If you want to discuss the book with me 1:1, you can choose a time here. If you prefer to send me your thoughts via the written word, you can respond to this email with a letter of your own. And if you feel like keeping it all to yourself, that’s fine too :)
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m writing to you from Florianópolis, a beach town in the south of Brazil, from a cold box five hundred yards from soporific waves and endless continuous stretches of sand. The part of the city I’m staying in—Novo Campeche—is reminiscent of Oahu’s North Shore with its poke and its bungalows and its restaurants with many missing walls. Here, like in Hawaii, the beach is found everywhere here: on top of cars, under arms, on inland sidewalks thousands of yards away. There is no escaping it.
And there is no escaping the Brazilian culture, either. From big cities to small towns, they live under their own sun, with their own joy that borders on unintelligible to those who come from the north, the south, the east, and the west. The difference in culture and mentality—the unbreakable optimism, the naturally deep breaths—at first makes foreigners feel like anthropologists before the lucky ones are swept away by the great Brazilian current, relieved to be unable to keep their heads above water.
Now, onto the topic at hand…
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Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in 1930, at thirty-two years old, over the course of six weeks, from the hours of midnight to 4am, at the tail-end of his twelve-hour shift on a power plant, without changing a word of the first draft. The man was a lunatic.
Though the novel was unsuccessful upon publication, it is now considered a pioneering work that stands as one of greatest of the twentieth century—the exact result the author was striving for:
I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be…. Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.
Given the book’s radically different structure and diction, it should not be surprising that a man who marched to the beat of his own drum wrote it.
Faulkner grew up writing poetry in Mississippi with the aspiration of becoming a renowned writer. Before dropping out of university, he attempted to join the US army, but was rejected because he stood 5’5” and weighed even less. Though he did successfully join the Canadian RAF, he never saw active service in World War I, a reality that did not stop him from making up fake war stories as well as faking injuries once he returned to his hometown one year later.
After leaving the University of Mississippi in 1920 (with a D in English, I might add), he made his way to New Orleans while many of his American contemporaries—such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway—decided to pursue the arts in Europe.
The physical distance between Faulkner and Hemingway, however, did not stop their ongoing competitiveness, defined by a mix of respect and resentment, not unlike the hot-cold relationship he had with Fitzgerald. The feud seems to have started in 1945 when Hemingway wrote:
[Faulkner] has the most talent of anybody and he just needs a sort of conscience that isn’t there.…But he will write absolutely perfectly straight and then go on and on and not be able to end it.
And continued when Faulkner stated that Hemingway was one the five greatest recent American novelists, qualifying his judgement by saying that:
he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.
which prompted Hemingway to utter one of his most famous replies:
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Despite the rivalry that grew over time, Faulkner actually began his career by writing in styles that were imitative of both Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Thankfully, these works were not well-received, and the lack of interest in them coupled with frequent rejections from publishers freed Faulkner to pursue greater experimentation that resulted first in The Sound and the Fury and then, one year later, in As I Lay Dying. He would later say about these early experiences:
One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’
Though he could write, Faulkner is certainly hard to read. The first time through As I Lay Dying, I detested much of the novel as I found it impossible to follow: major plot points were hidden in cryptic metaphors and understated sentences; the diction at times was incomprehensible; the shifting between narrators was disjointed and unsettling; and whenever clear philosophy did arise and lovely language blossomed, the author seemed intent on destroying it moments later through a series of esoteric sentences.
I am not alone in my confusion. When Jean Stein, an interviewer from the Paris Review, asked Faulkner:
Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
he replied:
Read it four times.
I only read it twice; and though I am certain that I did not get to every layer of depth on my second pass, the experience was wholly different from the first time through. Armed with an understanding of the plot and an acclimation to the various narrators, much of the splendor I originally missed started to stand out to me.
Faulkner’s capacity for developing characters is remarkable. Their dialogue lands on the page as though it had come straight from their mouths; and by writing from each of their perspectives, he continuously breathes oxygen into them until they come alive, each with their own distinct and consistent voice. The differences between them is vast, yet they are drawn together on an almost Biblical quest, just as real discordant families are.
Rather than choose a familiar cast—the rich businessman, the struggling artist—he insists on depicting rural life as it was, as though he was on a mission to take us into the middle of Mississippi to exalt voices that would were going to be forgotten before he inscribed them in the center of the literary cannon.
This perspective was fascinating. For the first time in my life, I walked through the hard hot countryside and the struggle that nearly every facet of their lives represent. Each of them speaks of the various difficulties, and of their conflictual relationship with religion, and their worries become our own. We are reminded of the reality that each individual is privately facing a whole host of internal struggles, and through that journey we better understand the men and women in our lives.
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Though I could certainly go into a more detailed analysis of the plot and characters, I would not do a much better job than the resources out there, so instead I’m going to conclude with a series of my favorite passages from the book:
Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner.
The quilt is drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands and her face outside. She is propped on the pillow, with her head raised so she can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candlesticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.
Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you’re tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going one lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash fell of of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.
He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.
[W]ords dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. . . . [M]otherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.
Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.
See you next month for Post Office by Charles Bukowski!
Okay.
I confess, I didn't finish this. I got about 2/3rds through. I did read it way back in the past. And, my copy of the book is an old paperback with faded typeface and yellowed pages. So, reading the dialect was particularly difficult for me and my aging eyes. Maybe that was the issue for me.
That said, I appreciate the author's genius and ingenuity. But, I found the story difficult to follow. I outlined each of the chapters in an effort to better understand what was happening from a narrative perspective. But, the writing didn't bring out any emotion in me.