Great Writers: William Faulkner, ABSALOM, ABSALOM

ABSALOM ABSALOM, William Faulkner

Published, 1935; 320 pages

Dialect Journal for Teaching/Lesson plans: 90 pages, 53,813 words

Included is a powerpoint of places that influenced Faulkner:  Mississippi, New Orleans, Paris and Hollywood

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is arguably the best American novelist of the twentieth century, the supreme literary stylist. His works are deep, cerebral, rich and complex. His style is dense, sometimes fragmented, wordy and difficult to read. He has the longest sentences and the longest paragraphs of any other writer. If you are trying to follow the thread of a sentence, you might have to go back and break it down into its many parts to figure out exactly what is being said. If reading a novel by Faulkner is frustrating and tedious at times (a painful slog), you must also know that it is worth the effort or you wouldn’t be doing it.
When I first started reading Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom, I found the first chapter (told in the voice of Miss Rosa Coldfield in 1909 when she is 64 years old) so difficult that I almost gave up. If you are able to make it through the first chapter, however, the following chapters are easier. Not easy, but not quite as difficult. (There’s no linear structure to the novel.)
Absalom, Absalom is the multilayered family saga of the Sutpen and Coldfield families in the American South in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Thomas Sutpen confounds the town of Jefferson, Mississippi—and particularly the Coldfield family—when he comes from nowhere and acquires a huge tract of land, called the Sutpen Hundred (square miles, not acres), and builds an enormous house on the edge of a swamp with the help of his band of wild black men and a French architect, who he more or less treats as a captive.
For years after the house is built, Thomas Sutpen entertains a band of his male friends with wild hunting and drinking parties and wrestling matches, until the day arrives when he decides he wants to acquire respectability in the form of a wife and children. 

Faulkner was perhaps the first writer to "blame" the South for its own problems--mainly slavery, the Civil War, and The Big Lie.  He was also one of the first struggling writers of the South to go to Paris, live at Roan Oak in Mississippi, study in New Orleans, and relocate to Los Angles to write screenplays for MGM.  ABSALOM, ABSALOM can be considered his masterpiece.  Included is a powerpoint of the places that influenced Faulkner.

This is difficult reading. Recommend only for advanced rading students,  Whatever their proficiencies, this will challenge them.