Thinking About William Faulkner

 I will state my bias: I prefer William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. Pretty sure i have said that before, but it helps me to say it again.

Which is why I read Greg Gerke's Faulkner’s Ghost in The American Novel from The Cleveland Review of Books. My friend KH says Faulkner would never be published by the MFAs running publishing nowadays. He may be right.

This was the particular passage that worried me:

... In Faulkner, one sees in brilliantine and minute unearthly detail like the bejeweled canvases of Vermeer. Certainly, we don't write like Faulkner because the sensibility has changed to something more conservative and fearful (the terms are contemporaneously synonymous) rather than imaginative. There is an inherent bias in our fiction-making against the mysterious, the alien, the uncanny (style—not narrative). But the nexus of tastemakers and editorial powers want fiction that can easily fit the market, which short-sells the reader, (Oh, this is this type of story or Oh, I see, this is what I should be feeling as I read this type of story) and for all the liberal and left-leaning people in the US literary industrial complex, there is a rampant conservativism in its product, which is to say, its language. From an overabundance of attention to book prizes to “beach reads” to book trailers and other promotional tie-ins, US fiction has fallen in the last twenty-five years away from maximalism (which need not require a 700-page book (Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony is maximalist as is Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country or Foster-Wallace's Oblivion or Mark De Silva's Square Wave) and even just a staid proficiency in outré language. Fuentes writes “Baroque...is the language of those peoples who, ignorant of the truth, look for it eagerly... [it is] the language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency: only those who own nothing enclose everything”—emboldening the conservative substructure in a market that doesn't have room for the Kafka's and Beckett's of the twenty-first century.

Too late for me to be anything but the conservative noted above. I do not have the time to work out a style. All I can do is play with what I have; my language flat-footed.

sch 11/23/22