Absalom, Absalom!

Well, that took a while!

Reading Absalom, Absalom! was a battle - a long, bruising, certifiable battle. And I was able to finish only by toughing it out, willing my way through a narrative whose complexity and structure became an absolute chore. 

There's no question that Faulkner's book represents some sort of literary transcendence, but it comes with a question: which is whether a general readership can be expected to slough through such a circuitous approach to time to and space (and let me hasten to add that I include myself in this category of readers). For me, Faulkner's novel was pushing up against the outer bounds of what might be considered reasonable in terms of literary fiction. Not that novels need to be easy: because they don't. But Absalom, Absalom! is so complex (and sometimes so self-indulgent) that I wondered whether it entered the realm of specialist literature, engineered for a specialist audience. 

Still, I wanted to offer a little commentary that I developed along the way (in this case, having to do with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway). 

Imagine the plot of a novel as a straight line. In the case of Hemingway, plot moves along the line. Sure, there are a scrapes here and there, but essentially, the line remains intact. That was Hemingway's goal: to adhere to the line, to capture it as it was. 

For Fitzgerald, the line remains visible, but little pockets of flowers spring up along the way. He hits a certain point and his writing explodes with beauty: and there you have it, gardens of color reach toward the sun. Fitzgerald's gardens are full of poetry and prose, but the line remains.  

And then there's Faulkner, for whom the line is almost entirely obscured: it's jagged and dirty and hates itself for being linear. The line has shoots and holes and traps that meander forever, only to reappear. Except, when they reappear, they're part of another story, another narrative, and the question is whether the journey you've endured can be corroborated at all: because now the line has assumed a different color, a different tinge and feel. 

Absalom, Absalom! tells a dark, cruel story. But it's a compelling one nevertheless. My wish is that it had been told differently. And again, it's not because I'm demanding an easy book. I'm just asking for a novel that lets its readers come to terms with the past - one full of triumph and heartbreak. In the case of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner consistently subverts emotion: all that's left is the opacity of his prose, and a story that begs to be retold.