The Year of Reading Faulker: As I Lay Dying

This book sucked. I'm done with it. Darl, Cash, Tull, don't care what happens to your mom or where you bury her.

I was supposed to be done with it a long time ago. Onward to Light in August (I think).



More after the jump...

The Year of Reading Faulker: As I Lay Dying

Did you think I forgot? That I would let this pass quietly into the night? That the overwhelming, convoluted, winding passages about Mississippi's rural quirks would frustrate me to no end?

After being thoroughly confused by The Sound and The Fury, I came to As I Lay Dying with some trepidation. The path before me had been carved by my good friend HCD who attempted the book a few years ago, but came back with little to show for it. Here's what he had to say:

I had always hated fiction. But as a college sophomore seeking to shun mainstream society, I discovered a hardcore band called As I Lay Dying. When I learned that the name was from Faulkner, I made a revolutionary decision: I would voluntarily read this novel. You can guess how my mind was transformed…

It wasn’t. I checked AILD out of the library, read 20 pages, remembered why I didn’t like novels, and returned it to the library three weeks later.

I did eventually gain an appreciation of fiction. Not high brow fiction, but John Grisham and paperbacks with embossed titles that you can buy at Wal-Mart—completely not hip, I know.

Will I give Faulkner another chance? Will his lost spy novel manuscript ever be discovered? (ed. he's joking...I think...)

I get this book or I think I get this book. I'm enjoying it actually. About 60 pages in, I think I understand Jewel, Darl, Tull, the girl named Dewey. Jewel and Tull left even though their mom was dying. I'm intrigued. It's still convoluted, it still winds around, there is no sense of chronology, but Faulkner obviously had it in mind--he tears bits off the puzzle, makes his own pieces and glues them back together in his own design.

I'm hyper aware of Faulkner's rhythm after reader The Sound and The Fury, whcih has disciplined me for this one. Maybe the only way to read Faulkner is to read them all back to back.

Anybody else read this? What are your thoughts?


More after the jump...

The Sound and The Fury Update 3

The Sound and The Fury: Update 3 (Final Update)

Finally finished this, but I will declare it "undone."
My copy of The Sound and The Fury does not have the appendix with the explanations of the Compson family and the fate of Caddy, once again I turned to the reliable Wikipedia in this matter. An interesting turn by Faulkner to name Caddy's daughter Quentin after her brother that committed suicide. The fated wild streak of the Miss Quentin comes to bear in the last section where no one has any control over Miss Quentin and she runs away with a carnival barker (was this mentioned in Section 3? Can't remember).

Perhaps the most disturbing of all this is Dilsey's steadfast loyalty to the Compson family and the family's reliance/command over Dilsey. Jason's reasoning for holding onto Caddy's money instead of giving it to Quentin is understandable, but it seems that instead of hoarding it, spending it towards improving his family now, rather than holding it for some uncertain future glory, Quentin's actions seem justifiable in stealing from her Uncle Jason.

On Matt Baker's recommendation, I read a piece in a 2006 issue of Oxford American about The Sound and the Fury by William Caverlee. Though Caverlee says that the Jason section is 'comic relief,' to me it's more like typical family disfunction, desperate moves for a desperate family, once prominent now a failure. But maybe Caverlee is right, normally that would be sadness, but Faulkner sets everything else up before it as so depressing, that Jason becomes semi-sympathetic.

Caverlee also dissects the odd chronological sectioning, but also addresses the first-time readers' discombobulation. There is constant guessing on speaker, timeline, frustration. Caverlee says this about the Quentin-narrated section:

"[Faulkner] pushes--dares--the reader to give up entirely, to throw away one's marked-up text, chartes and timelines with a groan of exasperation at the verbiage, at 'lonely and inviolate sand'--then draws us back in at the last minute with some gesture--the lost Italian girl at the bakery, the boys at the river--some gesture of fineness and bewilderment and human loneliness"

At least I know I'm not alone.

Next up: As I Lay Dying
More after the jump...

Year of Reading Faulkner: The Sound and The Fury Update 2

The Sound and The Fury: Update 2
(Read Update 1)

So I cheated... I read the Wikipedia page on this book after reading the Quentin section. It gave me comfort to know I am not alone. Quentin and this section are screw-ups. Figure myself to pretty savvy with the post-mod stuff, since I'm toting around a copy of A Thousand Plateaus most days, but putting the pieces of that together was difficult. To say Faulkner throws the reader into the action is a misnomer, instead he throws you in the aftermath of the action, to put together a body just from bullet holes.

A note--possibly a suicide note, someone point me to where that is in the section however. Concern/lack of concern about time---it doesn't matter to someone about to kill themselves. The immigrant girl---an obvious Caddy reference and Shreve's comment about how "it happens all the time" about how children follow him around, yes, Quentin is distraught over a lost childhood.

I understood they sold Benjy's "pasture" for Quentin's Harvard education, okay but why is that Benjy's pasture? Where is Quentin's pasture? Why doesn't he have a pasture? Do the other children have pastures?

Dalton Ames. The unspeakable name. Beat up everyone as if they are Dalton Ames. Wikipedia told me Caddy was marrying Herbert to cover up the pregnancy with Dalton Ames, but I didn't catch that was the problem. All I realized was that Caddy was marrying Herbert, but Quentin was obsessed with Dalton Ames. Maybe I should read more than 7 or 8 pages at a time...

The southern vs. northern element in this section is fascinating--how white Southerners get along better with Southern blacks, as if both sides agree on repression. Odd, really. Chivalrous Southern Gentlemen, but not chivalrous to blacks.
And these are the inconsistencies of the Southern mindset...

After trudging through this, understanding, but not understanding, confused and in awe of sentences like these:

"Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the signficance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who."

What does everyone else think so far?
More after the jump...

Year of Reading Faulkner Update: The Sound and The Fury

In 2010, Deckfight decided to take on Faulkner. This is a chronicle of our journey.



Hey remember this? I'll admit, it's been a bit of struggle the first two weeks. I'm going pretty slow, I'm reading some other stuff simultaneously, really just to keep my interest. Yes, this is hard. And no, I'm not totally into The Sound and The Fury yet, but I have started.

Just so we're clear, I've read no outside criticism. No Wikipedia of the book, no Cliffsnotes, and I never read this before in high school or college. I just read the back of the book and learned of Benjy the "man-child."




In my Faulkner Reader edition, I'm on page 60, 61, just after the "June 2, 1910" section. Which by the way, is this the first (and only) chapter designation? More chapters would be helpful, but I guess that would disturb the rhythm that Faulkner establishes with the time flips and italics. It's hard to read, but I settled into the rhythm of it by about the 25th or 30th page, though I felt mroe confused than the flashing-piercing-time shocks of the Lost castaways.

Benjy is what one of our Sound and Fury editions calls a "man-child," obviously mentally-incapacitated, yet observant enough to craft a nice first-person narrative. There's some weird fascination with sister Caddy, with a simmering sexual tension there--incest insinuations make me sick.

With that I'm confused on the rest of the characters and their relationships...Dilsey is obviously a caretaker/servant for the family, but I have no idea where Luster, Jason or Varsh come in, except that they sleep in a barn sometimes. And why, exactly, did they change Benjy's name from Maury? Was it because it was more biblical?

Conclusion so far: Almost threw this book down within the first 10 pages, then settled into it. Wasn't sure if the whole thing was going to be Benjy/Maury's disjointed observations, but now that I've barely started the Quentin section, I'm intrigued to see what is revealed.

Anybody else reading this? What do you think so far?
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