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| Three views of William Faulkner, Nobel Prize-winning author of "Absalom, Absalom!" and "The Sound and the Fury" "Light in August" to name but a few. |
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| Three editions of "Absalom, Absalom!" and a tomb. The tomb is the presumed resting place of the Biblical son of King David, Absalom. |
It is now time to speak of William Faulkner, whom I reference in Chapter 17 of “The Long Habit of Living.” Why is Faulkner, and especially his novel “Absalom, Absalom!” so important to me? This novel, more than any other, although with the inclusion of others, set the tone for what I was to write from 1979 on. It set the tone for subject matter, for style, and for complexity. I even wrote huge sections of my book in italics, as when the Joseph Sarjevo (the father) character speaks, since he’s speaking from the past, from the grave so to speak, as do large sections of Faulkner’s book appear in italics when the two narrating characters, Shreve and Quentin, discuss the long 19th-century story of Thomas Sutpen, and Rosa Coldfield, and the Compson family ancestors, and the voices of the past intermingle with the present. It was this novel that spoke to me about the construction of the Sarjevo family and how to use the dead to speak to someone who was not blood kin but who “saw” in his own mind the tortured love and death of someone like Owen’s father and mother, and Owen’s tortured soul’s death during and after the fratricide conspiracy, mixed with the religious battle between Monsieur Ebert and Father Revenant, and Walter’s internal moral strife.
And let us not forget the importance of Faulkner’s title “Absalom, Absalom!” Go to the Old Testament Second Book of Samuel, verses 13-19, and you will discover an errant son of King David, a son who killed his own brother Amnon, and then died a miserable death as well.
And the king was much moved,
and went up to the chamber over the gate,
and wept: and as he went, thus he said,
O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!
would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son, my son! (2 Samuel 18:33)
I was mobilized by the time changes in “Absalom, Absalom!”, by the blend of past and present voices executing those time changes; they burned themselves into my brain, as did the prose of my other favorite Southern writer William Goyen, and his book “The House of Breath,” which, I believe, is one of the most prosaic and lyrical works ever written by an American. Being so taken by the language of “Absalom, Absalom!” when the television series “Brideshead Revisited” began to air on PBS back in 1981, I wouldn’t watch it at first, because I thought Jeremy Irons’ voice, narrating Evelyn Waugh’s prose, would influence my own Faulkneresque writing: because, you see, I thought “Brideshead” was so beautifully written as well, and here were two profound voices coming at me from different angles, but still telling the story of family, of errant sons and distant fathers. It was one hell of a literary and auditory confluence.
So there were Shreve McCaslin and Quentin Compson in their Harvard college room, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, Owen Sarjevo and Walter Vann in Illinois, and Joe Savino talking to me at Bradley University--one talks, the other listens, learns, understands, or doesn’t, but the revolving parallels in those books and in my own life had found, as William Goyen says, “a transient homage,” and “bore the haunting question of ancestry.”
Over the years, the telling of family stories, from all of my friends and family to my friends and family, would pass through me and be held as “…a scar of resemblance, ancient and unchanging through the generations...and would make [my] own face longer than the stamp of any stranger’s honor….”*
(*) William Goyen, The Faces of Blood Kindred. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953.
From page 306 of the book: "...I shook my head in disgust at Daudet, that evening, and spoke of Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, who egregiously intones, "I don't hate the South! I don't hate the South!" "Now that's more like it," Ebert had exclaimed. It was remarkable how many parallels existed between the South of the United States and the South of the Fifth Republic. I was sure we would be taking part in all of them, one way or another."
From page 306 of the book: "...I shook my head in disgust at Daudet, that evening, and spoke of Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, who egregiously intones, "I don't hate the South! I don't hate the South!" "Now that's more like it," Ebert had exclaimed. It was remarkable how many parallels existed between the South of the United States and the South of the Fifth Republic. I was sure we would be taking part in all of them, one way or another."
