Among especially “fine-style” sentences in Light in August, here he’s writing about a Civil-War-haunted (because his grandfather died in the conflict) defrocked preacher, Gail Hightower: The latter is spare and visual, while fine prose celebrates the beauty of language, strewing about metaphors and adjectives, even adverbs, Dillard says, and “traffics in parallel structures and repetitions.”ĭillard deconstructs each style’s strengths and weaknesses. She places him as a modernist who employs “fine” rather than “plain” prose. Dillard, patron saint of this blog, also started as a poet-maybe helpful in pegging Faulkner.

Two punctuation idiosyncrasies (which do have a logic): he uses nary an apostrophe in contractions, so can’t is cant he runs together compound modifiers that normally would be hyphenated-though he’s inconsistent, neither correctly hyphenating nor oddly conjoining “back street restaurant,” and eventually he forgets the mannerism altogether.Īnother thing that makes reading Light in August interesting is that, since reading it decades ago, I revisit periodically Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction ( reviewed). Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star full of summer. Nothing can look quite as lonely as a big man going along an empty street. His great sentences, whether poetic or plain, arise from Faulkner’s own observations, from his immersion in his fictive story, and from his channeling of some characters’ thoughts. He works as a sawdust shoveler at a sawmill with a fellow named Joe Christmas, a bootlegger, soon-to-be murderer, and all-around tortured soul. Lena Grove, poor and naïve, very pregnant but indomitable, a girl from nowhere Alabama, tracks her feckless beau to Mississippi.

Then again, there are enough of those Faulkneresque doozies to keep you on your toes. Rereading it this summer, I’m struck by how sure a writer Faulkner was. I wrote mostly poetry then, and realized only recently that I had based a character, in an epic poem I was slaving over at night, upon the novel’s immortal Lena Grove. I remember Light in August fondly from college. Sometimes it’s also called his most accessible great one, the last bead on his string of masterpieces between 19: Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary. His sentences shine as well in Light in August, sometimes referred to as his greatest novel. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. - William Faulkner to The Paris Review Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. William Faulkner’s prose-stamped with his poetic lineage-shines.

Light in august