Faulkner is some kind of author, constructing these gorgeous, intense, lavishly long and winding sentences full of commas and semicolons (my favorite) and parentheses and interesting adjectives and surprising offhand observations that still give one pause (to think on one's own experiences and how they connect with those offhand observations so casually made yet so often ringing with a certain timeless and often sad truth) and somewhat dismissive bits of characterization (that don't feel so dismissive once one again pauses (although it is hard to pause when the sentence goes on for so long, one could get lost) and thinks over what was just said because Faulkner doesn't seem like the sort of author who just casually dismisses a character; close observation of what he is trying to say is of paramount importance) and a narrative that ebbs and flows, starts and stops; clearly the narrative is not the most important thing in his stories. He is like a talkative lover who wants to talk and talk and talk about their love and their passion and who wants to try all sorts of new things, who wants to take you into their world, surround you, just really take you over; I'm not usually into those kinds of lovers but they and Faulkner can be so overwhelming that my defenses are forced down and I have to do things in a new way, their way and his way, and in the end it's not a bad experience, but it is their experience that I have become a part of; as I said, it's distinctly like being taken over, at least temporarily. Faulkner doesn't make things easy for his readers, he wants them to live in his world and in his mind and so his passion and ease and experimentation with language (including a first for me: parentheticals that cross two paragraphs! I'm not sure I've come across such a thing before, certainly not something I recall from reading Faulkner in the past, in high school, with the fearsome and possibly senile southern belle Mrs. Durham, rest in peace.
Ah, Mrs. Durham! A terrible person in many ways, but hearing her lavish praise of Light in August day after day, despite her students' decided lack of interest, made me realize that passion can be expressed for many things, including and perhaps especially for books.) and his desire to immerse his readers in his worlds by challenging them with that - one would almost say - berserkly baroque use of language, that kind of storytelling, vivid and visceral yet loose and casual too, it is like a delicious provocation that a person like me, who likes challenges, certainly cannot resist. Faulkner's style is like the Old Man River of this novella's title: a force to be reckoned with: a flood that just sweeps and pulls everything inside of it, your will be damned. "Old Man" swept me away for a little while, but it was at times a distancing experience as well, characters who made some kind of sense to me but characters that are still unknowable by the end, despite all of the words words words. And despite all of the words words words, these characters barely talk! Everyone locked in their stony worlds, their barred cells where they follow their own rules and things like empathy and kindness are never given, man that journey down the river, the people our convict and our pregnant lady come across, the lack of compassion, I could barely understand it: why can't the people in "Old Man" and why can't people in general just show some goddamned mercy?
I didn't understand it until in one terrible flood of understanding I did understand it: I'm like those people too, especially that trio on the boat who refuse to shelter our convict and our pregnant lady, clearly in dire straits and out in terrible, life-endangering weather, they showed compassion in their own way by giving some food but they didn't take in our convict and our pregnant lady on the verge of giving birth; just as I didn't take that poor homeless guy and his cat on a leash huddled in a doorway in either, not when I see them in the sunlight nor when I saw them last night in the torrential rain and terrible cold while on my way home from the store, all I can do is spare some change and maybe pick up some cat food for him, but the thing is, I could have, there's room in my basement, not the best accommodations but it is outside of the fucking rain and cold, but no, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to walk on and feel sad and help out in a small way that doesn't matter much but I'm not a bad person, not really, and so I realized these people are not "bad people" either, and what does that mean anyway, they are just people who are looking out for themselves and don't want to compromise their world and that's like me and the convict and the pregnant lady too, we all live our own lives and follow the rules of our own worlds, even when we could do otherwise, we do what we know and stick with what we know; and so after all of his adventures and his amazing bravery in protecting our pregnant lady, at the end our convict is back in his jail cell, not much the worse for wear, and he's happy to be back in the box where he feels the most comfortable, where he understands who he is. Just as I'm happy in the box where I'm comfortable. Personally I don't think Faulkner believes in these boxes; well, he respects them in his own way, and he doesn't hold the fact of the box against the person who lives in that box, but I doubt he believes they are necessary to truly living a life. He's too outside of the box to think that way, I think.
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