Getting used to Faulkner again, and his interminable sentence structure that bathes a scene and character in mood with words that wrap around and spiral into sumbigdeal.
They would be seen together in the carriage in town now and then as though nothing had occurred between them at least, which certainly would not have been the case if the quarrel had been between Bon and the father, and probably not the case if the trouble had been between Henry and his father because the town knew that between Henry and Judith there had been a relationship closer than the traditional loyalty of brother and sister even, a curious relationship: something of that fierce impersonal rivalry between two cadets in a crack regiment who eat from the same dish and sleep under the same blanket and chance the same destruction and who would risk death for one another, not for the other’s sake but for the sake of the unbroken front of the regiment itself. (p. 79)
Sentences–yes, that’s a single sentence employing both a semi-colon and a colon amid the sprinkle of commas–like the above make me wonder why I fell in love with Faulkner and wonder if the bloom is off the rose.
In the example above which describes the changing relationship between Sutpen and his daughter Judith, Faulkner brings in the other characters to contrast the scenario had it been other characters involved. Then he brings in the example of “two cadets” to complete his explanation. Simile here seems stretched way above and beyond the necessary. But Faulkner wants to involve the reader so deeply into these dramatic family situations that he pulls out all the stops. Is it overwriting? According to today’s standards, most definitely. I’m guessing that about three-quarters of the verbiage of the sentence could be dumped with little meaning lost.
But then, I don’t find myself weary of the words, as I did with Styron’s Nat Turner. I find myself reading, reading, reading; a bit breathless before I stop to consider what I’d just read. And that, I suppose, is the magic of Faulkner.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology