Faulkners Light in August - Style :: Light August Essays

Light in August - Style   Chapter 6, opening paragraph Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echo building of dark red brick soot stark nakedened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking manufacturing plant purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence handle a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random ludicrous surges, with sparrow wish childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and turn up of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like blacktears.   Faulkners style may give you trouble at first beca drop of (1) his use of long, convoluted, and sometimes ungrammatical sentences, such as the one just quoted (2) his repetitiousness (for example, the word bleak in the sentence just quoted) and (3) his use of oxymorons, that is, combinations of foreign or incongruous words (for example, frictionsmooth, slow and ponderous gallop, cheerful, testy vocalise). People who dislike Faulkner see this style as careless. Yet Faulkner rewrote and rewrite Light in August many times to get the closing book exactly the way he wanted it. His style is a product of musical themeful deliberation, not of haste. Editors sometimes misunderstood Faulkners intentions and made what they thought were minor changes. Recently scholars have prepared an edition of Light in August that restores the authors original text as exactly as possible. This entertain Note is based on that Library of America edition (1985), edited by Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.   In some of his more difficult passages, Faulkner is using the proficiency called stream-of-consciousness. Pioneered by the Irish writer James Joyce, the most extreme versions of this whatsis give the reader direct access to the full contents of the characters minds, tho confused, fragmen ted, and even contradictory those contents may be.   But Faulkner develops his own, more organise variety of stream of consciousness. In his densest paragraphs, he often lets his characters fall into reveries in which they perceive more deeply than their conscious minds possibly could. His characters connect foregone and present and reflect on the meaning of events and on the relationships between them in a manner that sounds more like Faulkner himself than like the characters in their familiar states of mind.