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January 21, 2008
Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner
I have reached the end and let me from the start make clear how I felt about it. Once upon a time my top five list looked something like this:
1. Ulysses James Joyce
2. To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
3. The Golden Bowl Henry James
4. Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
5. Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
6. Portait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
I don't know I had ever considered much beyond this list. Now, I have a new second place prizeholder--Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner. I don't know that anything will ever displace Ulysses for sheer strength of story, prose, imagination, and writing. But Absalom, Absalom! has all of that AND it has great seriousness of purpose.
And today is a remarkably good day on which to review it precisely because of some of the nature of that purpose. Consider for a moment the following: The Absalom of the title, greated in an almost biblical way by his father near the very end of the book, encounters the following moral dilemma: a man he knows to be his half brother wants to marry his sister. With a great deal of effort and thought, he is able to come to terms with this. What he cannot come to terms with is the fact that this man Charles Bon is also one-sixteenth black, and therefore, in the eyes of the south a Negro. And this the man cannot bring himself to countenance.
A stark portrayal of the ingrained class structure and racism of the old South, it is, at once, savage, funny, disturbing, and deeply moving. The story unpeels, layer by layer, you sometimes learn something in a cast-off or aside in a speech of another character--a key clue to what is happening in the novel is just tossed out there. Usually it is developed further, but not always.
Faulkner plays with time, memory, incident, and character in the book. A good third of it is "making up" what really happened because there are gaps that no narrator can cover. So it is with history--we connect the dots we see, but the line connecting them may be missing dots we cannot. And yet, we personalize history by the stories we make up in the interstices--the stories that make history make sense to us. These are not "what really happened," as in many cases we cannot know--but they are the hooks on which we hang what we know and then move on.
Absalom, Absalom! is one of the most difficult books I have ever read--it may even, at times be more difficult than Ulysses. But the difficulty stems only in part from the convolute and involute prose. Another part of the difficulty comes as you try to piece together the past witht he characters and try to come to terms with the issues that have no terms that are acceptable.
Faulkner was a staunch supporter of the rights of African Americans. His language may not seem to reflect his sympathies, but it does indeed, and the compassion and power with which he writes about issues that stain the Old South is remarkable. He manages to explain much about those of us who are fiercely proud of our Southern Heritage and fiercely ashamed as well. How can it be one in the same. Well, read the book as a sympathetic reader and find out.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ten Favorite Cities
TSO listed his, here are mine:
Washington D.C.
Boston
San Antonio
San Diego
Everglades City (hardly even a town, and lovely)
Naples, FL.
Well, I guess I don't have ten. I do have a short-list of ciities I would like never to go to again, or in the event that I've never been there, to be spared that ordeal:
Atlantic City
St. Louis
Seattle
New Orleans
Miami
Las Vega
Los Angeles
And may favorite near neighbor city:
Victoria, British Columbia
Posted by Steven Riddle at 4:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 22, 2008
An Urgent Request for Prayers
My company has recently been acquired by another company in the same field. We know that there will be layoffs, and the strong suspicion and rumor is that they will be occurring perhaps as early as the end of this week, but certainly (the first wave) within two weeks. They are expected to affect between 13% (the company estimate) and 25% (the rumor going around) of the staff. While I have little reason to be concerned for myself, I'm very concerned for those around me. (And of course, I may just be an ostrich--in complete denial). Please pray for all of us as we go through this time--that the layoffs are less drastic than expected and that those who are let go are able to swiftly find gainful employment.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway
In my commitment to revisit some "classics" and reacquaint myself with them, I decided to take on my least favorite of the Big Four of the early twentieth Century. Full disclosure--I do not like to read Ernest Hemingway. Part of it may be the macho trappings and myth of Hemingway--the truth of which I do not know, but the extent of which colors my perception of Hemingway. While I think that Hemingway was radical in his excision of much of the excess of prose of the very early twentieth century (exemplified by James at his most orotund), I think he went so far that direction that his prose is almost self parody. It is so stripped down that rather than a lean lyricism it becomes a kind of drone instrument--the things one is supposed to pay attention to become so obvious and so overbearing that it is almost painful. For example, the old man's dreams of lions on the beach obviously have some deep and symbolic purpose and meaning. I shouldn't be able to pluck the symbol out so easily, but it recurs throughout the work--the symbols are obvious and occasionally odious. However, they are also sometimes lovely as in this uncharacteristic moment for Hemingway:
The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the waves.
"Agua mala," the man said. "You whore." . . .
From where he sung lightly against his oars he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were coloured like the trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble made as it drifted. They were immune to its poison. But men were not and when some of the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple while the old man was working a fish, he would have welts and sores on his arms and hands of the sort that poison ivy or poison oak can give. But these poisonings from the aqua mala came quickly and struck like a whiplash.
The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest things in the sea and the old man love to see the big sea turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them bob when he stepped on the with the horny soles of his feet.
One can't help but wonder reading this whether Hemingway himself might not have taken the same delight.
This book is a little less lean and a little less overbearing than some by Hemingway. A recent blog correspondent informed me that it was a favorite of John Paul II and so I thought to take it up again and see if it struck me.
My conclusion is that it is one of those books that you really have to be there to understand. For example, I couldn't care less about fishing. I wouldn't know a dolphin (fish) from a tuna to save my life. I could probably identify a marlin pretty readily, and flying fish seem pretty obvious--but I am sea-illiterate. I also have never experienced the kind of physical trial that is discussed in the book.
That said, The Old Man and the Sea has been referred to as Hemingway meets God. And I suppose one could read it that way. Certainly it is meant to be read that way. The trial takes place over three days--three days in which the weight of the world is borne on the shoulders of one man, in which the single striking simile for pain compares the Old Man's pain to the pain of a nail attaching flesh to wood. And there is this striking reflection on sin:
from The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest HemingwayBut he liked to think about al things that he was involved in and since there was nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin. You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?
"You think too much, old man, " he said aloud.
But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and know no fear of anything.
"I killed him in self-defense," the old man said aloud. "And I killed him well."
The dentuso referred to above is the mako shark who makes the first strike at the old man's hard won prey.
In all the book is interesting, and one could force Christian symbols on top of it and read it in a way about the agonies of Christ--but I'm not certain that the text bears that full weight. I find it difficult to read that way even though the obvious comparisons are there--fisherman, cross, and nails.
While I enjoyed revisiting this classic, and while I would recommend it to almost everyone as a quick and light exposure to Hemingway without some of the trappings that come with The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms, it did not have great resonance for me. Nevertheless, I will think about it for a few days and regard it as a palate cleanser in between bouts of Faulkner. My next read--the remarkable As I Lay Dying.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 7:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Some Faulkner Moments
Once again, Faulkner's humor, mordant though it is, comes through in this story of the Bundrens.
from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner[Referring to Addie Bundren who lay on her bed dying as others are debating doing a lick of work to earn three dollars]
"But if she dont last until you get back," he says. "She will be disappointed."
*****
[And somewhat later]
His folks buries at New Hope, too, not three miles away . But it's just like him to marry a woman born a day's hard ride away and have her die on him.
As I Lay Dying is the story of the Bundren clan Addie (dying), Anse (ne'er-do-well layabout of a husband), Jewel, Darl, Vardaman, and Cash (her four sons, the last of whom is working on her coffin just outside the window and Dewey Dell (her daughter). Told through the voices of all of them, Cora and Vern Tull, and a number of other characters, Faulkner himself thought of it as a tour de force, the one book he would leave behind that would be remarkable and make a mark. However, in his introduction to a later edition of The Sound and the Fury, while he recognized its worth, he noted that when he first set pen to paper, he already knew the last words of the book--an experience that did not satisfy him the way writing The Sound and the Fury did.
I know that I enjoyed this book when I first read it in high school, but I suspect that it is likely to be a very different experience for me now. At least I hope so.
Later:--That famous note may have been associated with the introduction to the 1932 edition of Sanctuary, not The Sound and the Fury. Sorry.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Faulkner Gives Gore a Helping Hand
from As I Lay Dying William Faulkner[From the chapter narrated by Peabody the Doctor]
"Me, walk up, weighing two hundred and twenty-five pounds?" I say. "Walk up that durn wall?" He stands there beside a tree. Too bad the Lord made the mistake of giving trees roots and giving the Anse Bundrens He makes feet and legs. If He'd just swapped them, there wouldn't ever be a worry about this country being deforested someday. Or any other country.
Moments. Small moments of real humor along with many other moments. And more than this--perhaps something for tomorrow--Faulkner as one progenitor of magic realism? Consider the case of Darl, narrator extraordinaire. . . or rather, let us consider it together in the near future.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 1:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Faulkner, Hemingway, et al.
I always feel a little defensive and a little self-conscious when I'm reading books such as the ones I've posted about here recently. It may seem like I'm trying to show off. It may seem a little snooty or high-falutin'. I recognize that it may seem a little elitist.
That's why I thought it might be good to explore my motives in reading these books. My motives are really very, very simple. I'm enjoying it. . . a lot. The only good reason for reading any book that doesn't directly contribute to either spiritual advancement or betterment in some aspect of life-functioning is that you enjoy the reading.
I enjoy the challenge of reading Faulkner and I enjoy the ample rewards such reading bestows on the reader. There is something about encountering writers one was once forced to read for "edification" on one's own terms. Now I can read Faulkner without a bunch of people trying to judge how well I am reading Faulkner. I've already admitted that I am neither the best nor most profound interpreter of texts. I am not a super-skilled reader--I can only offer the meager embellishments I do here. But to paraphrase something I read last night on Sam's dance teacher's t-shirt, "When I read, I do not try to read better than anyone else, I only try to read better than myself." So the challenges--there are many types--sheer linguistic thickness (Faulkner), a stark and bald simplicity that may or may not contain hidden depths (Faulkner). characters whose vacuity and the emptiness of whose lives absolutely beggars the imagination (Fitzgerald), and so forth.
So, I will continue to read these along with other works interspersed. For now, I'm content with Faulkner. I may round that out by watching a series of Tennessee Williams plays and adding a dollop of Flannery O'Connor or the truly bizarre Carson McCullers, savoring for the moment the warmth of the tropics in the midst of the winter of my discontent.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2008
Jury Duty Today
So, depending on how it goes, there may be a lot of opportunity for posting. If so, I have a number of things I wanted to share from my reading of As I Lay Dying--some humor, some observations in the hope that a better acquainted reader might help some fundamental understandings.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Darl--The Strange One
Throughout the book Darl Bundren is typified as "the strange one." Cora Tull thinks he's a darling and the most precious of the group, the one who loves Addie best, but Darl is the agent provacateur whose actions propel much of the book.
Darl is also very odd in this collection of characters. Consider this observation from early on in the book:
from As I Lay Dying
William FaulknerJewel glances back, then goes around the house. I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.
It doesn't seem particularly remarkable until you've read a little way and realized that there is no other character in this book that speaks with such remarkable clarity, such breadth of vision. The sentences are clear, grammatical, not shot through with the normal difficulties of Faulkner's country folk--ranging from near incoherence to an obsessive-compulsive concentration on the single object of their attention. Darl, in contrast is placid, distant, clear. In fact, he may be among the clearest voices in any of the Faulkner that I have read--preternaturally clear.
This is brought home by the fact that Darl narrates the scene of Addie Bundren's death, even though he is, at the time, several miles away, helping his brother Jewel fix a wheel that has been broken while trying to transport some lumber in order to make some additional money. Moreover, Darl is also privy to the thoughts of several characters. Here he shares Dewey Dell's thoughts:
from As I Lay Dying
William FaulknerShe will go out where Peabody is, where she can stand in the twilight and look at his back with such an expression that, feeling her eyes and turning, he will say: I would not let it grieve me, now. She was old, and sick too. Suffering more than we knew. She couldn't have got well.
Vardaman's getting big now, and with you to take good care of them all. I would try not to let it grieve me. I expect you'd better go and get some supper ready. It dont have to be much. But they'll need to eat, and she looking at him, saying You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl
And then he continues with a television-like viewing of the events around Addie's deathbed.
Darl knows things that have not been shared with him. For example, he knows about Jewel's parentage, about Dewey Dell's condition.
Distant, cool, and knowing, Darl seems to manipulate many of the circumstances of the novel. He is uncannily intelligent. The words he uses:
from As I Lay Dying
William FaulknerBefore us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.
It clucks and murmurs among the spokes and about the mules' knees, yellow, skummed with flotsam and with thick soiled gouts of foam as though it had sweat, lathering, like a driven horse. Through the undergrowth it goes with a plaintive sound, a musing sound; in it the unwinded cane and saplings lean as before a little gale, swaying without reflections as though suspended on invisible wires from the branches overhead. Above the ceaseless surface they stand--trees, cane, vines--rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water.
Who is this boy? Considering his upbringing and the schooling reflected in his siblings, how does he come to know the words "myriad," "Impermanent," "significant," among others?
Darl is one of the keys to the novel and one of the keys to what Faulkner has to say about family, community, grieving, and living again after grief. I don't know what that key will unlock--that remains to be seen. But he certainly poses a puzzle from very early on. This alien intelligence looks in to the events encompassing the Bundren family, manipulates them, and draws them into meaning and significance. What meaning and what significance remain to be seen.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 8:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Little Knowledge
Having read the book before, I'm looking for signs of something different--something that brings Anse Bundren into the realm of the human and humane. And it's here and it's interesting and it is one of those things that makes one pause and go, "Hmmmmm."
from As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner[Dewey Dell narrating]
Pa helps himself and pushes the dish on. But he does not begin to eaat. His hands are halfclosed on either side of his plate, his head bowed a little, his awry hair standing into the lamplight. He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it no longer alive and dont yet know that it is dead.
But Cash is eating, and he is too. "You better eat something," He says. He is looking at pa. "Like Cash and me. You'll need it."
"Ay," pa says. He rouses up, like a steer that's been kneeling in a pond and you run at it. "She would not degrudege me it."
This from the man who in his own sections says:
from As I Lay Dying William Faulkner[Anse Bundren narrating]
But it's a long wait, seems like. It's bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson's at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn't never see the river so high, and it not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn't never see nor hear of it being so in the memory of a man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.
But now I can get them teeeth. That will be a comfort. It will.
Addie's death gives him the excuse to drive to Jefferson, a day's cart-trip away to bury her, but also to pick up some false teeth along the way. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
Posted by Steven Riddle at 9:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack