Faulkner

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner

I am starting the process of teaching Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying to my AP kids. It's been years since I read it myself, so the re-reading has been a pleasure.

Faulkner's world is such a thoroughly messed-up, yet somehow familiar place. Those characters he crafted are slices of Southern culture. They still exist. I see fragments and shades of them in neighbors and family members. I don't know what that says about me. Is it a bad thing when you recognize Faulkner characters?

For years I wouldn't read Faulkner. My first experience with him was The Sound and the Fury. I hated, hated, HATED that book, a reaction that is rare for me. I wouldn't read anything else by him and considered him to be highly overrated. Sometime in graduate school, I came back to him. I suppose it was more out of curiosity than anything else. I don't even remember what book it was that I read. It might have been AILD. I enjoyed it. That lead me to read more of his work. With each one, I found a rich world waiting that was fictional, yet familiar.

Faulkner distills the South into tiny, shimmering, jewel-like drops. Even though lots of things have changed since his South dissolved into mine, so many of his observations hold true. I don't know if that's because things change so slowly here, or if it's because the characters he wrote share traits that will be a part of human makeup one hundred years from now. Maybe it's a little bit of both.

I am by no means a Faulkner scholar, but I have learned to enjoy him. There are many more of his books that I need to read. I even have plans to revisit TSTF to see if it's really as bad as I remember. (Probably.)