On a recent Wednesday night at the Chamblin’s Uptown Poetry Reading, Dack Saig was explaining to me that William Faulkner was one of the originators of Southern Gothic. It reminded me of an article by Jamelah Earle, about Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, which I read some time ago on Literary Kicks. I went back and read it again, and enjoyed it so much I thought I would share it here:
I understand why people give up on it and declare it unreadable, and think it is an impenetrable wall of modernist “Oooh, I’m in your thoughts” blabbity blah, but the truth is that it’s not as difficult as it seems and the stuff you think you’re not understanding at first starts to make sense as you move through the novel. Perhaps that’s cold comfort for anybody who has tried to make it through the first section with Benjy and his bright shapes and Caddy smelling like trees, but it gets easier as it moves along.
The novel consists of four sections, each written from a different perspective, yet all of them come together brilliantly to tell the story of the Compson family . . .
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