My favorite canonical author, William Faulkner, had a phony war story to tell. While he was alive, biographers would say that Faulkner, born in 1897, left the US for Canada in 1916 because he was put off by Wilson's neutrality policy and wanted to get into the Great War. He trained in Canada to become a pilot in the RAF and spent some time flying in France before the war ended. That was what would now be known as "stolen valor." It begins with his misdescription of when he left the US and why. The precipitating cause wasn't eagerness to fight, it was romantic heartbreak. His family (and the family of his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, prevented the two young'uns from marrying in 1918. Broken hearted, and aware of course that there was a war on, Faulkner tried to enlist. He was rejected by the US Army because he was too short. He entered Canada then, hearing that the height requirement there was one he met. He was never anywhere near the fighting. He did enlist in ...
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The opening words of Faulkner's masterpiece, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, are as follows: "Through the fence, beneath the curling flower space, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward me where the flat was and I went along the fence....They took the flag out and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence." Most adults 'get' this in its straightforward meaning after a couple of reads. To be clear, though, we are asked to identify with an "I" who is watching two men play golf. A bit of a golf course (including the putting green for one hole and the tees [the "table"] for the start of another) is on the other side of the fence. The description of this action is literal to a fault. One oddity may strike you -- the observer of the golfers doesn't mention the golf balls that the golfers "were hitting" No explicitness...
At my birthday celebration last month, my sister gave me a book about the works of William Faulkner, FIGURES OF DIVISION (1986) by James A. Snead. This gift led me to google Snead's name, and discover a fascinating story. Snead was a promising scholar who died young -- at 35 years old (well, I'm old enough to consider that young). He died in 1989 -- apparently an AIDS related death. FIGURE OF DIVISION , an analysis of race in Faulkner's use of language, began its own life as Snead's doctoral dissertation. That earlier version got him his PhD in English from Cambridge, St John's College, under the direction of Colin McCabe. Here's a nice, I think representative, passage in the book: an appreciation of the character of Thomas Sutpen, "If one must read Sutpen as 'a version of the American dream,' a myth of rags-to-riches elevation, then clearly the American Dream of advancement deconstructs its own performance. Something is wrong if, even aft...
"He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speeds were not necessary." I like that sentence. From LIGHT IN AUGUST. The context indicates that the "he" refers to McEachern, though the sentence as it unfolds makes us suspect that the "he" does double duty, that it might as well be a "they," for both man and horse, except that "they" would do violence to the unity involved. I don't know that McEachern ever gets a first name in the novel. H doesn't need one. He is pure Calvinist indomitability, or implacability as Faulkner calls it here, trying to give his adoptive son a proper Presbyterian rearing...