Word: compson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...real world for a discussion of Oxford politics and two hours of flying, then back to the typing of chapter two and an analysis of chapter three. The only value of such adherence to chronology is that it makes Faulkner's antichronological depiction of the Sutpen and Compson stories seem logical by comparison...
...could have guessed just from the sound of the name of the biographer that the approach would be neither magical nor mysterious. It's good, it's all there, but it's Blotner. Why not Carvel Collins, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley? These names (and writings) ring, echo Quentin Compson, promise a more magical treatment--a story told worthy of the great story-teller. But Collins fought with the Faulkner family a while back--sin number one for a megabiographer--and his biography had to wait for Blotner's. Cleanth Brooks will eventually come out, I hope, with his second volume...
Like Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Donald traces his historical urge (and that of C. Vann Woodward, Francis Simkins and other historians from the South) to a wrestling with the contradiction between ideals and practice in the Southern experience...
...grave; but even the Christians knew better than to resurrect the dead more than once. Still not content, Gardner spices his novel with allusions to Arthurian legend. And to all this he adds his own version of that classic Faulknerian tale of the decay of the proud and respected Compson family. It is all done in the same battered, albeit rigid, multi-consciousness point of view...