I said I was going to post examples of Faulkner's extensive use of parenthetical statements in The Reivers. So here you go. Reading these out of context, they may not seem so bad. But when they're right in the middle of a larger paragraph, your ability to follow along can get thrown for a loop.
pg. 74
But just tough men then, no more, until Colonel Sartoris (I don't mean the banker with his courtesy title acquired partly by inheritance and partly by propinquity, who was responsible for Boon and me being where we at this moment were; I mean his father, the actual colonel, C.S.A. - soldier, statesman, politician, duelist; the collateral descending nephews and cousins of one twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth say, murderer) built his railroad in the mid-seventies and destroyed it.
pg. 100
The middle right-hand upper one was gold; in her dark face it reigned like a queen among the white dazzle of the others, seeming actually to glow, gleam as with a slow inner fire or lambence of more than gold, until that single tooth appeared even bigger than both of Miss Reba's yellowish diamonds put together. (Later I learned - no matter how - that she had had the gold one taken out and an ordinary white one, like anybody else's, put in; and I grieved. I thought that, had I been of her race and age group, it would have been worth being her husband just to watch that tooth in action across the table every day; a child of eleven, it seemed to me that the very food it masticated must taste different, better.)
pg. 109
His supper was hot: not a plate, a dish of steak smothered in onions at his place. ( You see? how much ahead of his time Mr Binford was? Already a Republican. I don't mean a 1905 Republican - I don't know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any - I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a man who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.) We all sat down, two new ladies too...
pg. 166
Though some of it has not changed: the big rambling multigalleried multistoried steamboat-gothic hotel where the overalled aficionados and the professionals who trained the fine bird dogs and the northern millionaires who owned them (one night in the lounge in 1933, his Ohio business with everybody else's under the Damocles sword of the federally closed banks, I myself heard Horace Lytle refuse five thousand dollars for Mary Montrose) gathered for two weeks each February; Paul Rainey also, who liked our country enough - or anyway our bear and deer and panther enough - to own enough Mississippi land for him and his friends to hunt them in: a hound man primarily, who took his pack of bear hounds to Africa to see what they would do on lion or vice versa.
pg. 169
But still behind the bit; he had never once come into the bridle, his whole head bent around and tucked but with no weight whatever on the hand, as if the bit were a pork rind and he a Mohammedan (or a fish spine and he a Mississippi candidate for constable whose Baptist opposition had accused him of seeking the Catholic vote, or one of Roosevelt's autographed letters and a secretary of the Citizen's Council, or Senator Goldwater's cigar butt and the youngest pledge to the A.D.A.), on until he reached Ned, and with a jerk I felt clean up to my shoulder, snatched his head free and began to nuzzle at Ned's shirt.
pg. 190
So Butch and Boon went that way, and Everbe and I (you have doubtless noticed that nobody had missed Otis yet. We got out of the surrey; it appeared to be Butch's; anyway he was driving it; there had been some delay at Uncle Parsham's while Butch tried to persuade, then cajole, then force Everbe to get in the front seat with him, which she foiled by getting into the back seat and holding me by one arm and holding Otis in the surrey with her other hand, until Boon got in the front with Butch - and first Butch, then the rest of us were somehow inside the doctor's hall but nobody remembered Otis at that moment) followed the doctor into another room containing a horsehair sofa with a dirty pillow and a wadded quilt on it, and a roll-top desk cluttered with medicine bottles and more of them on a mantel beneath which the ashes of last winter's final fire had not yet been disturbed, and a washstand with a bowl and pitcher and a chamber pot that somebody hadn't emptied yet either in one corner and a shotgun in the other; and if Mother had been there his fingernails would have touched no scratch belonging to her, let alone four cut fingers, and evidently Everbe agreed with her; she - Everbe - said, "I'll unwrap it," and did so.
A pain in the ass sometimes? Perhaps. But dude was (and still is) the man.
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Damn that man can write a long sentence!
ReplyDeleteoh hey, I just was at your school. Not bad my friend, not bad.
- J
page 190 and this blog title all equal money.
ReplyDeletep.s. The Gaslight Anthem=win..as in I don't have to pretend I like it, just kidding I really do like it.
p.p.s. I would also enjoy it if you blogged more. No lame excuses :) Thanks!
Josh: Hope you're able to get some work there. But just be careful. It's a different breed of student there.
ReplyDeleteChelsea (Did I just blow your cover? Oops.): Glad you're enjoying those TGA jams. I'll kick their new album your way at some point. Though you better not be "pretending" to like any of my suggestions.
you blew it, now I'm going to have to start an entirely new blog. Please do kick the new TGA my way... Uh, pretend.. I've been honest so far. i.e. Jawbreaker. Guh.
ReplyDelete