. Spinning .

Okay, I made that up, but it seems that this is what Faulkner is doing as he builds the character base and the importance of the automobile to plot.

It brings to mind making tapioca, or more particularly, jelly or candy where you must stir constantly while heating though nothing much appears to be going on. All at once, a certain temperature is reached and the boiling cannot be controlled by stirring and the mixture must be taken off the heat before it overflows the pot.

Faulkner has given us enough time spent with the two main characters, Boon Hoggenbeck and Lucius Priest, and has them past their first hurtle of taking off with the automobile on a secret joyride that will last supposedly for a day or two until they must return the car. Here, with the addition of the stowaway Ned, and the interest of Miss Reba's house of ill repute, we have more interaction that moves the story a bit more quickly.

And just as the story is starting to form those tiny bubbles at the edge of the pot, Faulkner threatens to boil: Ned has traded the auto for a racehorse.

Interesting, as Faulkner gives voice via his narrator into a manner of labeling generically the political positions of his own time by describing the whorehouse's master (or pimp):

Picking up some speed here with the reading; hate to say it, but the first 80 pages were duller than matte paint.

Boon has been warning Lucius and Ned about this particular spot and how hard it would be to get the car across this mudhole portion of road. What the other two were not made aware of is that there is a gent who is not only prepared sitting by with mules and tackles to get the passersby through the mud for a fee, he is also responsible for producing and maintaining the obstacle.

I like Faulkner's facing up to the clash of past and present, old and new. There is an element of change and there is something that never changes: the folks who will always be there to take advantage of opportunity for self gain.

One of the first things I noticed about Cormac McCarthy's writing style was a propensity to double up on words and phrases that emphasized the meaning. For example, something like "the sun was hot, was hot, and was hot," which isn't from anything McCarthy, just a quickie as an example. Another writer (why can't I recall?) did this as well. It sets the fact in the reader's mind exactly how hot the sun felt.

But with Faulkner, I'm seeing a duplication of meaning using a different word that is set to emphasize perhaps, but to my editing mind, comes off like an editing change of which word is better, choose one, drop the other.

While reaching and approaching are not exactly alike in meaning, one being successful where the other is nearly so, their use here would seem to make the difference negligible. Whereas the two words may even be in conflict with each other, one could say that it would be a clarifying term, had approaching come before reaching. This would indicate a moment's movement that could make the difference.

Movement again is the subject of the next pair of verbs–and Faulkner does this most often with verbs–and while lurched and canted indicate two different motions, I can't help but think that either one singley used would have sufficed.

What is the mood behind Faulkner's choice of diction? Could it be that we have an old man telling a tale and this speech pattern becomes more intimate with its voice of reality? For me, however, always and ever in editing mode, I see it as a returned-from-workshopping eagerness to change the words of the writer.

Slow. Ploddingly so. I am missing something here, I'm sure, but I'm about to miss more as I plan to scan-read through some of this to find something that holds me to Faulkner's story.

Yes, I am ashamed of myself; I'm obviously missing the magic somehow. There are several instances where Faulkner repeats his statement using different words lengthening an already somnambulant story. The plot points have been the planning of this trip and the manipulations on the part of both Boon and Lucius to get away from the family and take off in the automobile. Ned is a stowaway and Faulkner introduces his presences with a bit of humor as Ned's flatulence gives him away.

So I'll be skipping some passages, thoroughly ashamed of my illiterate ways.

Faulkner has taken a heck of a lot of time to give us an environment with a couple of characters and an adventure about to begin. At this point, those who like action and fast paced reading might have continued reading to find some satisfaction in the story. I must admit though that even I, a staunch convert to Faulkner, was finding myself reading a paragraph or two and putting the book down, unimpressed by story, character, prose.

But now that I'm over that hurdle of the first seventy pages, it seems that I am getting the feeling of the interaction between the two main characters of the boy, Lucius and Boon Hoggenbeck as they 'steal' the boy's grandfather's car for some enjoyment before they are bound to return it. 

There are two main points made by this book, one being the relationship between Southern blacks and whites in the early part of the 20th century and the other being the nature of good and evil as the boy recognizes his own capacity for lying to go along with Boon's plan.

While I'm still not excited about Faulkner's narrative style in this particular novel, I do see where it was all leading and am looking forward to a more interesting story unfolding.

Fifty pages in, yet I do not feel the Faulkner magic, the connection with the characters and the place. It makes me wonder if mood is relative, if perhaps reality must be left behind to become totally absorbed with his stories–it's been a while.

There is one trick that Faulkner uses here that I hadn't seen in other novels (of his) I've read: the story starts with "Grandfather said" in bold subtitle and from there the story unwinds as told by the Grandfather to the narrator (odd, but true if you take the subtitle at face value). Faulkner then uses parenthesis to clarify some statements that would qualify as "asides." These bring the reader into a more intimate situation whereby he, together with the narrator, are fed details in a one-to-one basis.

Unfortunately, I have been finding this parenthesized "asides" rather annoying. The story is loaded with characters, of which Boon, the child who is the narrator's grandfather, and the grandfather are paramount to the story so far, but which seem to clutter the action. The action being a simple setup of place and situation and the focus an automobile and the status of the hierarchy of the family, the business, and the employees. These "asides" are halting; as if to remind me that not only is a tidbit being offered, but that it is the grandfather who is telling the story.  I can read no more than a page or two at a time.

So, will Faulkner redeem himself in my literary opinion or shall I merely plod through a classic story told by a master storyteller for the homage due him?

Not nuts about the first twenty pages of this and I do hope it gets better as it moves deeper into the story. Right now, there's a basic plot, a bit of action to drive it, and a truckload of characters that are falling over each other for my attention. Too many people, too many bits of detail, too much unnecessary stuff that overshadows the reader's chance to fall in with these folk. I find myself forcing the reading to get beyond a "who cares?" attitude.

It is Faulkner, however, so of course I'm bound to catch the rhythm eventually.

Your typical backwoods family: Anse, hardworking, toothless, faithful, semi-useless; Addie, his wife, very hardworking, resentful, cheated on her husband, dead at an early age; Cash, their oldest son, focused, determined, honest; son Darl, intelligent, watchful, non-risk-taking, strange, arsonist; son Jewel (son of Addie and NOT Anse), wooden-eyed, angry, loner, fiercely loyal; daughter Dewey Dell, dopey, pregnant, loving; youngest son Vardaman, just a kid trying to hold it all together.

Faulkner’s technique in using the multiple point of view and stream of conciousness form provides the reader with a more intimate relationship with the characters, and the involvement requires closer reading to develop insight and decision as to their credibility.  We find ourselves believing one, then may after hearing from others, change our minds.

Conflicts:  Death, unwed pregnancy, adultery, arson, floods, stinky coffin, nutty son, broken wagons, manipulations, selfishness, abortion, surprise wedding.

Faulkner certainly puts a lot of action and misery within one family situation.  Narrative structure is reinforced by different points of view but remains linear with inclusion of some backstory woven within.  Information is fed to the reader in bits gleaned from a myriad number of characters, mainly family and neighbors, so that the story is built in layers of clues that parallel unseen until they connect and move forward.  I visualize the DNA graphics we see in twisting strands of different colored pearls.

Only Faulkner knows how to create literary life using these pearls.

We knew the river was rising, the rains swelling it to wash out the bridges, and the Bundren’s are in trouble crossing with the wagon loaded with Addie in her coffin.  Two things detracted from the drama of the moment (for me).

First, a few years back I had watched the TV mini-series movie (not the show) Lonesome Dove.  In it, the main character Gus had extracted the same type of promise from his friends; that he be brought to some distant place to be buried.  The same thing happened, with the coffin caught up in a river crossing (only Gus fell out).  So the reading of the Bundren’s struggles in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying lost some of its punch.

Second, the multiple points of view that Faulkner uses could have been extremely powerful here, in this immediate dramatic situation, and yet the still slightly difficult to follow free thinking of the characters detracts by dragging the moment out and by not making it totally clear what is happening, as the views are broken up between those on the banks and Cash, Darl and Jewel in the river.  Somehow, for me, the excitement was slow-paced, and all I wanted to do was see if the coffin would make it safely somehow to land.

Though I’m not sure I agree with the language and thought patterns that Faulkner assigns his characters, I do again see his dedication to understanding the passage of time in other than our own decided measured out format.  Here Darl, one of Addie’s sons, is narrating the story as they try to cross a swollen stream with Addie’s coffin in the back of the wagon:

The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.  Yet they appear dwarfed.  It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.  (p. 146)

You need to read this several times to visualize it.  I keep in mind something Anse, the father, had made a point of early on in the novel; that is, that roads brought a horizontalness and motion to the world that man and trees, as uprights, were yet in conflict.  Darl’s view above can give us a point of time from here to there–most easily seen as ahead.  But here he sees the river as time running sideways, separating him and his brothers Cash and Jewel, and of course the body of their mother, from the others across the stream.  They appear smaller than they should at his estimated distance. 

"runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between" – This is more difficult to comprehend.  Focusing upon the double threads (being looped) and the idea of a loop being endless, I almost see time as running on between them as they are standing still; an idea of infinity and how the human mind and body are unaffected by it, as well as it by them.  Addie has been dead five days, and yet she is lying among them.  Does it affect her the same way as those living?  I see the separation of the family by some Faulknerian measure of time and space, and wonder how it affects the story.

Man, after this novel if I don’t get it right I’ll give up.  (I’ve just gotten used to good and well.)  Addie, for eighty pages, has been lying in her bed, and now in her coffin, where they laid her.

It’s the question of Lie versus Lay, and if you click the link, it’ll bring you to a page that I’ve learned to keep handy while I post on Faulkner’s book (I’m not going back to correct the incorrect usage up to this point) where it will lay beside my computer as I type.

Faulkner obviously loved to play with the question of time and space, effectively seen in The Sound and the Fury.  But I love this passage in As I Lay Dying, where Addie’s youngest boy, Vardaman, runs from the room just as she has died:

Then I begin to run.  I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop.  Then I begin to cry.  I can feel where the fish was in the dust.  It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls.  Then it wasn’t so.  It hadn’t happened then.  And now she is getting so far ahead I cannot catch her.  (p. fifty-three)

Vardaman is referring to a fish he’d caught earlier that his father, Anse, made him gut by himself.  He is about eleven years old, and his concept of life and death is likening his mother to the fish, the place where the fish was flopping alive just a bit ago, and his mother was still breathing.  A child’s wonder at the passing of time and of life, and yet are we ever resolved as adults to an answer?

NOTE ADDED: Guess I nailed it:

Vardaman:  My mother is a fish.  (p. 85)

Ah, just when the muses had returned, poked me with their golden staffs and had me hopping, hoping; I read Faulkner:

Pa stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped, motionless.  He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the saw.  He comes nearer and rubs his hand, palm and back, on his thigh and lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her hands are.  He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smoothe it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead.  He tries to smoothe it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw, smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm and back, on his thigh.  The sound of the saw snores steadily into the room.  Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums.  "God’s will be done," he says.  "Now I can get them teeth."  (As I Lay Dying, p. 51)

Dangle-armed, not arms dangling; humped, not hunched over.  It is the language Faulkner uses to describe action without using adverbs; turning them to adjectives as if they belonged there.  This same phrase has been repeated in a slightly different way, just as Faulkner has repeated Anse’s movement of wiping his hands before he touches Addie, who has just died.  Do you think Faulkner’s run short of words?  Not when he uses others such as "perverse ubiquity."  The saw has repeatedly been "snoring" into the room, where the dying woman had lain in her bed.  How perfect the word used to simulate the making of her coffin to the woman they hope is just sleeping on her bed.

I used to be inspired to write by reading good writing.  But with Faulkner and McCarthy and Steinbeck, I am halted.  There is no way I can ever hope to write like this; my writing will improve with every reading, but I will always be a hundred steps behind those I admire.   

Shall I be content with reading, then; to soar within the language used in stories told by others?  Methinks so.