David Denby on Faulkner

June 22, 2009
Books, Interrupted: David Denby Stares Down Faulkner
The fourth offering in an ongoing series on failed reading projects.

I like difficult modernist fictions—late Henry James, Joyce, Proust. But I have never been able to read Faulkner, whose difficulties wear me out before capturing my imagination. How can one understand the first section of “The Sound and the Fury”—an odd, fragmented narrative told from the point of view of the retarded Benjy—without reading the rest of the novel? You almost have to read it backward in order to read it forward, and I don’t have the interest to make that journey, or to get into “Light in August,” which my wife, Susan Rieger, tells me goes easily and well once one overcomes the initial strangeness. So: A clear reading failure. Part of the reason for it, I admit, is regional prejudice: I’m not much held, as a subject, by the collapsing morale of formerly “aristocratic” slave-holding families in Mississippi.

But now, a minor redemption: Last weekend, in order to prove to myself that I couldn’t read Faulkner, I read some Faulkner. I read the celebrated short novel, ‘The Bear,’ from the collection “Go Down, Moses,” and it’s obvious, from the first rhapsodic pages, that “The Bear” is a great work. Yes, there are passages of inflationary rant, propelled by Faulkner’s patented repetitions and sonorous echoes—“the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules” What are “immitigable rules,” anyway? Still, there’s amazement enough in the evocation of what a young boy has to do truly to possess the wilderness; the re-creation of dogs, a snake, the great bear itself; the alarming, encrusted vividness of old hunters, cooks, alcoholic roughnecks. So, a great writer—I guess. Perhaps I should try “As I Lay Dying” again.