A review by korrick
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

4.0

3.5/5

One day he was not. Then he was. Then he was not.

Of course life decided to hit me with a (good, for once) sledgehammer the day before I'm due to review a juggernaut basket case of a work, so if this review is even more discombobulated than this kind of read merits, there's the rightful target of your blame. Anyway, here I am, seven years after my second most recent entanglement with the infamous Nobel Laureate of the cthulhu Southern Gothic, comparatively dazed but much less confused. Some of this can of course be chalked up to the minimal chronology + genealogy this puffed up edition saw fit to put in in place of any sort of (more plebian, perhaps (although plebes are why we have 40 hour work weeks and weekends, but try telling the libertarians that)) (foot/end)notes, but there's also the matter of the multiple multi-thousand paged tomes I've inflicted upon myself in the interim, transmogrifying my brain into cheesecloth with a gaping maw and gluttonous gut attached to every opening. You come back to a barely 400 page bout scraping by with an all too familiarly sordid history rambling about your own backyard, you're tempted to take the enterprising author by the shoulders and say "Faulkner, I love your lengthening longwise language along our mutually acquaintanced tongue, I truly do, but my sweet summer child, your doom and gloom bigotries are motherfucking pathetic," and boy howdy will that set the academics off. In short, it's what I've come to expect after making my way through four works of this fiendish wordsmith whose prose barely covers up the plot holes and whose repetitions can only be forgiven due to how poorly 99% of everyone else performs upon it, so all I have to say is, if you think you want to read this, really think about your thinking such. I derived enough pleasure from it to have been worth my own price of engagement, but anyone who sanctimoniously sets this up as a "must read," however implicitly, is a liar and a fool, and you'd be better off learning how to think in other venues much easier to parse than otherwise wasting your time with these here stodges and insipidities.

[S]ince neither Henry and Bon, anymore than Quentin and Shreve, were the first young men to believe (or at least apparently act on the assumption) that wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of settling youth's private difficulties and discontents.

Some more sacrilege, perhaps, but seeing as how A, A! came out four years into Faulkner's career as a screenwriter, I have to wonder what the impact of the moneymaking was on the lionizing. You see, I've had my fair share of "experimental" media over the years, as well as a recent batch of "can't let the audience figure out the plot twist ahead of time else our exploited workers will succeed in unionizing" twaddle, and while I enjoy a formative singularity every once in a while, there's a reason why in medias res has worked for the human species for nigh on three millennia. In other words, since my general lack of patience for spooky scary tales of libido when pseudoscience meets rapaciousness makes Faulkner's main point rather flaccid, if I want to get anything out of this text, I have to instead think in terms of structure, and narratology, and what it means to string a fact between two twisted fates and pull until it strangles itself on its own velocity. It doesn't cancel out the fact that the most inexplicable parts of the tale are the ones that are so conveniently glossed over by the once-removed narrators, but it does result in some unexpectedly pleasurable tangents down the memory lanes of The Sound and the Fury and Jane Eyre of all things, alongside rabbit holes of the two types of plot, the twelve archetypes of character, and the full embodiment of Faulkner's writerly raison d'être, found, of course, in [b:a far lesser known work|1008839|Requiem for a Nun|William Faulkner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1334525385l/1008839._SY75_.jpg|2041161]: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." How seriously you take the facts of feudal legal systems and modern day slaveries that all the characters, from the most grandiose of balloons to the flattest of excuses, live and set themselves on fire by is your prerogative, but it's an engrossing ride when the reading time is right, and Faulkner, for all his hysterical status quos and conveniently monotone glossolalia, is always a pleasure for me to simply settle down and read. This isn't a work I'd recommend as an introduction to him, but then again, I went and flung myself off the cliff of his most well known Shakespeare derivative on first glance, so who am I to tell someone to not do the same with his one in the Biblical.

For all my less than enthused mutterings scattered throughout, I do find myself, here at the end of my review, dwelling upon a rather pleasing thought: where in Faulkner will I go from here? [b:As I Lay Dying|77013|As I Lay Dying|William Faulkner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451810782l/77013._SY75_.jpg|481854] offers itself as the most logically accessible, and I'm afraid that my momentary enthusiasm doesn't mean that Faulkner completionism will ever walk hand in hand with my own peace of mind. Still, five works is a rather serious investment for a somewhat decently historically infused prose stylist with ivory tower credentials ten times as long as my own personal enthusiasm, so it wouldn't be all that bad if it took me another seven years to get to the next. To anyone reading this and still attempting to make up their mind about what all this convoluted fuss is about (Faulkner's text, my own review: whatever you please), once upon a time, a certain section of the human species thought themselves capable of buying the world, and the manner in which chronology has inflicted itself upon their collective psyche in various contrary fashions has scared them shitless ever since. Faulkner's far from the only one to tackle such even in his micro specific venue of time and space, but as I've said before for one enfant terrible or another in the literary sphere: there's no one quite like him, and when he does it right, he does it best. Folks are free to carve up his nicely bound hardbacks for kindling if should a time arise, but if the likes of Rittenhouse are anything to go by, nothing much has changed in this homeland of mine in the last 160 years. We just see it all that much more quickly without a figure such as Faulkner to mediate, and risk one runs in confronting it is all the more overwhelming.

Because the time now approached (it was 1860, even Mr Coldfield probably admitted that war was unavoidable) when the destiny of Sutpen's family which for twenty years now had been like a lake welling from quiet springs into a quiet valley and spreading, rising almost imperceptibly and in which the four members of it floated in sunny suspension, felt the first subterranean movement toward the outlet, the gorge which would be the land's catastrophe too, and the four peaceful swimmers turning suddenly to face one another, not yet with alarm or distrust but just alert, feeling the dark set, none of them yet at that point where man looks about at his companions in disaster and thinks When will I stop trying to save them and save only myself? and not even aware that that point was approaching.

Did I mention how queer this all could have been, and not only that but if executed in such and such a fashion could have even being far less racist in its deviating process? Ah well. It's not the first time a narrative hangs itself on its own cishet scaffold, and it won't be the last.