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My Sore Neck, William Faulkner, & Novels Today 5/17/2016 7:20:41 PM
I have a problem with my neck for which I receive massages once a month and do exercises near the end of the day, unless I happen to be out and that usually doesn't happen more than once a week. One exercise my therapist recommended to give my neck muscles a rest is to lie on the floor for fifteen minutes with my head resting on a book and breathe deeply. How can I do that, I wondered. If my mind isn't busy with something, it turns to squash.
I remembered that I have a good-sized collection of stories and novels or abridgments on audiotapes that I put together when my work took me for long drives through mid-north Ontario. Ontario, by the way, is Canada's largest province by area, bigger even than Texas.
Listening to tapes of writings by Dickens, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad helped me get through fifteen-minute periods of lying on a hardwood floor. Now I find myself prone on the floor for half an hour many evenings while I make my way through a complete tape of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Faulkner's writings have long been favorites of mine. I read all his novels except for two very early ones some years ago. Now that I've done some writing myself, I can see what a fine achievement Absalom is.
Faulkner wrestled with the American Civil War and its aftermath with as much conviction as Whitman did in Specimen Days. He didn't shrink from portraying human cruelty, narrowness, bigotry, racism, our licentiousness, and also our capacity for endurance, our courage, and our pride. What's more, he tells his story with a unique narrative form and a way of using language that's completely his own.
The 20th century produced several great writing originals -- the late Henry James, Mann, Proust, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf along with Faulkner. You may have other names to add to the list. The situation looks different now, at least in English speaking countries. Literature is broken down into categories and what we call literary fiction occupies a corner of the marketplace. What's more, many of the novels that come out, some very good ones to be sure, all seem to resemble each other -- pared-down, straight-ahead narratives, brisk, emphasizing immediacy over abundance and the reflective powers of our brains. Where are the innovators -- the generous, boundary-jumping pioneers?
Now, I have to confess a blind-spot. I haven't read any of the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy. and what few post-modernist works I've become familiar with haven't seemed warm-blooded to me. The one I've felt the closest rapport with is Paul Harding's Tinkers, which owes something, I believe, to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.
Several factors may account for the situation I've observed -- the devastating effects of World War 2, the rise of pop culture, a money-first frame of mind, and the pressure to conform and keep up with someone else.. I recently heard an author of two creditable literary novels say that she often wondered what she had to do to move up and write something that a big publisher would print and that would sell many copies to make her prosperous and well-known.
I have no right to make a judgment, but that frame of mind must be common. Still, I hope that new writers will come along who have the strength to work with big subjects in an original way. It may be that the Internet and new developments in publishing will bring us first-rate works of vision and courage that will challenge us and stretch our minds and hearts..
By the way, my neck is a bit better because of the extra time I've spent lying on the floor.
