Right now I am reading Absalom, Absalom!by William Faulkner for my Southern Lit class. This is the second time I have read Faulkner, the first time during
I can read good.
my sophomore year of undergrad. Five years later I felt a little more prepared to tackle this literary giant and make sense out of the seeming mess of his work.
Mess is obviously the wrong word, but at first glance, that’s exactly what it feels like. His sentences are long and contrived and full of run-on sentences, abused punctuation, multiple perspectives, and hidden meanings. Don’t believe me? An excerpt:
“Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence” (7).
I didn’t make that up, I swear. And if that isn’t confusing enough (which it is, let’s not kid ourselves), that passage is about the Civil War and Reconstruction. So, yeah. Last night I read a sentence that was three pages long. Though, that is nowhere near the record for the longest sentence in the English language. That honor belongs to Jonathan Coe’s book, The Rotters Club, which contains a sentence that is 13,955 words long. See ya never.
This isn’t a post to show you how neat I am for reading long, confusing sentences and then finding (hopefully) intelligent things to say about them. Rather, I have been comparing this Faulkner effort to the one five years ago and am very happy to recognize how much better this one is going. While Absalom, Absalom! is no walk in the park, it definitely offers an intrinsic reward for me. The effort of struggling through a book and taking pages of notes, just to stay with the plot-line is rewarding, as opposed to frustrating, like it was several years ago. Methinks I won’t be picking up every Faulkner novel out there tomorrow, but I do think there is something to be said for stepping outside of one’s comfort zone, intellectually sparring with a book and feeling better on the other side.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Print.
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