[lbo-talk] Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom

magcomm magcomm at ix.netcom.com
Wed Aug 22 08:51:35 PDT 2012


Carrol:

For me it is the best novel written in the English language in the 20th century. There is a moment in Chapter VIII when Faulkner moves the novel from modernism to postmodernism in the most deft way possible. "The Sound and the Fury" was his modernist masterpiece - but he had gone as far as he could with modernism and then there is the miracle of this novel. He moves the novel away from the "look-how-many-authors-I-quote" technique of "Ulysses," and back toward life as experienced. In the book, the action is both linear and wrapped within itself, so a reader -- at least this reader -- is immersed in a tangible, textured world.

Brian

P.S. Howard Hawks tried to make a movie out of it to be called "Revolt in the Earth" with a script by Faulkner. When Faulkner tried to sell the novel in galleys to 20th Century Fox, he told Nunnally Johnson "The price is $50,000. It is about miscegenation."



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