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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Challengng but good starting point for any serious reader of WF, December 29, 2008
This review is from: William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Lives & Legacies (Oxford)) (Hardcover)
Don't dismiss this book because of its brevity. Porter clearly knows her stuff. Without any apparent biases (Marxist, Freudian, or archetypal) she gives clear, insightful, and helpful readings of all of Faulkner's major novels and is clearly well-read in all of the important Faulkner criticism and scholarship produced over the past half-century. It is refreshing to find an academic who can produce an "introduction" of this breadth and complexity without writing down to those just beginning their foray into her subject. She assumes her readers are interested in getting the most out of their reading of Faulkner and provides sufficient background (biographical as well as critical) to help them do so. I read this book with great interest over the course of a week, underlining many of her points for future reference. She covers all of Faulkner's major works (The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary, Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!) and makes a good case for including Go Down, Moses and The Hamlet among them. She even argues in favor of taking Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, (often dismissed as a nostalgic reverie) as a serious contribution to the Yoknapatawpha literature. In addition, she acknowledges the value of a number of non-Yoknapatawpha texts (such as Pylon and The Wild Palms) for understanding Faulkner's experimentation and innovation in the art of narrative (a key theme throughout her book). At the same time, she is not blind to Faulkner's weaknesses (such as his early failings as a poet, his insecurities and need to self-mythologize, his alcoholism, and his eventual decline as an artist after his "major phase" from 1929 to 1942). Her discussions of race and gender issues are frank, helpful, and unfreighted by polemics. Her "Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography" is full of helpful tips on how to read Faulkner. "I tell my students always," she writes, "get used to not knowing exactly what's going on. Understanding will come, but the pleasure of confusion comes first. The language itself should be your first seduction" (p. 187). Porter has not written "Faulkner for Dummies," but has offered a great introduction into the vast and diverse imaginative world of the greatest American writer of the twentieth century.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Faulkner Fantasied, May 19, 2011
Recently reread "Absalom, Absalom" and have read Porter's take on the story and a few others. All of the critics from Brooks to the present have been able to delineate the usual patterns of interest and concern that circulate in this story with predictable summations and projections to its intent and overall meaning, but without true conviction and completion.
Porter pins her take on the story on Sutpen's innocence, an innocence that she goes to great lengths to tie to the notion of a nascent American Eden, an innocence that is enterprising, driven, and tough in its hell-bent fury and desire to leave its mark (design). However, she argues that this innocence is innate and instinctually begin in its haphazardness, its awkward inclusion of something which spells out its own inevitable failure; most alarming that Sutpen is genuinely heroic in undertaking the mantle of this innocence in his mad pursuit of his design. This innocence is an odd mixture, one that combines a will to power with a skewed sense of the natural order housed in a boy who had a man's design and knows that ' to accomplish it would require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family--incidentally of course, a wife.' In accepting the premise that Sutpen possesses this amalgamated innocence as a default setting, she clips the wings off of the body of her observations about Sutpen, deminishes her accurate sense of the story as discovery, one caught between telling, retelling, listening, and reading; thus, she ends up only mirroring the jejune belief that American literature finds its true resonance in the lives of the restless adventure capitalist with a feverish design to turn the land into something he can possess, the people around him into articles of this belief, and the oceans and rivers into paths of least resistance, ones for escape and forgetting. And that all this is somehow heroic, flawed and fated with muted Grecian tones and a bright shinny veneer of American transcendentalism.
Porter and all of the critics I have encountered so far have ventured no further in their understanding of Sutpen than did Quentin or Shreve, also simply creating other designs or overlays to a story that is puzzled at best; in the final analysis, duplicate the fierce resolve of Rosa Coldfield to have their version of the story, their truths about what happened stamped out on any readers and listeners who come along; like Rosa in the vein of someone knowingly at odds with what they are saying, but holding steadfast to it after being said.
The puzzle is this: how can one find innocence in the presence of original sin and overcome the burden of this sin to create a new Eden? The sin is slavery, which negates the innocence at every step and in every remembrance, or acceptance of that mark. Sutpen is all of us who desire to make it in this world at all costs, who believe we are blessed or righteous in this pursuit, for we have a greater need or design that trumps and accepts the ethics of promoting one human over another based on race or religion or whatever other standard we can devise to ensure our success.
Only when we become Huck and suspend this ethical nightmare can we begin to address our sin, the sin of our fathers, and forge a new dream for Jim, Sutpen, Bon, Rosa...., and ourselves. Possibly,"Absalom, Absalom" is the most important story out there to read and reread. And the only story that Faulkner wrote and reread to figure out what he thought about it and its central character, Sutpen.
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4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
RAISE A WHISKEY TO PORTER ... FAULKNER, TOO, June 6, 2007
This review is from: William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies (Lives & Legacies (Oxford)) (Hardcover)
Todd Sentell is the author of the mother of all golf satires, Toonamint of Champions
Since 12th grade I've been fascinated with William Faulkner ... his work and the way he lived was revealed to me then by my high school English teacher and that fascination is coming up on thirty years. And like all Faulknerians, I devour, as quickly as it comes out, any book on the man. Carolyn Porter's recent work has just been devoured by me in a wonderful June afternoon and she's provided something special ... something no other Faulkner explainer has ever provided ... and it's in her final chapter, titled, A Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography. In this chapter she gives you some tips on the best place to start with Faulkner ... and where to go from there. Sure, this is a book review ... but it's also a thank you note from me to Carolyn Porter. Thanks for a new road map. A road map I'm happy to begin again.
by Todd Sentell, author of the wickedly hilarious social satire, Toonamint of Champions
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