary feud that is the rivalary between John Updike, John Irving, Norman Mailer, and the would-be literary giant Tom Wolfe. Amusement, in part, because the substance of these, and of all more recent pretenders to the throne--Bellow, Roth, Franzen, Pynchon, and so on--is so slight in comparison to the giants upon whose shoulders they stand.
I am no fan of Hemingway, either prose nor narrative, and yet I recognize in his work a towering brilliance--the brilliance of radical simplicity, of tearing down the facades and saying things as simply as they might be said. And Fitzgerald--who can have much sympathy for his endless array of vacant, vapid, and self-involved caricatures, trotted across a glamorous stage to no effect--yet the prose is supply, strong--accepting the revisionism of Anderson and Hemingway, and yet altering it to be a kind of poetry in prose--capturing perfectly single moments, which unfortunately do not make a book. And then there is Faulkner whose theme is the weight of the living past which we all bear even if we never bother to acknowledge the bearing of--whose prose is anti-Hemingway--the logical extension of the experiments of Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf--creating a thick atmosphere, full of the dense shadows of spanish-moss weighted trees and the odor of verbena or honeysuckle. And Steinbeck whose lithe and supple prose benefited from the reforms of the early century, but whose heart was always with the oppressed, even if his political solutions often left much to be desired. His stories are strong, sometimes almost mythically so.
And against his we have? A Month of Sundays, the interminable sexual explorations of a minister and his wife, The World According to Garp, the intermindable sexual explorations of a delilberate illegitimacy, I Am Charlotte Simmons (the less said about, the better) Portnoy's Complaint, Exit Ghost. . . The list could go on to the sounding of the trump. But none of these has the sheer thematic and mythic weight of the giants of the earlier part of the century. Why might this be? And are there those who may have that weight?
As unpopular as it might be to say so, I see some of that power and much of that authority that comes from moral certainty, in works by Toni Morrison, most particularly the horrendously difficult Beloved. When attention is given to the weight of the past and not to the passing fancy of a gratuitous lust (the predominant theme of many of the modern claimants), we begin to find something in the work that rises to the level of these giants.
Is there anyone writing whose prose offers the sheer silken suppleness of a Fitzgerald? I think we've mostly decided that we can dispense with that as an artifact of a bygone era. And perhaps it is--crystallized in its time and in its own virtuosic perfection.
But the rank and file of those who write today will have to be seen through those more removed than we in order to determine relative merit. Frankly, I can't see many of them surviving the concerns that drove them to write, because those concerns are so confined to our own perverse and blinkered era.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:17 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
From Publisher's Weekly
Major Adult bestsellers of the year:
Adult Fiction: Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns 1,377,000
Adult NonFiction:Rhonda Byrne's The Secret 2, 947,000
Children's Ficiton: J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 7,740,000
Hmmm.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
More Bookselling Surprises
States Ranked by bookstores per capita:
1. Wyoming
2. Vermont
3. Montana
4. New Hampshire
5. Iowa
34. Texas
38. Ohio
39. Florida
47. California
50. New York
Now, one must keep in mind that the lower rank doesn't come from lack of bookstores necessarily but from plethora of people. For example Wyoming has 39 bookstores for a population of 507,000 people. New York has 437 bookstores for a populaiton of 19,227,000 people.
Florida has 635 bookstores for 17, 397,000 people. Ohio has 426 for 11,459,000 people.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 2:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2008
Faulkner's Humor and Moral Vision
Throughout most of Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen, a key figure, could hardly be called sympathetic. He seems at time little less than a monster. In the last third, or so, of the book, Faulkner spends some time telling us about Mr. Sutpen and how he came to be who he presently is. What emerges is a man who much conflicted attempts to make his own way in the world by his own constricted and convoluted sense of morality and ends up precipitating the entire action of the novel.
Throughout the book there are moments of high humor even within the tragedy, pathos, or sheer chaos of the action. One of these moments occurs in the passage sited below.
from Absalom, Absalom!
William FaulknerAnd then the shrewdness failed him again. It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before: and what day it might have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, one foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not feel it, when he realised that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some super-distillation of this lack: that he was now past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality. So he suggested what he suggested to her [Miss Rosa Coldfield], and she did what he should have known she would do and would have known probably if he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move. Hence the proposal, the outrage and unbelief; the tide, the blast of indignation and anger upon which Miss Rosa vanished from Sutpen's Hundred, her air-ballooned skirts spread upon the flood, chip-light, her bonnet (possibly one of Ellen's which she had prowled out of the attic) clapped fast onto her head rigid and precarious with rage.
The description of Miss Rosa's departure in irate indignation (fully justified) is a marvelous limned-in portrait right down to the last phrase which, while probably modifying "head" can be seen as modifying "her bonnet," in which case we get, "her bonnet rigid and precarious with rage." Even her clothing revolts against Thomas Sutpen.
But encased here is Faulkner's statement about so many of us. And it is a statement wise and true, and most particularly true when we try to operate on our own. ". . . [I]f he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move." The quandary of modern humanity--we have all the component parts of a morality, all of the right concerns, all of the proper foci, all of the will and the energy, and no ability to implement. The parts are all there but if they are not connected into one smooth-functioning machine, they are useless--they are but spare parts or the old washing machine on the front porch--they identify us as surely as our names or the clothes we wear, they tell something about us, but they don't even serve as window-dressing.
Faulkner makes this point time and again and the downfall of Sutpen is directly related to his inability to get his moral life in order and functioning. And this inability is directly related to the fact that the society he occupies has refused the moral norms of the world in the "peculiar institution" they cling to with such ferocity.
It's interesting--Faulkner loves the South--deeply. He is a true son of the South and yet he can have no truck with the nonsense (on either side) of the War Between the States. The South cannot be justified because it has a moral laxity and a patent offense to natural law. The North cannot because they are not fighting a war to release a people from bondage, but a war that many of them fail to understand at all and so their "bringing freedom" rains down destruction and chaos (see some of my posts related to The Unvanquished.) In a sense Faulkner gets it exactly right and encapsulates the love-hate many of us who are partisans of the South have with our native land.
But I digress--and I digress because Faulkner is one endless digression on matters of such grave importance that it is a pleasure to read and to absorb all that he has to say. Absalom, Absalom! starts out as a kind of mystery and quickly evolves into a complex tale of moral nightmare, evil, delusion, self-determination, and the destruction not only of the person who fall prey to this, but to everyone around him. Thomas Sutpen is a moral cancer in a society that hasn't a firm grasp or understanding of God and His purposes, and as such he is a nexus of destruction and endless unhappiness--perhaps even contributing to Quentin Compson's decision later in 1910 to commit suicide (only after, fortunately, he left us his part of The Sound and the Fury).
And just to seal the point, let me finish the passage quoted above:
And he, standing there with the reins over his arm, with perhaps something like smiling inside his beard and about the eyes which was no smiling but the crinkled concentration of furious thinking:--the haste, the need for it; the urgency but not fear, not concern: just the fact that he had missed that time, though luckily it was just a spotting shot with a light charge, and the old gun, the old barrel and carriage none the worse; only next time there might not be enough powder for both a spotting shot and then a full-sized load;--the fact that the thread of shrewdness and courage and will ran onto the same spool which the thread of his remaining days ran onto and that spool almost near enough for him to reach out his hand and touch it. But this was no grave concern yet, since it (the old logic, the old morality which had never yet failed to fail him) was already falling into pattern, already showing him conclusively that he had been right, just as he knew he had been, and there what had happened was just a delusion and not actually exist.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . .
And again, a light touch in a very serious matter: "(the old logic, the old morality which had never yet failed to fail him)."
And so it is with the man who refuses his redemption and attempts to acquire it by his own merits.
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Faulkner's Language of Negation
"Unvanquished" not triumphant--but unvanquished has exactly no meaning, or the minimal meaning of "remaining the same--the existant," because it is the definition of a state that has failed to exist.
"Unsentient," non-sentient and perhaps less--refusing sentience.
Faulkner often takes words that have opposites in English that are not formed by a/un/dis or other such prefixes and creates them--unsolid, unstolid, unforetold, these are like the words Faulkner would invent. And yet each of his "uns" is deliberate, chosen, meaningful, and rich. A language abounding in invention and intention, nuanced, lithe, and flexible in the way few others are.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More Humor
"He overheard them before he could begin to not listen. . . "
William Faulkner, Abasalom, Absalom!
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One More--Wash Jones on Bravery
Hi all, I'm sorry, I'm just enthralled with the last part of this book and I'd probably post the entire last fifty or so pages I've read had I the time and the right. Because I have neither, let me regale you with one more excerpt:
from Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner'. . . Because you are brave. It aint that you were a brave man at one second or minute or hour of your life and got a paper to show hit from General Lee. But you are brave, the same as you are alive and breathing. That's where it's different. Hit dont need no ticket from nobody to tell me that. And I know that whatever your hands tech, whether hit's a regiment of men or a ignorant gal or just a hound dog, that you will make hit right.'
Bravery isn't the matter of a moment but a matter of the heart and mettle.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 18, 2008
Is Believing Seeing?
from Absalom, Absalom! William Faulknerwhile one part of him said My brow my skull my jaws my hands and the other said Wait. Wait. You cant know yet. You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing. Wait. Wait.
Often we see beyond the thing we are looking at and into the inference we are making from it. This is one of the very common problems in science--a scientist can reasonably confuse inference with observation when what he wants is strong enough. In fact, I would accuse some evolutionary scientists of this problem. They want so much to see evidence for evolution that their "observations" cease to be descriptions of the natural world and become descriptions of their inferences from the natural order. Thus we have a plethora of books for agnostic and atheistic evolutionists who leap from the observations of the natural world to the inference of chaotic origin, all the while making a case for it being observation.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Faulkner's Despair
Faulkner's was a difficult and fractious literary apprenticeship--so much so that after the rejection of his first "major" novel Flags in the Dust (which was radically revised to become Sartoris he had this to say:
"I think now that I'll sell my typewriter and go to work--though God knows, it's sacrilege to waste that talent for idleness which I possess" (Faulkner, Selected Letters 39).
Of interest is the fact that Faulkner took up screen-writing in Hollywood at a rate of $500.00 a week and Director Howard Hawks got him several major ventures including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep--both superb movies starring Bogart and Bacall.
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Southern to the Core
from "William Faulkner: Heart in Conflict with Itself" John D. AndersonIntruder in the Dust presaged Faulkner's speaking out on integration. He argued in several public letters that southern blacks must receive equal rights, which led to harassment and threats by bigoted neighbors. However, his resistance to federal intervention to enforce those rights alienated staunch liberals. Faulkner's moderate liberalism angered everyone.
Found here
I'll have to read a biography to verify this, though I've no reason to doubt it. Faulkner is Southern to the core and this stand is only one of many that demonstrates it. While he wants to do what is right, he wants it to come not from pressure from above but from the hearts of those who need to "get right." No federal intervention, because Faulkner felt the weight of the past and what that weight did to his beloved South. While this won for an oppressed people their freedom, the Federal Government of that time did little to relieve the crushed south and the freed slave population of the plight that had been inflicted upon it by years of war and its concomittant poverty. So much so that the legacy remains with us to this very day, with Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi amongst the poorest states in the union though at one time they ranked with all the others. Faulkner could see no good in this mode of operation (about which one could argue the wisdom). Had the movement risen organically from the people of the South we might still have with us the moderate voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But had there been no intervention would anything at all have changed? One cannot tell, but if what is said above is true, Faulkner felt that the consequences would be more negative than positive, prolonging the agony of racism and bigotry. Who knows. Whatever the case may be--Faulkner shows himself in these opinions a true son of the South.
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