William Faulkner Writing Style

Benjy Compson hears golfers call for a caddie and drops out of 1928 into the afternoon his sister Caddy climbed a pear tree to watch a funeral through an upstairs window, her drawers muddy, her brothers looking up at her from the grass. He does not know he has moved. The first time through, you do not either. The opening section of The Sound and the Fury hands you a narrator who registers every sound in a room and interprets none of it, and the only signal that the ground has shifted under you is a change of typeface.

The same withholding runs at book scale in Absalom, Absalom! He keeps you out of the room where the killing happens. Rosa Coldfield gives Quentin Compson one account in a shuttered house in Jefferson, his father gives him a second on the porch, and that winter Quentin and his Canadian roommate Shreve build a third in a freezing Harvard dormitory out of letters, town gossip and open invention. It is Conrad's relay of tellers pushed one stage past the witness, since neither of the last two men was alive when Henry Sutpen shot Charles Bon at the gate.

He also reuses one county, and that lets consequence arrive before cause. Quentin, who drowns himself in the second section of The Sound and the Fury, is alive and listening through most of Absalom, so a reader who takes the books in that order already knows how the listener ends. Flem Snopes works his way from behind a store counter in Frenchman's Bend to a bank in Jefferson across three novels, so a reader who meets him late meets a settled method and has to go back for the appetite behind it. Yoknapatawpha is a filing cabinet for facts held over.

None of this survives being copied at the surface. The dialect spellings are the cheapest thing he owns. They are what imitators take. What repays study is the scheduling. He fixes what you will know at each pass, and he settles the debt his confusion runs up, on a timetable he could have drawn on one sheet of paper before writing a line of the sprawl. Draw yours first.

Right-branching accumulation

Write a clause that could stop where it stands, and then keep adding to its right-hand edge. Every new phrase fastens to material the reader has already closed, so nothing needs holding open, and the sentence can run half a page without becoming a memory test. Steven Pinker puts the difficulty of a long sentence in its shape rather than its length, and names the phrase jammed inside another phrase as the thing that breaks readers. The cost is sameness. A whole page of accumulation flattens into a list, so the tool wants a short blunt sentence dropped in as ballast, which is what Faulkner supplies after every long run.

The held noun

Choose one concrete thing and refuse to rename it. Addie Bundren's coffin stays on the page through most of As I Lay Dying, through the flooded river, through the burning barn, through a rotating cast of tellers who each want something different out of the journey, and it is what keeps a reader oriented while the voices swap. The tool answers a problem that grows with your ambition, since a reader needs a fixed object to measure movement. It fails when the thing you fix on has no stake in the outcome. It works when touching it costs somebody something.

The flat document

Set an unliterary document down in the middle of literary prose, and leave the arithmetic to the reader. In the commissary section of The Bear, Ike McCaslin works through his family's plantation ledgers, and the entries are terse, misspelled and administrative, a line or two for a whole human being. Faulkner writes no commentary over them. The document supplies the facts and the surrounding prose supplies the grief, and a reader who joins the two remembers the join in a way no explanation would have earned. Absalom uses a letter the same way. Watch for the document with nothing damning in it. That one reads as texture.

Two strands, one binding

Run two stories in alternating chapters and keep them apart. The Wild Palms sets a doomed love affair against a convict swept up in a Mississippi flood, and the halves share no character, no place and no plot. Borges said of the pair that they somehow complete each other, which is the effect in one line: each strand corrects the other's temperature, and the excess in one becomes legible beside the excess in the other. Mario Vargas Llosa calls the arrangement communicating vessels and sets a strict condition on it, since adjacency alone does nothing, and if the halves read the same apart as together you have a collection rather than a novel.

Rumour as the reporter

Let a town carry the exposition. Frenchman's Bend talks about Flem Snopes long before it understands him, and Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent who drives the county, carries the talk from porch to porch with his own reading of it attached. Backstory delivered this way arrives pre-weighted, because somebody chose to repeat it and their reason tells you more. It also self-corrects, since a rumour can be wrong on the page without the writer lying to the reader. The difficulty is voice. A collective teller needs a settled set of prejudices, or it turns into the author in a hat.

The walking frame

Open and close on a character who has almost nothing to do with the central horror. Light in August starts with Lena Grove walking into the state, pregnant and unbothered, and ends with a furniture dealer in bed telling his wife about giving her a lift. Between those two pieces of comedy sits the hunting down and the killing of a man named Joe Christmas. The frame sets a scale, so the violence reads as an event inside a world that carries on, and it hands the reader a way out that the book has not made cheap. Get it wrong and the frame reads as evasion. The frame character has to touch the main action at least once.

Stream of consciousness

Faulkner uses interior flow to strand a reader inside a perception that has no way to interpret itself. Benjy Compson reports a fire, a slipper, a smell, a name, and assigns none of them a cause, and the jumps between years arrive in italics and nothing else. The device makes the reader do the character's thinking for him, which is the same bargain Golding later struck with the Neanderthal mind in The Inheritors. An explanatory narrator would have been clearer and would have cancelled the point, since the section exists to show a man to whom time does not happen in order.

The displaced crux

The central event gets lifted out of its place in the chronology and handed back in pieces later. Sanctuary turns on what is done to Temple Drake at the Old Frenchman place, and he declines to narrate it. It reaches you later and sideways, through a trial and through what people are willing to repeat and what they refuse to, and Mario Vargas Llosa calls this an anastrophic fact, hidden for a while rather than for good, taking Sanctuary as his sharpest example of it. What a reader feels is delayed dread. The dread then rearranges everything already read.

Testimony instead of report

No narrator in the major novels holds authority over the others. As I Lay Dying is built from short chapters headed with the name of whoever is speaking, family and neighbours and a druggist among them, and the accounts refuse to reconcile. Darl describes his mother's death from a wagon road miles away, and Cash explains the coffin in a numbered list, the only technically competent account of anything in the book. The reader ends up cross-examining rather than following, and the truth of the novel turns out to be the pattern of what each teller had to leave out.

Free indirect discourse

The narration slides into a character's own language without warning or quotation marks, so the judgement inside a sentence belongs to somebody standing in the scene. In Light in August the prose takes on Hightower's cadences when it sits near him and Percy Grimm's flat certainty when it sits near him, and that shift is the only thing telling you whose morality you are reading. James Wood makes the governing question of the technique a simple one, which is whose word this is. Faulkner's answer is usually the person with the most to lose, which is why his third person feels crowded: the narrator keeps getting overruled by the people it describes.

Building long sentences by interruption

Most writers lengthen a sentence by shoving material into the middle of it, so the reader has to hold an unfinished structure open while a second one runs through it. Faulkner does the opposite. He completes, then adds, then adds again. Steven Pinker's account of readable long sentences names the same culprit, the phrase embedded inside another phrase, and shows that word count on its own predicts difficulty badly. The practical test takes a minute. Ask whether the end needs the beginning. If it does, unpack the embedded clause and hang it off the back.

Withholding without planting anything

Faulkner takes the crux out and leaves debris all over the floor: a stain, a rumour, a man who will not answer a direct question, a house the neighbours walk around. A reader rebuilds from the debris and feels clever for it. Copy only the removal and you produce a page that goes quiet for no reason a reader can find. Hemingway put the condition exactly, that omitting what you know lets a reader feel it while omitting what you do not know makes hollow places, and a hollow place is what a reader senses when the writer has no answer either. Write the buried fact out in full first. Then decide how much of it to bury.

Treating dialect spelling as the engine

Phonetic spelling is the most visible thing on a Faulkner page and by some distance the least load-bearing. It slows a reader down, and it turns speakers into specimens the moment the reader has to decode rather than listen. What the sound carries is standing. Who is allowed to ask, who has to explain, whose account gets written down and whose stays talk. Build that pressure first and let the diction bend under it. Dropped consonants over a flat scene read as costume.

Several narrators with one temperament

A writer copies the multi-voice structure, puts a different name over each chapter, and writes all of them in the same rhythm with the same things left out. The structure then charges the reader effort and returns nothing. In As I Lay Dying the voices differ from one another in what they are each competent at. Cash thinks in measurements and lists his reasons for bevelling the coffin. Vardaman thinks by substitution, and decides his mother is a fish. Darl thinks in a lyricism that eventually takes him apart. Test yours by deleting the chapter headings, and if you cannot tell who is speaking by the second sentence, the structure is decoration.