Onward and Upward with E-Books

It's a momentous day here at Phoenicia Publishing: we just released our first e-books!

I've been reading books on my laptop and Android phone for quite a while now.

And here's the verdict: I've decided I like it, even though I'm not a 100% convert.

I like the ability to take my reading — lots of reading, in fact — with me wherever I go, on one nearly weightless device that fits in my pocket. And I like being able to buy, for less, books that I don't particularly want to keep as physical objects in a physical library. I like being able to search them, make bookmarks, look up words: all those interactive features.

If I can get a book I want to read at the local library, that's often the option I choose – it's free. But I live in a French-speaking province and can't always get what I want, which has been a problem ever since we moved here. And, like most people now, I like the instant gratification of being able to download a book and start reading right away. It's clear to me that the future of publishing lies, at the very least, with a mix of e-books and print books, and more likely with forms of electronic publishing that we can't even imagine yet, but which include a lot of multimedia content impossible with the printed page.

Most people don't have to think about all this, well, beyond their own pockets, but the problem is…I'm also running a publishing company. A small company, yes, but it's a furry little entity dedicated to being a fast and adaptable hare rather than a ponderous tortoise. At Phoenicia we publish mostly poetry — one of the most challenging formats for e-books, which are still pretty hobbled when it comes to complex typography. The other thing we will be publishing are art and photography books: also a type of book that needs careful, beautiful design.

I've spent the past couple of weeks thinking and exploring and learning, and today we released our first two e-books at Phoenicia: Dave Bonta's Odes to Tools and Ken Pobo's Ice and Gaywings, winner of this year's qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. Both are available in the Kindle/.MOBI format, and as EPUBs for the iPad or other EPUB readers, like the Nook or Sony, for a cost of only $2.99. Full-length e-books will be priced similarly to most commercial ones: around $10.00.

It was fun learning the new technology and I'm proud of the finished products. And it feels like a pretty big deal – a big step into the future.

(Dave Bonta has another book, a collection of his wryly funny and sometimes poignant "Words on the Street" cartoons that's just come out in multiple formats, through Bauble Tree Books in London. Check it out!)

I've been pretty low-key about Phoenicia here on the blog, but will be talking a bit more about it in the coming months – we've got several exciting projects in the works that I think will be interesting to Cassandra's readers, and, as always, the authors and I really appreciate your support! Nobody's getting rich – or even making any money to speak of – but I'm trying to develop a model that at least gets excellent, deserving work into print — and now, e-ink — which is a whole lot better than having it languish forever in a virtual folder in a virtual desk drawer!

2011 Book List

Back by popular demand, here's my reading list for the past year.

First, the statistics:

48 books total

• 15 by women, 32 by men, 1 anthology

• Format: 2 audiobooks, 7 e-books, the rest in paper

• Genre: 9 non-fiction or essays; 9 poetry books; 30 fiction, plays, sagas, misc.

The asterisks in the list indicate e-books. The links go to my reviews on Goodreads, most of which also appeared here on the blog.

Standouts? I very much liked this years Booker Prize winner, Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, and particularly enjoyed listening to it as an audiobook. The seemingly simple story, told in first-person, eventually reveals an unreliable narrator whose version of events made me call into question my own memory, and think back hard about events in my own life. Barnes isn't someone I would read for his literary style, per se, but this is a masterful novel.

It's no secret that I love Teju Cole's Open City. Even though he's my close friend and the book is partially dedicated to me — an honor that continues to stun and humble me — I definitely think this was the best book I read this year, for its originality, the lyricism of its prose, and the risks it takes. Many illustrious reviewers have agreed with me, so my objectivity can't be entirely suspect!

As usual with me, there's a bit of a geographical focus, this time on Iceland. Somehow I had never read either the novels of Halldor Laxness or the Sagas of Icelanders, and I'm very glad that gap was closed this year before we went to Iceland; the trip was immeasurably enriched by their writing.

There were also a lot of British novels set in the early 20th century. It was odd to read A.S. Byatt at the same approximate time as Virginia Woolf, and two young-people's books by Frances Hodgson Burnett as well. I loved The Secret Garden, which turned 100 this year, just as much as when I was a girl. Byatt irritates me; I find the books overwritten, overly long, and self-indulgent, and that was especially apparent reading them next to Woolf's beautiful, spare, carefully-constructed prose. Byatt's stories kept pulling me along nevertheless; they won't endure as literature but she's a good storyteller. Woolf is in a class by herself, often painful to read, but in many ways a kindred soul. I'm glad I'm a happier and far less public person.

This year's shock quality award goes to César Aira's How I Became a Nun, with second place to Rawi Hage for De Niro's Game.

In keeping with the year's Nordic theme, I also really liked the uncategorizable Broken, by Karin Fossum.

Quirkiness and condensation are trademarks of Lydia Davis. I'd recommend her Collected Stories as inspiration for any writer.

For sheer lyricism, I loved experiencing The English Patient as an audio book – but I'm crazy about Ondaatje's writing anyway. I could hardly wait to get back to it during the time I was listening to this book, and was bereft when it ended. For similar reasons, I loved John Berger's To the Wedding.

The worst book on this list, hands down, was Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey. It had its moments, but…my God. I've never seen a book take such a disastrous turn and then fall apart the way that one does!

Particular poetry favorites were Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, The Throne of Psyche by Marly Youmans, The Book of Ystwyth — works by six poets (including Dave Bonta and Marly Youmans) in response to the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and Dale Favier's chapbook, Opening the World.

I liked all the non-fiction titles listed (if I don't enjoy a non-fiction book I generally don't finish it.) The last and the first look like they may be my favorites; John Hales' book about the Athenian navy was absolutely fascinating, and Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by Tamim Ansary, seems, after 90 pages, to be an emminently readable and timely look at, well, just what its title says.

I'll be looking forward to hearing what you have to say!

 

CASSANDRA'S 2011 BOOK LIST (click for lists from previous years) *=ebooks

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary (current)

Middlemarch, George Eliot (current)*

Letters from Iceland, W.H.Auden and Louis MacNeice

Fight the Wild Island, Ted Edwards

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (audio book read by Richard Morant)

The Wide, Wide World, Susan Bogert Warner

Vatnsdœla saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders

Egil's Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders

Opening the World, Dale Favier (poetry chapbook)

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje (audio book)

Open City, Teju Cole (rereading)

The Book of Ystwyth, six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Ice and Gaywings, Ken Pobo (poetry chapbook)

The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Triplicity, Kristin McHenry (poetry chapbook)

Paper Covers Rock, Chella Courington (poetry chapbook)

Phaedrus, Plato

The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde*

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf*

I Stand Here Shredding Documents, Kristin Berkey Abbott (poetry chapbook)

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Years, Virginia Woolf*

The Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett*

The Throne of Psyche, Marly Youmans

Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy. Adaptation for the stage by Mark Healy.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (reread on its centennial)*

The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt

Errata, George Steiner 

Dark and Like a Web, Nic Sebastian* (poetry chapbook)

De Niro's Game, Rawi Hage

How I Became a Nun, César Aira

The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner

Phédre, Jean Baptiste Racine

Broken, Karin Fossum

The Redbreast, Jo Nesbo

The Sign of Jonas, Thomas Merton (rereading)

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis

To the Wedding, John Berger

The Jewel Box Garden, Thomas Hobb

Under the Glacier, Halldor Laxness

The Stone Raft, José Saramago

Home is Where We Meet, John Berger (rereading)

Human Chain, Seamus Heaney

Val/Orson, Marly Youmans

Independent People, Halldor Laxness

Open City, Teju Cole

Lords of the Sea: Athenian Naval Power in the 5th century, John Hales

I was just in the mood for a little Pushkin…

Oddly enough, this morning after posting this photograph I read a very good short story on the New Yorker website, Haruki Murakami's "The Town of Cats," and want to recommnd it. I love Murakami's uniquely deadpan style, which reminds me a bit of J.D. Salinger, and his odd plots which — like many of those Russian short stories — are actually full of insights into human behavior.

Reading Faulkner and the News: and Further (7)

William Faulkner on the Web. A collection of links.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is a new book on the Great Migration of six million African-Americans who left the South between 1910 and 1970. This link is to a review, "Freedom Trains" in the New York Times.

"Scant Effort in Progress over Racial Killings," an article from August 23, 2010, about the non-prosecution of murderers of blacks during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The 40-year statute of limitations is running out on most of these cases, but the FBI has done little.

Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America 2009, a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. This report includes sections on hate crimes against African-Americans; Hispanics; Jews; Asian Pacific Americans; Arab Americans, Muslims and Sikhs; Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals; Individuals with Disabilities; Women; and Juveniles. (Downloadable .pdf, or view online by section)

Publications and resources on Hate and Ethnoviolence, from Political  Research Associates (PRA), a progressive think tank.

 

Reading Faulkner and the News (6)

The Hanging of Absalom, Silk, Weft-silk fabric, foil wrapped threads, paper, watercolor; attributed to Faith Robinson Trumbull (1718-1780) c. 1770. Lyman Allyn Art Museum at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut. This Revolutionary-War-era embroidery, done at a time when such bible stories were well-known, depicts Absalom as a patriot being killed by a British redcoat. Absalom, here, has rebelled against his "father" David, in the guise of King George III, who sits on his throne, oblivious to the suffering of his child. (from "Religion and the American Revolution."

Wrapping It Up

Peter, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed talking about this book with you! It's been so much more fun for me, and I bet a lot more interesting to our readers, than if either of us just wrote about it alone.

In college, I had lots of people to talk to in depth about books, and we were all equally excited — I remember long dinner-table conversations that migrated to one of our dorm rooms, and went on into the night. Adult life isn't like that, but blogging does offer some great opportunities for communication. I'm grateful to our commenters here for their contributions to the conversation and wonder if any of them have additional thoughts about this form of book talk.

But mostly I want to thank you for helping me think more deeply about this remarkable book; it proved to me how our human minds really do thrive on input from others. I'm also keen to go on reading and talking about Faulkner, who seems to occupy a unique place in American arts&letters. After posting this, I'm starting my re-read (40 years later) of The Sound and the Fury.

Beth

——-

Beth,

 

That was right slick, rereading one of my favorite novels and then learning the next day that you had just read the same novel and wanted to exchange letters about it.  The exchange felt even fuller on a blog with the comments people were kind enough to make.  I especially appreciate Lorianne’s frequent, rich contributions.

 

I wonder if you or other readers have any thoughts about how someone wanting to try out Faulkner might best do so, generally speaking.  I’ll take my answer off the air, as callers often say on the NPR talk shows, and see what develops in the comments.

Peter

Reading Faulkner and the News (5)

A Monstrous Innocence

—-

Dear Beth,

 

Thomas Sutpen is a monster, but Grandfather learns what
makes him tick. “Sutpen’s trouble was innocence,” Grandfather says, an
innocence that Grandfather believes he never loses.

 

It’s hard to see what Grandfather is talking about at
first.  Sutpen ruins four women’s
lives in progressively more dishonorable ways.  At the last, he sires a child out of wedlock by his longtime
companion and flunky Wash Jones’s granddaughter, who is forty-four years his
junior.  (“‘He chose lechery,’
Shreve says.”)  When Sutpen learns
that the child is a girl, though, he decides to treat his mare, who has just
given birth to a male, better than Wash’s granddaughter, and tells her so:

 

“Well, Millie, too bad you’re not
a mare like Penelope.  Then I could
give you a decent stall in the stable.”

 

It’s then that Wash kills him.

 

Shreve is correct, strictly speaking.  When marriage doesn’t produce a
suitable male heir, Sutpen chooses lechery.  But he’s never a lecher, never someone interested in women
for lust’s sake or even love’s. 
He’s even a virgin when he first marries at age twenty, and he admits to
Grandfather that he “could neither have suffered temptation nor offered
it.”  He’s virile enough, the
reader knows, but his sex drive like everything else takes a back seat to his
design to acquire a plantation owner’s respectability.  Only after the Civil War ends and
respectability is no longer an option does Sutpen get the granddaughter
pregnant so he can at least have his design’s bare bones, the male heir.

 

Sutpen innocently hatches his design as a young teen in reaction to being slighted by the Tidewater plantation slave (and,
through him, his master).  But his innocence
is the rigid innocence of childhood that makes monsters of adults who never
grow out of it, “that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality
were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and
balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was finished and
nothing but pie or cake could come out,” as Quentin says.

 

I think today’s religious fanatics, no matter what their
persuasion, suffer from Sutpen’s brand of monstrous innocence.

 

Peter

—–

Dear Peter,

It's fascinating to me that Faulkner called Sutpen
an almost-perfect tragic hero. I could possibly agree with that
assessment of Joe Christmas, in Light in August, but for me, a tragic
hero has to have a very clear good side, a nobility of character, as
well as fatal flaws. I never felt that with Sutpen, and part of the
reason for that is Faulkner's own way of conveying his character: at a
very great distance. So great in fact, that we cannot warm to him
because (like all the characters, much more real because we hear them
speak, see them move and interact as they also try to figure the man
out) we're never close enough to really feel him in the flesh.

I
think this distancing is a further reason why we can see Sutpen and his
downfall as an allegory of the South itself. Faulkner, speaking
about this book, said that the South labored under a curse – the curse
of slavery. Curses, in the Old Testament style, affect not only the
king/patriarch but his progeny and the entire tribe or nation-state
under that leader, who refuse to "turn away from their wickedness;" the
curse can extend "unto many generations." Faulkner seems to carry this
out
as he kills off all of Sutpen's descendants except for the
feeble-minded Jim Bond; his slaves; even the old spinster Rosa who once
ran
away from him. Our poor narrator Quentin, grandson of the
Grandfather who professed Sutpen's "innocence," doesn't escape either;
apparently he knows too much and came too close to the source of the
curse.

Which, like your comment at the end of your letter, brings up a larger question about innocence itself.
If slavery was indeed a "curse," — or an evil — did the entire South
deserve what happened to it? What level of participation in a communal
sin — and we can think of many of these that societies have
participated in and still do  — is required before an individual is
guilty of
complicity? Sutpen was certainly a willing participant; I doubt we
could say such a thing about his West Indian slaves or his wives. Is he
excused by
the fact that he was born into a world where his "design" would be not
only acceptable but admired, and where acquiring and exploiting slaves
and women was behavior shared, to at least some extent, by all the
adult males at the top? At what point does an adult, even one steeped
in the prevailing culture, bear the responsibility of seeing it clearly
and choosing for him or herself?

But going beyond the individual,
since the book is also an allegory of a society, we have to ask what,
if anything,
can stop the curse and expiate the sin. If slavery was an expression of
racism, we certainly can't claim that the elimination of slavery
eliminated racism. Neither can we claim that the white male claim of
superiority  and privilege over all other groups was, or is, confined
to the South; as subsequent history and even current events are
proving, racism infects North American society as a whole, and has been
present
since white people first came to these shores.

I have
to wonder if our continual collective "moving on" from one oppression
to another — Native Americans, blacks, women, Japanese, Vietnamese,
gays, Muslims — it's a long sad list — without true self-reflection,
justice for the victims of hate crimes, trials of leaders, or
reparation for victims — has contributed to the perpetuation of racism
as an endemic and largely acceptable trait that repeatedly bubbles
violently to the surface of American society. We have had prophets,
too, calling us to truth and repentance, but have we really listened?
It doesn't seem that way to me. Faulkner, writing this book in the
1930s, was trying to speak about the South as he saw it approximately
sixty years after the Civil War. That's the same distance we now have
from World War II; not long, but not short either. When we look at our
history since 1940, what can we say about innocence?  Who are the
tragic heroes of these subsequent chapters? Who are the victims? Who
are we? And where does it end?

Beth

The image at the top is from a set of murals of biblical scenes in Harvard University's Andover Hall, painted in the mid-1950s by Laurence Scott. I'm captivated by them and hope someday to see more of them; apparently the plaster is not in good condition.

Reading Faulkner and the News (4)

[Photo by Ralph Thompson of Faulkner taking to students at the
University of Virginia ca. 1957.  The school admitted its first black
student in 1950 by court order, and it went coed in 1970.  Faulkner
split his residence between Oxford, Mississippi and U. Va. from 1957
until his death in 1962.]

Absalom's Women

Dear Peter,

My freshman year in college, I became friends with an engineering
student from the South who lived near me in the dorm (yes, co-ed!
1970!) and was dating a close friend of mine. Like Quentin, he had a
southern name previously unknown to me, and he had grown up in a
totally different society of teas, lawn parties, cotillions and clear
gender roles for both young men and women. He had had a sweetheart with
another unfamiliar name – Marleve – and told me how she and all her
friends used to get up an hour early to do their hair and put on their
makeup before class. Meanwhile, we were burning our bras…if we wore
them at all. He liked the university and did well, but he only lasted
through his sophomore year, when he went home to be with his
girlfriend, shaking his head when he said goodbye to me and saying, "I
just could never quite get you Northern girls."

So what about Faulkner's women? If Thomas Sutpen is an archetype of a
patriarch, desiring to create a dynasty through his male lineage (but
definitely not chivalrous), what about the women around him?

We learn little about his first wife in the West Indies, the unknown
octaroon who gave birth to his first son, Charles, repudiated because
of his negro blood. His second wife, Ellen, perhaps comes closest to
the idea of a "southern belle" – she's lovely, but fragile, and is part
of  a "deal" made between Sutpen and her father. Unhappy and unable to
assert herself, but dutiful, she bears two children – Henry and Judith
- before taking to her bed and dying after a slow, shadowy decline.

Then there's Rosa, the elderly woman whose long rambling narration,
delivered to Quentin as a kind of verbal legacy, forms the "core" of
the narrative. She's Ellen's cousin but much younger, who comes to live
at Sutpen's Hundred with Judith and the negro servant, Clytie, after
Ellen's death, and after Henry kills Charles and flees. Rosa, then in
her early 20s, becomes engaged to Thomas after he returns from the
Civil War (a shell of his former self), but breaks the engagement in
outrage after he poses the condition that she bear him a son before the
marriage to prove that she can; she goes back to town where she lives
in miserable poverty, spinsterhood, and hatred for the next fifty years.

And perhaps the most enigmatic woman of all is the daughter, Judith,
who resembles none of these women as much as her father. Peter, one of
the most vivid scenes in the book for me is when we discover Thomas
wrestling at night in the barn with his slaves, a sort of cockfight
scene lit by lamps illuminating the faces of the men of the town,
watching the spectacle and drinking whiskey. Henry, the son, can't bear
it, but up in the hayloft we see Judith – a little girl then – looking
down on the sweat and blood and violence with her implacable,
unreadable face. Later, she becomes not a spinster but an archetypal
widow, even though her marriage to her half-brother Charles is
prevented, and later dies of smallpox. The only emotion we ever witness
from her is a sudden gush of tears, almost instantly dried, when her
father comes home and she tells him what has happened to his sons.

What do you think Faulkner is trying to tell us through the characters
of these women? Are they stereotypes or true to the society he's
portraying?

Beth

——-

Dear Beth,

The Absalom, Absalom! women seem locked into something tougher to break out of than the clear gender roles your disoriented Southern friend found missing at college. To me, the Absalom women are closer to the earth – to something essential – than the men are, and they are more inclined to feel and to act not in furtherance of a design, as is always the case with Sutpen, but out of instinct (usually love) and emotion (usually hate) alone.

To put it more negatively, the Absalom women seem subhuman. But it’s a "subhuman" woman, Sutpen’s octoroon first wife, who follows her instinct (and a smart lawyer’s vague advice) to bring Sutpen down.

Women are like the novel’s blacks.  Funny how Sutpen tells Grandfather the story of his first
marriage while Grandfather and he are waiting for Sutpen’s slaves and dogs to
hunt down Sutpen’s French architect. 
Quentin, who is telling the story of the story (much of the novel’s
information is second, third, or even fourth-hand) to Shreve, makes the blacks
out to be as primal as the dogs.  They are better hunters than the dogs:
their sense of smell is as good as the dogs, but they don’t get stuck barking
up the tree the architect entered when they realize he's been hopping through
the trees for acres with Sutpen-like tenacity.  Well, when the architect
is caught, Sutpen stops his story just at the point when he and his first wife
get engaged.  Sutpen is caught,
too, by someone as primal and indefatigable as his slaves, but in his story he
doesn’t know it yet.

 

It takes thirty years for Sutpen, now at Grandfather’s
office, to resume his story.  He
tells Grandfather then that, shortly after their marriage, he learns of his
wife’s one-eighth Negro blood, 
“puts her aside,” and (he believes) settles up with her. 
Grandfather, maybe “hollering,” says, “. . . didn’t the dread and fear of
females which you must have drawn in with mammalian milk teach you better?”

 

Sure enough, as Grandfather surmises, the octoroon, with her
lawyer’s help and quite like Sutpen’s slaves, amazingly hunts down the story’s
chief “architect” a few paragraphs later. (For Sutpen is an architect of sorts:
he endlessly talks about his “design” to which women are merely
“adjunctive.”  “I had a design,” he
tells Grandfather.  “To accomplish
it, I should acquire money, a house, a plantation, slaves, and a family –
incidentally, of course, a wife.”) 
The octoroon grooms her son Charles with “mammalian love,” and her
lawyer sends him off to Henry’s university with a letter of introduction.  Through the octoroon’s primal love for
Charles and her nursed hatred for Sutpen, Henry brings Charles home to Sutpen’s
Hundred one Christmas, and Sutpen knows he’s caught.  His and his progeny’s downhill slide starts there.

But the octoroon survives to enable her feebleminded grandson, Jim Bond, in turn, to survive the Sutpen family doom. In contrast, none of Sutpen's white lineage survives.

This sort of wretched and triumphant primitivism shared by the novel’s blacks and women – is Faulkner describing a problem or contributing to it? I’m never sure with Faulkner. This account of a talk Faulkner gave while a writer in residence at the University of Virginia reminds me of the endless debate over whether he was a racist or was someone who supported blacks’ equal rights:

He was not afraid to challenge his UVA audience, as became clear when he decided to commence his second Spring semester in “Residence” by delivering “A Word to Virginians,” a nine-minute speech urging them to help solve rather than exacerbate the growing crisis over court-ordered integration in the Jim Crow South. To 21st century listeners, his exhortations may sound more like temporizings, but at the time they were controversial, and to some in his immediate audience, as you can hear for yourself, unacceptable. (Faulkner at Virginia: An Introduction)

It’s the same with Faulkner and women. I can’t tell what he really thinks about them. But sometimes I believe I want to know what an author “really thinks” only because I find the topic’s richer treatment in his chosen genre to be so unsettling.

° ° °

The last question I’d like to raise about Absalom is the question of innocence. Sutpen comes off as a monster – “the demon,” as Shreve is fond of calling him – yet Grandfather believes he is the victim of his own innocence. Which is it?

Peter

Reading Faulkner and the News – 3

Part 3: Dense as an Overgrown Swamp

Peter, what was the experience of reading this book like for you?

-Beth

—-

Dear Beth,

Faulkner's tragedies are the only works I can read half asleep and still not miss anything. I don't mean there's nothing to miss – on the contrary! At college, too: I dozed through most of my reading assignments, but I didn't have to turn the pages back very often for Faulkner. I think my conscious mind gets in the way with Faulkner. Faulkner gives it some bones to chew – all those big words to look up – but most everything else seems geared for my subconscious.

Absalom is tough on the conscious reader. Its narrators, whether first person or third, pull him away from his regular reliance on plot and character development. Key plot details are buried in labyrinthine sentences. And characterization through dialog? Forget about it! All the characters sound the same: the dominant ones speak in short, objectively insignificant phrases, while the passive ones – Faulkner's Greek chorus – speak in those long sentences that process and repeat the dominant characters' phrases and put a kind of mental illness, or at least obsession and inexorable amazement, between the reader and the facts. No wonder we all relate to Shreve, who frequently tries to stop Quentin long enough to get a simple narrative point clarified: “'Wait,' Shreve said. 'For Christ's sake wait.'”

So Absalom examines reading, and Shreve is Faulkner's model reader. His conscious mind struggles with the narration, but his subconscious mind catches enough so that he's drawn into the sickness. Because he's a successful reader from outside the South – indeed, outside the U.S. – Shreve demonstrates the universal reach of Absalom's themes. I think it's also significant that Shreve survives, just as Faulkner, who's not known for hope, says in his Nobel acceptance speech that mankind will survive. 

-Peter
—

Dear Peter,

Well, in part 1 of this conversation you compared me to Shreve, but I doubt that I'm a model reader! For one thing, I tend to read very fast, and that's not helpful to Faulkner. I really like what you said about his books requiring us to use our subconscious mind; it feels like you have to somehow uncouple your normal intellectual, analytical, processing mind and submit yourself to the flow of words, which are at times almost dreamlike and quite often rambling or even completely crazy. 

I also love books like this that force me to slow down and engage with the writing itself, while at the same time immersing me in a mood and place that feel foreign, dark, ominous, and yet somehow seductive. I'm a very visual person so I'm always constructing mental images while I'm reading. With Faulkner I always feel like I'm in an old black-and-white movie, shot without enough light, and definitely scary; I am out of my element here; there's little comfort or familiarity. That mental place haunts me all the days I'm reading the novel, and for some time afterward. I never realized before that this book belongs to the genre of writing known as Southern Gothic, and while it's not about the occult or ghosts or vampires at all, this "haunted" and demonic quality is palpable. 

When I stopped reading this book each day, I kept thinking about what he was doing. I was stunned by the complex construction of this novel. Multiple narrators, not always clearly identified at first; a great deal of stream-of-consciousness writing; extremely long sentences; and a story that's gradually revealed through flashbacks from many different points of view. The sheer mastery of the craft of writing was pretty thrilling.

What I found especially impressive is that even though the construction is as dense as an overgrown swamp, he doesn't call attention to it, he's not showing off (like some other masters of the "modern" novel we might name) — it simply becomes another part of the world he is creating for us to inhabit as we read, and this tangled, dark complexity contributes to the book's mood of violence, tension, murky confusion, and impending doom. If I had to use one word to describe the mood of the novel, I might choose "tense" — what about you?

And from here, I wonder if we might talk about the female characters in the book next, and about women and the South!

Beth

Reading Faulkner and the News (2)

The Plot and that Title

Peter, it's hard to know where to begin with this book, isn't it? We could talk about it as one of America's first modern novels, and analyze its structure. We could talk about Christianity, Calvinism, and slavery, and the concept of the elect and the damned, and how that's still playing out in our culture. Or, as Lorianne mentions in her comment to the first post, about how it addresses southern notions of "ideal" womanhood, and the patriarchy that supposedly protects it. I hope we'll get to all of that eventually. Maybe what I'll do first, though, is spring off your wonderful, Faulkner-esque glimpse at the characters to talk a little more about the plot, and explain the title, so people who haven't read the book won't go nuts or give up on us all together!

Basically, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man born into poverty who gets money, goods, and slaves — we don't know exactly how — and comes into a small Mississippi town full of whispering, speculating inhabitants, acquires one hundred acres, and starts to build a plantation and mansion. His goal, beyond building this empire (on the backs of the slaves he's brought from the West Indies) is to establish a family dynasty, so he needs sons.

Faulkner himself said that slavery was the curse under which the South labors, and that Thomas Sutpen's major flaw was his belief that he was too strong to need to be part of the human family; those two curses and how they play out are the subject of the book. I'd argue that it goes even deeper, that what Faulkner explores here is racism itself, in the character of a person who believes himself to be elect while others — even his own flesh-and-blood — are cast aside because a tiny percentage of negro blood flows in their veins.

So – the title. In the Bible, Absalom is one of the sons of King David, but he rebels and fights against his father. His death occurs during a battle when his hair catches in the branches of an oak tree, unseating him and rendering him helpless (a clear parallel, I think, to the image of a lynched black man hanging from a tree.) Joab, the enemy, is told and comes back with a posse of soldiers and kills him. But when Absalom's death is reported to his father, David is inconsolable.

In many ways Thomas Sutpen is this kind of Old Testament patriarch; he has many human weaknesses and cruelties but he's also fascinating and exerts a powerful, some say demonic, force on everyone around him. Like the OT kings, he looms much larger than most of the other people on the stage, and affects them all, but he also causes his own ruin. Faulkner makes his story into an allegory not just about one family, but about the South and its downfall, just as the Books of Kings contain cautionary tales about rulers and justice, and what happens when they allow their human weaknesses to dominate their character and actions.

Faulkner may have doubled the name to "Absalom, Absalom!" because there are two sons in his story: Henry Sutpen, his legitimate and pure white son, and Charles Bon, whose mother was an octaroon (1/8 black) whom Sutphen married in the West Indies but repudiated and abandoned after he found out about her (and their son's) negro blood. Henry and Charles, unknown to each other as brothers, meet at university, and their paths toward self-discovery are an essential part of the book's plot.

Beth

———

Beth, that's a great summary. I'd just add the incest angle. The Bible's story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David starts when Absalom's half-brother, Amnon, rapes Absalom's full sister, Tamar. The narrator's not wild about the rape, but the incest is the big sin. Absalom plots his revenge for two years, has Amnon killed, and flees when David finds out. In this respect, Henry Sutpen resembles Absalom: Henry kills his half-brother Charles to keep him from an incestuous relationship with Henry's full sister Judith, and then he flees.

But Charles resembles not only the incestuous Amnon but Absalom, also. The Bible infers that Absalom seduces Israel because David doesn't lift a finger to see him over the two years following Amnon's murder. Similarly, Charles is frosted that his father Sutpen never comes to him, never speaks to him, even after Charles knows Sutpen knows Charles has designs on Judith – a match Sutpen tries to get Henry to stop. So Charles seduces Henry and Judith because his father slights him, just as Absalom seduces Israel because his father slights him.

So I could see how Henry and Charles are both Absalom, which might help explain the title. The title may also be shorthand for David's repetitious lament after Absalom's death: “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!”

We're free to draw our own conclusions, I guess: there's no reference
to Absalom or David in the novel even though Faulkner alludes to some
classical and other biblical texts in it.

Peter

—-

image sources (click for larger versions): top, "The murder of Absalom," Morgan Picture Bible. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. bottom, Brettman/Corbis archive, life.com

Summer Reading, Part the First

It's been an eclectic few months of reading, with more globetrotting coming up. Last night I finished "Champlain's Dream," a riveting biography of the man who did more than anyone else to establish and shape "New France." David Hackett Fisher is a historian at Brandeis who won the Pulitzer for his book about Washington at the Delaware and the surrounding events, titled "Washington's Crossing." I was fascinated to read this one, though, because Samuel de Champlain (~1570-1635) not only explored, shaped, (and named!) much of the St. Lawrence valley from Tadoussac, near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to Montreal and far beyond; his explorations and courageous attacks (with the Huron and other Quebec tribes) to repel the Iroquois took him as far south as present-day Syracuse (Onondaga) and as far west as Lake Huron; he also explored and mapped much of the Atlantic coast, down to Cape Cod. What this means is that he had an influence over all the area where I've spent my life – and in northern Vermont and northern New York, a much greater influence than the New England first settlers we're taught about in history books.

He was also a remarkable man who I've come to admire greatly, not only for his leadership and creative vision but for his great humanity, most obvious in his love and respect for the native Americans which resulted in cooperation, mutual admiration, and a peace that endured throughout his lifetime – a record neither the British nor Spanish can begin to approach. Champlain's humanity was rooted in his catholicism – and I write that deliberately with a small "c" – he was Roman Catholic but much less interested in dogma or the organized Church than in his deep belief that all human beings were equal. He actually encouraged intermarriage between the native people and the French, and like his king, Henri IV (who actually may have been his father) dreamt of a New World free of the sort of religious and cultural strife that had plagued Europe for centuries. I can certainly see lingering effects of his legacy in the Quebec of today, and am anxious to follow out some of the threads that were started by my reading of this book.

At the same time, I'm into another Conrad: this time, "The Secret Agent," set in London. I can't say that I'm wild about Conrad, even though I'm reading most of his books. He is, however, one of the best descriptive writers I've ever read. The problem stems from the fact that none of his characters are people you come to love. Conrad's interest is in exposing the flaws that lurk in every human, and expose them he does, perhaps better than anyone. So it's not pretty, but he has a great deal to say, not only about individuals but about the times and places he's writing about, and this psychological and cultural drama, combined with his remarkable writing, have kept me going through this particular reading project.

Knowing about my interest in Orhan Pamuk and Istanbul, as part of my larger interest in the Near and Middle East, Elizabeth Angell recommended "A Mind at Peace" to me because its author, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was one of Pamuk's greatest influences.  The book is about a doomed love affair in Istanbul; that is, the love between the man and the woman is doomed, but the entire novel is a love poem to the city itself. It's a wonderful book that I am very glad to have read, not only for its insight into Pamuk but for its own story and the delicacy of Tanpinar's writing. "A Mind at Peace" weaves a sort of spell for the reader, while speaking of the spell cast on the protagonist by his love for a particular woman, and creates an atmosphere and a world that I became immersed in and was sorry to leave.  No wonder Elizabeth said, as she took it off the bookstore shelf in Brooklyn and handed it to me, "If you want to see where Pamuk is coming from, this is the book to read." Pamuk's concept of the city's embodiment of melancholy, or hüzün, clearly comes directly from Tanpinar, but Orhan, while a great storyteller in his own right, has never written about love as convincingly as Tanpinar.

That book led me to two by Louis de Bernieres, "Birds Without Wings," set in a small Turkish village, and "Captain Corelli's Mandolin," winner of the Commonwealth Prize and a beautiful and harrowing story of the occupation of a Greek island by Italian soldiers at the end of WWII, and I'd happily recommend either.

Next up: another Turkish novel by an author I discovered through the recent BBC radio series about Istanbul: "The Bastard of Istanbul" by Elif Shafak. That will complete the little Turkish focus for this spring and summer; it's time, I think, to finally come back home and read (or re-read) some American novels. First will be "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner, and we'll see where that leads. The others on my immediate list are "Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" by Jose Saramago, recommended by Wah-Ming Chang who has written an excellent essay on Saramago after his recent death; and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami and "Experiments in Ethics" by Kwame Anthony Appiah, both highly recommended by my friend Bill Gordh (he and another close friend are also reading the Faulkner right now.)

I'm excited — and we'll see how much of that I actually get through by fall, or will there be an unexpected but serendipitous detour?

(Note: there's already been a detour! When I couldn't get the Saramago or Murakami listed above at the library, I got Murakami's "South of the Border, West of the Sun" instead and immediately read it in two obsessive sessions between 10:00 pm and 8 am. A remarkable, deceptively simple book.)