cycles

John Jeremiah Sullivan (what a name!)  had a piece in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine about Absalom! Absalom!  I have always been drawn to the dark, violent messiness of Faulkner, so I read with interest. As I faced diving back into work, a couple of items from the article seemed to holler at me.  Here they are:

1.  The rules Faulkner doesn't ignore in this novel he tends to obliterate.  {Me, on my feet, cheering.}  The plot, for instance.  There is none.  He tells us on the third page (in italics) pretty much everything that will happen in the book, action wise.  {Right, on.  What happens isn't ever the point, is it?}

2.  Sullivan quotes the writer Paul Metcalf, which seems like a rebuttal to revealing your plot all too soon:  "The only real work in creative endeavor is keeping things from falling together too soon."  {Of course!  Suspense involves withholding.  But this is so perfectly put.}

3.  What we discover, though, on advancing into the novel's maze, is that Faulkner has given nothing away, not of the things he most values.  He's not concerned with holding us in suspense over the unearthing of events but in keeping us transfixed as he goes about excavating the soil beneath them. . .


And so, the point is made.  Faulkner did not use the plot to create the necessary suspense, but, rather, the ramifications of plot.  So guess what I'm reading?  Yep.  And as I look at the passages I underlined, it is clear that I was reading with the knowledge that I would have to be writing a paper.  I am hunting for thesis ideas and evidence to throw behind them.  How strange to remember what that kind of reading was like--trying to excavate the excavation.