Jefferson, Mississippi, meet Flem Snopes.
And yet, can it be that Jefferson and Flem might actually get along?
Faulkner's stream of consciousness style does wonders for realism. The story is always being told by one character at a time, and when it switches to another character's point of view we may get an amazingly different take on events, and yet no point of view is much more believable than another. Ah, the human mind, as it imbues the world around it with subjective meaning. As it fugues along sometimes in self-argument, so that the premise or action which was completely dismissed out of hand a page or so ago has now been accepted as a wonderful solution and why didn't I think of that before? (I am never like that ;) ) Indeed it wouldn't be far from the truth to say that we all live in our own little worlds sometimes, from the lawyer Gavin to his kid nephew Charles to the ubiquitous V.K. Ratliff.
I have to say that I am quite relieved Faulkner did not try to write from a feminine perspective in this book (I believe he did in As I Lay Dying, though I can't remember, that was ages ago). Mostly because of the opinions of his characters regarding women. I don't know (probably don't want to know) if those opinions were Faulkner's own, but I'm still relieved. I think it is hard for an author to write such a personal, in-depth point of view as stream of consciouness from the other gender's perspective, man or woman; such that it may only be possible if the character in question is quite slow or eccentric or sick. And I certainly don't want to know what Eula Snopes was thinking... she quite disturbs me!
The names, a word about the names. I'm not sure that Faulkner was thinking, because I myself have lived in the South and, um, yes, back out in the sticks there are sometimes names like this. Especially from people like the Snopes. Still... Flem and Eck as given names? First and middle combinations like Wallstreet Panic, Montgomery Ward, and Admiral Dewey? Plus the lovely sibling combination of Clarence and the twins Vardaman and Bilbo. or the sibs Byron and Virgil. Although we do get one lovely Russian name hidden in there, unsuspecting. Certainly never a dull moment in nomenclature...
Or descriptions, as I said in The Hamlet, and will likely say again for every single Faulkner work. One long quote, permit me, please (and you can't know how perfect it is until you know the character and the situation):
There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burnin; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light werenot being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward inot that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.
Then, as though at signal, the firelflies---lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child's vernacular---myriad and frenetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling. 315
on Poetry:
But then, poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instince are exalted and terrified by it. 88
on Berets:
... and a black thing on his head kind of drooping over one side like an empty cow's bladder made out of black velvet... 120
on Courtly Love (not Courtney Love):
"By Cicero, Gavin," Father said. "You're losing ground. Last time you at least picked out a Spanish-american War hero with an E.M.F. sportster. Now the best you can do is a Golden Gloves amateur with a homemade racer. Watch yourself, bud, or next time you'll have a boy scout defying you to mortal combat with a bicycle." 187
on Childhood (ok, this is long, too. so just part of it, then):
...when it occurs to you that maybe the sensible and harmless things they won't let you do really seem as silly to them as the things they seem either to want to do or have to do seem to you. No: it's when they laugh at you and suddenly you say, Why, maybe I am funny, and so the things they do are not outrageous or silly or shocking at all: they're just funny; and more than that, it's the same funny. 304 (& the rest of that paragraph)
A few last words (go read it yourself):
...that no man deserves love since nature did not equip us to bear it but merely to endure and survive it... 305
She didn't sound like a snake because snakes can't talk. But if dentist's drills could talk she would have sounded just like one. 180
The last little vingette of the story was really bizarre, and almost seemed like an add-on, but it was out-and-out Snopes for sure.
Oh, and, yes, this is where
Snopes.com gets its name: from Faulkner's Snopes.
