Absalom, Absalom! By William Faulkner

He (Faulkner) exacting his revenge on credulous readers, yes born to belief out of what (?), guilt, victory, destruction, reconstruction, deconstruction (Oh! Merida, where art thou now?).  Exacting, extracting rapt attention - hiding, disguising, camouflaging the truths, for only in truths do the lies emerge, his Oxford-based drunken stupor perceives, while he places the tale in Cambridge, in distant victorious Harvard moving the blame eternally and forever north away from the distant evil begetting evil.  Who else could make “lambent” a noun?  Not Joyce for sure, no certainly not Joyce.

Sin, revenge, retribution, reconciliation – a Faulkner box he places us all in.  In their (so-called) modernity do Joyce, Proust, Faulkner (especially him ((Faulkner)) really have something to say in a new way?  Or does their effluvium, vomiting out of language actually dull our senses beyond hearing?  Do we admire him (Faulkner) because he is so obscure he must be great?  Or has our 21^st century sensibility been so dulled by computer speak (somnolent unto eye dulling clouds of grayness) and ad-talk (Attention, there’s just been a merger between our two biggest competitors – meeting in thirty minutes) we can no longer respond internally to his (Faulkner’s) endless monologue.  Thinking this is difficult, one (Ted) quails at the thought of Finnegan’s Wake while contemplating a second run at Ulysses.

Faulkner finally lets us (The Readers) off the hook and tells the story and a pretty good story it is, too.  But is it, finally worth his (Ted’s)  or their (the book group’s) effort?  Do the thousands of mysterious words add up to enough to make the story of sin, expiation, and finally (?) reconciliation (does he ((Faulkner) provide any of that?}worth the effort, trial, expenditure of limited energy, holding of breath until faces turns from pink to red to blue?  And the story can’t be told without the lawyer, a deus ex-machina who (the lawyer) makes the whole story unbelievable into not working without his intermediation.  “At the center of any novel is curiosity about the other.”  Shreve’s voice and curiosity voices ours.  The other, Faulkner’s south and life in post-Civil War Mississippi, dominates him, and eventually us.  

Does Faulkner’s writing become more clear as he approaches the climax, or does my (Ted’s) reading become more enlightened?  I think Faulkner, in the end (literally) is truly a story teller who becomes taken up by his story.  As such, he must allow the story to override style, clarity to intrude on excessive verbosity.  Or maybe he merely has become bored with the process and want to get it over with so he can sink back into his Oxford induced alcoholic daze, dream, reverie, nightmare, hallucination. 

An Iranian writer has commented that “When events are in the saddle, remember that it is the artists and writers who will crystallize the meanings of the times we are living through.”  Faulkner lived through the chaos of the south of the first half of the twentieth century.  Looking back, through air-conditioned comfort and media induced homogeneity; it becomes difficult for us to reconstruct the rage, resentment, discouragement, futility, loss, and self-abnegation growing from the moral and physical defeat reinforced by a decades-long period of reconstruction.  Faulkner recreates that time for us, and it is as painful as it is difficult to understand.  What each reader brings to this dialogue, in the end, will determine the kind of reading growing from it.  Faulkner provides the meaning, drawn through the searing furnace of his own experience, if we can only approach it with him.