late post on Barn Burner

I found it hard to escape the bias given to me by creative writing workshops in my reaction to William Faulkner. As a writer, I exist more on the Hemmingway side of the spectrum: I appreciate short and to the point sentences in my fiction. So I found it hard not to want to put in periods and edit the hell out of Faulkner's complex and unnecessarily long sentences. I do not know why he decided to write like that, but it has been my experience that those I have met who practice that kind of writing, are often pompous windbags who care more about self-gratification in showing off their intellect, than they care about telling a good story. One of my instructors called that type of writing “masturbation on the page.”

It took some meta-cognitive exercising to get myself out of that mindset in order to appreciate a sentence like: “He merely ate his supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth – a shape black, flat and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin: “You were fixing to tell them” (Faulkner 1793). In the end I decided to define it more as prose poetry than short fiction. I know that good writers know no genres, but as I am still a novice myself, it helped me to appreciate it more by playing with the definitions.

Faulkner’s descriptions, the depths he visits within his sentences capture the certain complexity of the scenes that he is trying to describe. There are a lot of levels to this story, and every sentence helps convey that meaning by making it difficult to read. If I swallow my bias, and my own favoritism towards concisely written story telling, I can appreciate this difficulty for the way it reminds me of life itself. Life is difficult: there are layers upon layers to how we see the world, if we are thoughtful, just as there are layers upon layers to how this boy sees the world. Many times, these layers do not come one at a time, but rather all at once, and making sense of each moment is very important to understanding the whole story.