Word: faulkner
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...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...
...plantation aristocrats, but now needing to let their land out to sharecroppers, they hold tenaciously onto their aristocratic facade hoping desperately for the Old South's return. The family is characterized by a savage stubborn streak and a suicidal recklessness, which contrasts with the demure tones of their surroundings. Faulkner's countryside is saturated with heat. The days are endless, windless, dissolving afternoons and slow silver moon of 'opaline tranquillity.' He peoples his book with "Negroes, slow and aimless as figures of a dark placed dream." And his characters' movements are "hushed,...sibilant...
...beauty of Faulkner's style is his long, inward-turning sentences, like distracted monologues that veil the intended revelation. He doesn't attach himself to details in any precise, coordinated way, but roams about looking for the latent image. At times, though, his wordiness turns against...
...most of the time, especially when submerged in a character's thoughts, Faulkner is at home in the stretching, disconnected prose...
...Flags in the Dust says nothing different today from what Sartoris said almost half a century ago. It is perhaps a slightly better introduction to Yoknapatawpha County because it describes in more detail a few characters who will play a larger part in later Faulkner novels. Scholars of Faulkner will eat the stuff up--comparing the manuscript to the original, chasing down differences in dates, names, places, etc. (Bayard's great-grandfather, according to those in the know, died on three different dates in three different novels...