"A Rose for Emily" (1930)

To be clear, my opinion is that the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) basically has it right about this William Faulkner story, which appears in The Dark Descent and is a pretty good Faulkner story. ISFDB, however, classifies it as "non-genre," noting somewhat snippily, "This gothic story has nothing supernatural in it, but has appeared in so many genre anthologies that we want to index its appearance for the purposes of this database." You can feel the skepticism. I'm in sympathy to the extent that I worry editors of horror anthologies too often reach self-consciously for literary credibility. Thank God for Edgar Allan Poe, the go-to win-win (we can talk about the high levels of trash another time). On the other hand, I don't think a horror story has to have something supernatural in it. But it does get to be tricky business out here at the fine edges of sorting and ranking. I'll say I also have my arguments with ISFDB from the other direction. The database for example largely excludes Patricia Highsmith, whose formal specialty is more the crime or mystery genre, that's true. But if your idea of horror does not include the Ripley novels then I am not buying your idea of horror. To be blunt, "A Rose for Emily" is not even remotely my idea of horror. Yet there it is in The Dark Descent along with stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and even D.H. Lawrence for crying out loud. Editor David G. Hartwell really did not need to go to most of these places because he otherwise has impeccable taste in stories that can only be called horror. The Dark Descent is one of the best collections I've come across yet.

In a roundabout way that brings us to the topic of "gothic," ISFDB's term which I probably need to understand better. Starting with the dictionary definition, the third sense in Merriam-Webster gives us "a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents." Sounds like Wuthering Heights! But we are starting to split hairs fine here as that definition in many ways applies equally to horror. Specific circumstances in "A Rose for Emily" reminded me of the Dickens novel Great Expectations and its scenes with Miss Havisham (perhaps as Faulkner intended?), another reason ISFDB's "gothic" seems right. "A Rose for Emily" tells a gruesomely horrific story, if I'm getting the picture right from the usual Faulknerian fragments: Miss Emily Grierson's father would not let her marry, she was 30 by the time he died and her prospects were limited by then, a Northern laborer was beneath her but even he wouldn't have her so she murdered him and slept next to the moldering corpse for many years.

Again, there's a good deal of overlap between horror and grotesque cruelty, mental aberration, and/or crime, so the argument may be fair that "A Rose for Emily" belongs or fits as horror. But something is missing here that I always find in horror, some sense of the uncanny or mystery of an unknowable beyond. In many ways this story reads like merely straightforward degradation of Miss Emily Grierson, with misogyny supplying some of the energy but much more a kind of resentment from the author, an understandable one too, toward the perversions of the Old South, here made absolutely and quite cynically concrete. To stretch it a bit, Faulkner does indulge one of H.P. Lovecraft's ploys, with an insistence on a penetrating noisome smell, but it doesn't feel derived from Lovecraft, and incidentally makes me wonder if Faulkner was even aware of him, though they were roughly contemporaries. Lovecraft was a little older but only by a few years. My main takeaway from "A Rose for Emily" is that the literary values of horror are best left to sort themselves out. Editors of horror anthologies don't need to drag morbid literary stars into the picture to shore up mainstream credibility (beyond Poe of course). Perhaps because it is a reliable commercial cash cow, perhaps for other reasons, horror will never get mainstream credibility and probably shouldn't. Let Faulkner be Faulkner. Let horror be horror.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell

The Wild Palms (1939)

The title William Faulkner originally had for this unusual novel, one of my favorites by him, is If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, but his publishers had other ideas and these days it's seen both ways. I read it first as The Wild Palms and always think of it that way. The experimental aspect is that it is actually two long stories shuffled together in alternating chapters. The first is called The Wild Palms and involves a torrid hothouse love affair as perhaps only Faulkner could imagine it (see also Sanctuary). The other is called Old Man and tells the story of a convict put to humanitarian work in Mississippi during the 1927 floods. What I like is how straightforward, concrete, and vivid these stories are. It's from a few years after Absalom, Absalom!, arguably peak Faulkner (though I tend more to favor 1929 to 1932 as his peak). There's a sense of a writer in frenzy, with so much to tell and explain and so little time, continually forced into eruptions of detail that come in torrents. He commits amazing feats of balance with his long abrupt sentences. Perhaps, also, I like it because it's not elaborating the Yoknapatawpha County history. Both tales have obvious biblical sources—Adam and Eve and Noah's flood, to start. The Wild Palms story is not exactly depraved, but it is fairly wrong. She is married to another in what appears to be a free-love style open relationship. He's a self-destructive underachiever with medical training. I know these events are nearly a hundred years old, and different times, different times, but it felt to me like an alien toxic man-and-woman dynamic. I had a hard time buying it. I can believe the toxicity in a general way but this is nothing like anything I know. I recognized some aspects—Faulkner's descriptions of her fierce creativity rang true, very much, but I could never understand what these two were doing together. Old Man, meanwhile, works often and best like an adventure story with a rich dark vein of humor in it as well. The movements of the waters on the grand scale in a flood situation of the Mississippi River and its tributary system, the whole look and feel of being trapped in a boat in a flood of such scale, is really amazing stuff. When I was poking around for information, I found an interesting list of Faulkner in-betweener narrative pieces, such as "Spotted Horses," a long story that he later incorporated into The Hamlet (the first novel in a trilogy completed 20 years later), "The Bear" (a long story that is arguably a stand-alone and arguably part of what is arguably a novel, Go Down, Moses), and these two long stories, as novel or read separately straight through, which latter I've never done. I like the way Faulkner kept blowing up the very idea of what a novel is. This is one of the best and most rewarding examples.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Go Down, Moses (1942)

William Faulkner considered this cycle of seven stories to be a novel and that's good enough for me. Some of them were published separately, but even what is likely the most famous story here—"The Bear"—has a long section that has nothing to do with any bear and everything to do with themes and elements developed in the other stories. The stories are discontinuous but sequential in time, with a shifting cast of main characters. As with much of Faulkner, the themes and elements can be reduced to interbreeding among Old South settlers and natives, including of course slaves. It's the story of the McCaslin family across the generations, but it's not easy to sort out all the relations in this sizable clan, especially the brooding way Faulkner tells it, elliptically, from obtuse angles, occasionally wading deep into minutia of genealogy. I saw a chart once that made reasonably clear what is meant by first, second, and third cousins, and the "removed" business too, but I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it, especially in Faulkner's brusque linear narrative form. To make things worse, the African line of descent is of course kept secret among McCaslins (open secret, not to be discussed aloud) and marked by shame and humiliation. But character traits and physical features can emerge in any part of the clan, and they are all united in some ways. There are lots of lively anecdotes here, and Faulkner often surprises with humor, though much of it is ultimately tragic. The main character—or the unifying character—is Isaac McCaslin, a white man, gifted hunter, and lifelong bachelor who repudiates an inheritance of land and utterly bewilders everyone else here. As readers we can see that he's actually explaining himself fairly clearly, in that strangely stilted language of Faulkner that grows hypnotic. Isaac McCaslin is explaining himself—they just don't want to understand. We can understand better. So it goes. The first story tells of how Isaac's father was tricked into marriage late in life. His name is Theophilus but he's known as Buck. In the later stories Isaac is Uncle Ike and an old man. The centerpiece and best story is "The Bear," a great hunting adventure with nice exaggerations, spending a significant portion of its significant length on Isaac's explanation of himself in a somewhat arch experimental format, which is nonetheless effective. This novel, as slapped together as it feels in a way, is one of my favorites by Faulkner.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Sanctuary (1931)

The first and only other time I read this novel was in the '70s, so I was surprised that I noticed the difference between it and this "Corrected Text" version, which came along in 1981. Mostly what I noticed was the absence of William Faulkner's "misleading" introduction, written a year after the original publication, which he then changed his mind about and did not want included in later printings. But there it was in 1975 or so, a heaving disavowal of Sanctuary as a potboiler, "the most horrific tale I could imagine," written for the money and ultimately failing even at that. I suspect at bottom it's an issue of embarrassment—Sanctuary is a profile of a mindset of which Faulkner evidently was not entirely in control at the time of writing. The basic story is about a white college girl of 18 in Oxford, Mississippi—Temple Drake—and her coercion into prostitution. It's a solid foundation, even classic Zola style naturalism, but from that point on we are hard into Faulkner-land, and he's straining remember. The man who turns out Temple is known as Popeye. He is impotent and sickly, though lethal and dangerous. Faulkner thinks Popeye thinks he can do the job with a corncob. This is sufficiently lurid, yes, but I think we're losing track of believability, never mind taste. There is also a scene no doubt beyond lurid for its times, but far more graphic displays of it can be found by the hundreds now in the "cuckold" section of your favorite porn site. In a word: eww. But one word won't do: eww, eww, eww. Thus my fair warning to you, gentle reader, and too late now for spoiler warnings. I'm a little embarrassed myself by this overheated funk, but that's not really my main complaint. I've seen worse. At the same time, with its insistence on the poetic concrete—to the point I'm not always certain what is going on except on a base experiential level—he seems to want to have it two ways, writing a potboiler and maintaining his literary dignity. He is often examining light and shadow closely, and people and scenes slip easily into affects of oil paintings. He has a particular fascination with the texture of eyes, describing them as soft black rubber, knobby, and utterly black. In the Faulkner universe, this novel is slightly to the side. We run into a couple of the Snopes brothers, who I tend to enjoy though obviously they are a stereotype of poor white trash. I know the name Horace Benbow too—he is the attorney and knock-kneed moral compass here and has appeared elsewhere in Faulkner's work. Sanctuary is an interesting curiosity but I don't think it ranks with the best of his work. For its raw action it's not much fun to read either, though the language as always has its points.

In case it's not at the library.

"Barn Burning" (1939)

Read story by William Faulkner online.

This story sees William Faulkner in good form on the Snopes family. It's told third-person from the point of view of a young Snopes boy, who is ludicrously named Colonel Sartoris, though everyone calls him "Sarty." Sarty is only 10 or 11 years old, but he is regularly amazed and aghast at the behavior of his father, Abner. Abner Snopes is proud, filled with rage, and self-destructive. He perversely refuses to cooperate with anyone on anything, even friends or neighbors, even on things like building fences to enclose his animals. When these friends and neighbors object, and then impose penalties to counter his irresponsibility and offset the cost of their troubles, Abner gets mad and takes revenge, burning down their barns and such. Then the family has to move again. Abner Snopes is a classic Faulkner character—poor, white, ignorant, unyielding, and boiling with rage. Already Sarty can remember moving nearly a dozen times. Abner is described more than once as looking as if he were cut from tin, a familiar Faulkner formulation: " ... he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth—a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat." The story starts with a legal case against Snopes that can't be proved, but he and his family are run out of the area—once more Sarty has to move. At the new place, Abner immediately makes more trouble with his new landlord. The story is half shocking treachery and half pure comedy, as Abner alienates all people he suspects thinks they are better than him. In this case the victim is Major de Spain, also seen previously in Faulkner's work. The Snopes stories, in fact, are some of Faulkner's funniest, though the grim razor edges of violence and seething anger are never far. I'll also point out this story is a reasonably straightforward narrative. You always know what's going on and it has a lot of momentum. The ending, an epic confrontation between Abner and de Spain, is not entirely clear, but it's likely that's clarified elsewhere in the Faulkner canon. And if it's not, it's possible to make the note of ambiguity work too, so all good, right? The important part of the story to me is the unearthly unrelenting powerful physical presence of Abner. His anger can be felt palpably, yet even at his most threatening he is also an unmistakable comic element, a kind of downhome version of Tony Soprano, bumptiously cracking hilarious and maiming and murdering people. Remarkable balancing act and a good story.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

As I Lay Dying (1930)

I was impressed all over again by how difficult Faulkner can make things with his abrupt changes in point of view, even inside of one character, and here we are privy to the inside first-person views of some 15 characters. This often reads to me like Benjy Compson's first section of The Sound and the Fury, with simple declarative sentences and straightforward dialogue that yields very little directly. Even so, in As I Lay Dying the scope reaches biblical proportions of event, with both flood and fire and arguably locusts too, as it tells the story of a backwoods impoverished white Southern family attempting to transport the body of their matriarch, Addie Bundren, to her desired resting ground in Jefferson, Mississippi. Much grotesquerie goes on with the various family members and especially the corpse, to the point where it becomes comical. The corruption is passed out unequally but most of the characters share some taint—adultery, greed, pride, and sloth are the usual suspects among the God-fearing population of Faulkner novels. I respect it like hell for its adventurous experimentalism and for its usual x-ray of the bizarre (and still familiar) ways of the post-Reconstruction South. But it feels mannered and disconnected too, again reminiscent of Benjy Compson's narrative style. What I prefer of Faulkner, which is otherwise more commonly found, is the brooding ruminating free-flowing narrative voice, with long artful spiky sentences. It is an even more difficult style to read in some ways—the extreme is Absalom, Absalom!, which I admit is a bit much even for me—but also, once in, the most luxuriant and energizing to read. Light in August may be the best expression of it, or the rest of The Sound and the Fury, after the first section. Faulkner set out to write a tour de force with As I Lay Dying, and accomplished it on multiple levels—stylistically, by plot points, by influence (particularly on pulp noir writers), and by the way the story proceeds, like a relay match, handing off the baton of narrative chore to the next seeming random character, even as Addie Bundren reaches the point of her death, is put inside a box, and after some ordeals finally comes to be buried. It does what it sets out to do and it feels like an accomplishment to read it too, so all good all around, I suppose. But it feels mechanical too, it always has to me—something less than organic.

In case it's not at the library.

Light in August (1932)

Of the handful of great William Faulkner novels (and keeping in mind that even the second tier of his work is well above the top of all but a select few others), Light in August is probably the most pleasure to read, a big juicy pulp-fiction style of melodrama that swoops about among its elements like a bird of prey feeding on carrion—and thus, cautiously, I will suggest it as starting point if you have not yet read him. There are elements of this degree of storytelling power in The Sound and the Fury, but then there is also that novel's first hundred pages. As I Lay Dying is studied experiment. And both "The Bear" (probably more accurate to call a novella because so short, so make that Go Down, Moses) and Absalom, Absalom have long passages in which the language must be parsed slowly and patiently. By contrast, Light in August tends more toward simply introducing its themes and players and briskly setting them in motion, working everything with such facility and seeming ease into the kind of lurid gothic template into which he wanted so badly to fit Sanctuary (which, I will say, nonetheless remains very nearly one of his great ones too). To be sure, Light in August is not without the Faulkner trademarks of ornate brooding passages and elliptical structures, with long sentences and some tendency to favor the Latinate. The flashback, for example, to the troubled childhood of protagonist Joe Christmas (one of the great literary names) starts Chapter 6 with: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears." But that kind of thing is generally more for the effect here, and doesn't constitute the bulk of it. Me, I find this language utterly hypnotic, particularly once fully under Faulkner's sway, but I certainly understand that YMMV. As a study in racist anxiety, a continuing underpinning theme all through Faulkner's work, of course, Light in August veers more toward the clinical (not to say Freudian) understandings of "hysterical"; but also toward the connotation of "very funny," in which regard it may sometimes seem almost badly dated. On the other hand, some days I look around at things happening all the time in Southern politics even now and I have to wonder how dated after all that the kind of grotesque, deep-seated racism documented here really is.

In case it's not at the library.

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Perhaps one of the more interesting and telling points about the critical reception of William Faulkner is the wide variation and lack of consensus found in assessing any single "masterpiece"—this one gets the nod frequently, perhaps even most, but close behind it are Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; and Light in August, not to mention the rest of the oeuvre, including a fat tome of stories, all well worth looking into. But this remains my favorite, in spite of all the effort and patience required to make it through the first of the four sections, the one that develops the "tale told by an idiot" part of the Shakespeare quote that engendered the title. As opaque as it generally is, it contains information essential to what follows, as the inevitable second reading of the whole really proves. In the sections that follow I find inspired sources and foreshadowings of J.D. Salinger, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy, respectively. Sure, it's all a bit melodramatic (strike that "bit"), but Faulkner plunges joyfully in language, meaning, and mood like a dog in a lake on a hot summer day; the pleasures and associations unfold and unfold and unfold.

In case it's not at the library.