Pylon (1935)

Summary

A. B. Bernd. “Today's Book.” Macon Telegraph, March 23, 1935.

More than ever, William Faulkner now writes like a man in a nightmare. To the tortured technique of story-telling which he developed to a high degree of obscurity in Sanctuary, he now adds the fantastic stylistic idiom of James Joyce. Into this idiom Mr. Faulkner has occasionally lapsed in the past; but never for such sustained passages as in this newest novel of his, nor quite so forthrightly.

Warning you in advance that this passage is descriptive of New Orleans streets in early morning hours during the Mardi Gras celebration, I give you a single sample culled from numerous opportunities, and ask if it [is] capable of evoking pictures in your mind:

“The scabby hoppoles which elevated the ragged palmcrests like the monstrous broomsage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night's clatterfalque Nilebarge supine now beneath today's white wings treading, the hyrdantgouts gutterplaited with the trodden tinseldung of stars.”

This is impressionistic writing which gives a strange eerie quality to the narrative. Combined with the chronological distortions and evasive suggestions of incident that are part of the Faulkner method, it can make a commonplace tale seem other-worldly, unreal, some strange excursion of the subconscious or the alcohol-saturated mind.

Now, all this undoubtedly sounds derogatory,–and therefore is far from my intention. William Faulkner has written a magnificent book, a story that achieves much of its excellence from the very artificialities (literally legitimate or not) which I have tried to describe. The tale, throbbing, exciting, is there; the persons who make it, though all suffused with the very nightmare-quality which pervades the entire book, are living, sentient, predictable human beings.