Word: absalom
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...JUNE 2 of my sophomore year, the 62nd anniversary of Quentin Compson III's putting flatirons in his shoes and jumping off of the Anderson bridge, I spent the evening with a girl, who was then a close friend and was then from the South, reading Absalom, Absalom! for our English 700 exam (back then it was and it deserved to be called 700). We read to each other by the light of a street lamp on the bridge next to the secret plaque marking the spot from which Quentin was said to have jumped. Such dedication to Faulknerian trivia...
Blotner's dedication to trivia, however, has unearthed information that sheds light on Faulkner's fiction. An early jotting regarding Absalom, Absalom! reveals that Faulkner was concerned more with the way his different narrators--especially Quentin--obtain their information about Colonel Sutpen than he was with the Sutpen story itself. The young Faulkner's correspondence with Sherwood Anderson records an amusing fantasy world of swamp animals they created...
...chronological ordering is at times confusing as well as ridiculous. For example, Blotner opens the description of the writing of Absalom, Absalom! in 1935 in his usual meticulous way: "On March 30 he had taken a sheet of paper with printed margins and written at the top, in blue ink, the title Absalom, Absalom!. He underlined it twice and dated the sheet in the upper left hand corner." He then describes two false starts set at Harvard. So far, very interesting. After a plot analysis of the first chapter, Blotner breaks to tell us about a three-hour flying practice...
...extraordinary discovery. And it is most tantalizingly true of the years between 1928 and 1936. But those years mark a time of creative intensity unparalleled in American letters, when Faulkner turned out Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom...
...like his fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, Donald speaks of a personal ambivalence toward many of the region's values. He cites Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! as one of the most eloquent expressions of "what it means to be a Southerner...