Word: faulknerisms
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...first novel in three years William Faulkner displays the vision of a Hieronymus Bosch rendered in the style of Grandma Moses. The demons who emerge from the earth are those old familiars-the Snopeses-and the earth is the red clay of Yoknapatawpha County, Miss. Yet Faulkner is not what he appears to be-a regional novelist; he is a novelist of the nether regions...
...Hamlet (TIME, April 1, 1940), Faulkner told how Flem Snopes, a repellent specimen of white trash, sidled into Frenchman's Bend. Now, in The Town (the second book in an intended trilogy), Faulkner takes Flem Snopes from his earlier triumphs over the steppingstones of other men's dead selves to higher things in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha's county seat (which closely resembles Oxford, Miss., where Novelist Faulkner has lived for most of his life...
...Labyrinths. The plot slithers like a water moccasin through the canebrakes among four narrators and unnumbered previous Faulkner books; it more or less turns around the fact that Eula, daughter of the old. failed squire Varner, has become pregnant-though nobody is sure by whom. Varner marries her off to Flem Snopes, who advances from shortest-order cook to bank vice president, then moves up several more rungs of Jefferson's social ladder when he permits "Major" De Spain to cuckold him with Eula. His motives are Snopesean and Faulknerian: through a kind of sexual osmosis, he hopes that...
Through all this move the grisly minor characters of Faulkner's theater. The druggist is running a dirty-picture seance. Bad niggers chase good niggers with carving knives, fall together into the same ditch and talk philosophy. Four grotesque little Indians (the offspring of a stray Snopes and an Apache woman) turn up out of nowhere, settle down in a cave and very nearly burn alive a citizen who tries to civilize them...
...Faulkner's book continues the involuted garrulity of its predecessors into new labyrinths of confusion. There is all the usual apparent clumsiness and a kind of deliberate illiteracy, e.g., characterizing the Snopeses in general. Faulkner mixes five metaphors in about half a sentence: "[The Snopeses] accreted in from Frenchman's Bend into the vacuum behind the first one's next advancement by that same sort of osmosis by which . . . they had covered Frenchman's Bend, the chain unbroken, every Snopes in Frenchman's Bend moving up one step, leaving the last slot in the bottom...