I’ve just finished responding to all the posts I received for the first week and must say, I’m very pleased. Everyone is reading well–no mean feat especially for the 60% of you who have never read any of Faulkner’s novels–and many of you are doing excellent analysis. The hill that a significant number of students need to climb is moving from impressions to arguments. By this I mean a writing voice that moves through a progression of argumentative claims that take readers from point A to point Z in increasing complexity. The impressionistic voice, in contrast, records one’s reading experience–how hard the text is, how one feels about the characters, what kinds of affects the text conjured up. These impressions are all valuable, of course, but they are grist for the critical mill, not the final product. The best analyses show what the structure of the text does to inspire the impressions and feelings that one experiences in the course of reading.
More substantively, I was interested to read the various takes you had on the novel’s startling clash between a consistent overarching theme–roughly, Caddy’s violations of sexual taboos as registered through very different subjectivities–and wildly divergent literary forms. Several of you noted that Benjy records reality like an audio or video recorder: see Molly’s response for a vivid example. This is an argument that critics like Peter Lurie have developed at great length.
I also note that many of you wrestled with Quentin’s narrative’s juxtaposition of what the early 2othC philosopher Bergson called temps with duree: the objective, measurable “clock time” that we moderns all attend to and the subjective “inner” sense o time as duration, as something liquid and changeable. See Katie’s post for a lovely reading of this dynamic.
Finally, a number of you explored links between Faulkner and other examples of literary modernism, such as Joyce or Woolf. This is something we’ll talk about throughout the course. For now, check out Matthew’s comparison between Benjy’s narrative and that of Molly Bloom in Ulysses.
We’ve got our work cut out for us Thursday due to the snow day: show up ready to sweat it out (literally) and work through as much of the novel as possible. We’ll also learn how to create an entry in the wiki (due a week from Thursday). Also, don’t forget you’ve got Post #2 due Thursday.
