Woolf's Waves and Faulkner's stories - more books I read in May - I love tremendous and sonorous words

More books I read in May.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).  A difficult book.  It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of consciousness to a new, extreme position.  I wonder if it is a dead end.  It is a live novel.

Six friends describe or think about or experience their lives.  Childhood, school, and so on at roughly decade intervals, interspersed with a prose poem about light effects on the ocean.  The text, aside from the prose poem, is all in quotation marks, as if it is speech, except for “said Neville,” “said Rhoda,” like that, which I have to put in quotation marks here, which is confusing.  But the text is obviously not speech, but thought, and not direct thought, as in Mrs Dalloway (1925), definitely not stream-of-consciousness, but more like a summary of thought, or a retrospective description of thought.  All of it somehow “said.”

The first section, the childhood piece, is the most confusing, because I have no information besides names and gender (three boys, three girls), and, realistically, it is not clear how the childhood personality transfers to the teenager or adult.  Characters sometimes seem to blur into each other, too.  Later, I could tag Louis as the poetic sensibility, Susan as the motherly one, Bernard as the novelistic sensibility, and so on.  The six characters take turns for a while, which is a little mechanical (I think, okay, who is left, who has not “spoken” yet?), until the last section, which is a fifth of the book:

“Now to sum up,” said Bernard.  “Now to explain to you the meaning of my life…  This, for the moment, seems to be my life.  If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire.  I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes.  I would say, ‘Take it.  This is my life.’  (238)

Bernard the “novelist,” has taken over.  He has never written a novel (has he?), but it is possible that this text, or some refraction of this text, is his novel, the story of this group of friends.  Perhaps the whole thing is meant to be his.  “’I love tremendous and sonorous words’” he says, or thinks, or writes, much earlier in the book (32).  He sure does.

I assume, when I re-read The Waves someday, I will abandon everything I just wrote.

***

William Faulkner, These 13 (1931).  His first book of short stories; his worst title?  Faulkner occasionally rearranged his work, so this book has vanished, dissolved into Collected Stories (1951), but I wanted to think about the stories in their earlier context.

Four stories are about World War I, mostly pilots.  They are now  housed in “The Wasteland” in Collected Stories, almost by themselves.  Three stories are about Americans in Europe after the war, and are in “Beyond.”  The Italian stories in particular sounded more like Hemingway than I would have guessed possible for Faulkner, but perhaps I am being addled by the shared subject matter.

None of these are Faulkner at his best, but he did keep them.  They are not essential Faulkner, unless the question if “how did Faulkner become Faulkner”.

The other six are essential, good or bad.  They express the essence of Faulkner’s art circa 1930.  “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner’s first published story (!), the perfect distillation of “Southern Gothic”; “Dry September,” a clear-eyed lynching story; “Hair,” Southern Goofic, but the shared protagonist with “Dry September” shows how Faulkner’s Balzac-in-Mississippi concept works; and “That Evening Sun,” about racial incomprehension, and ditto on the Balzac thing except the characters are from The Sound and the Fury.

That’s only four.  “Red Leaves” and “A Justice” are about Chickasaw slave-owners and the history of Yoknapatawpha County before it was Yoknapatawpha.  Faulkner is mythologizing.  I only have a vague sense of what he is doing in these two stories.  A problem for later.