10 months later
From E'town to Bardonia
In the end of February 2022, I decided to re-read Faulkner, everything he has ever written. I still have not completed this journey. Jun Since then, other than reading news and technical articles, I've read one other book of fiction (American Pastoral, by Philip Roth), all the while continuing to read Faulkner.
What draws me to Faulkner, are the stories themselves, his ability to make the experience he's writing felt on a visceral level whether it's a description of a wagon wheel getting stuck in mud, or a character's thoughts and feelings about what they are doing, capturing the vernacular of his characters, describing history as he saw it in the South and his use of language. Most nights before I go to sleep I read in bed, and inevitably I need to get up to go to my phone to look up at least one word that I am unfamiliar with. Last night I got up to look up these two words: cachinnation and dipsomaniac. While I might never use these words (cachinnation: noun: raucous laughter: psychiatry inappropriate laughter, sometimes found in schizophrenia or the word(dipsomaniac)- (no longer in technical use) a person with alcoholism or alcohol use disorder, especially characterized by an irresistible typically periodic craving for alcoholic drinks, I love broadening my limited vocabulary with words that I have never heard in common discourse.
Right now I'm reading and coming to the end of "Go Down Moses," which is comprised of seven interrelated stories. Ralph Ellison writes this on the back cover:
"For all of his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeing out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose."
Edmund Wilson "Faulkner....belongs to the full-dressed post Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce and Proust,"
and Robert Penn Warren this:" For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, Faulkner's works are without equal in our time and country.
