As I Lay Reading

This is just a brief post-mortem on William Faulkner’s Light in August. One or two other matters seem to have got in the way lately. 

 

Overall, I’m glad to have read it, as it was considerably better than As I Lay Dying. But I’m also glad to have finished it. Faulkner’s reputation for verbose and exhausting prose is well earned, and although I was complimentary about the first half of the book, it soon began to drag. 

 

One particularly annoying feature of the novel, and one that I certainly didn’t expect from someone accepted as a masterful storyteller, was the clumsiness with which Faulkner kept introducing new characters. ‘At that time there was X, who had lived in the town for Y years...’ This happened several times, and was so formulaic and cumbersome that I almost suspected that Faulkner had run out of storyline and was introducing new characters in order to coax the plot along for a few more pages.

 

It is easy to see how Faulkner earned his title as one of the great American novelists, and it is equally obvious that he has shaped whole generations of authors. His metaphors are vast and captivating, his language poetic and sinister. For me, the problem is that some of his modern protégés seem superior. If I want to see blood spilled in the Deep South, I’ll turn to Cormac McCarthy, an author whose style and use of language owe so much to Faulkner, but who is far more accessible to the modern reader. He doesn’t have the lulls that Faulkner has.

 

Perhaps fast-paced modern literature has spoiled me, although I am still happy to trudge through classics like Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. I think Faulkner’s major problem is that legions of writers have come after him in the Southern Gothic tradition, and the style that was so uniquely his is now readily available elsewhere. He may have been original then, but he is not unique now. And although he writes with incredible power, his voice is lost among those of his imitators. Faulkner has been a victim of his own success.