The reader of Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust gets, in addition to a compelling and tightly plotted murder mystery, a course in philosophy and metaphysics. Who else but Faulkner, in describing a jail door closing, could do this (or want to): "... the heavy steel plunger crashing into its steel groove with a thick oily sound of irrefutable finality like that ultimate cosmolined doom itself when as his uncle said man's machines had at last effaced and obliterated him from the earth and, purposeless now to themselves with nothing left to destroy, closed the last carborundum-grooved door upon their own progenitorless apotheosis behind one clockless lock responsive only to the last stroke of eternity ... "
"Cosmolined doom" is a phrase that could easily have gone undiscovered until "the last stroke of eternity," but the reader is glad that it wasn't. There also is here, as always with Faulkner, a rich supply of similes, for me a proving ground for writers. The ability to invent a perfect one and place it so it flows naturally is an uncommon skill of which Faulkner is world champion.
Then the themes: children and an old woman doing what others cannot, or will not: doggedly pursuing justice; the racial elements and characteristics that are so subtly explained that they must be correct even if the reader realizes that they are (merely?) folk wisdom; and the oldest crime but one in the Bible.
Intruder in the Dust makes a compelling argument to ignore everything written in the last 50 years and go back to Faulkner, to Dreiser, to Tolstoy and Goncharev, and back to Balzac and further to Boccacio and Cervantes, to ignore this know-it-all world and sink into a more dignified past. Did I mention that Faulkner's style is infectious?
"Cosmolined doom" is a phrase that could easily have gone undiscovered until "the last stroke of eternity," but the reader is glad that it wasn't. There also is here, as always with Faulkner, a rich supply of similes, for me a proving ground for writers. The ability to invent a perfect one and place it so it flows naturally is an uncommon skill of which Faulkner is world champion.
Then the themes: children and an old woman doing what others cannot, or will not: doggedly pursuing justice; the racial elements and characteristics that are so subtly explained that they must be correct even if the reader realizes that they are (merely?) folk wisdom; and the oldest crime but one in the Bible.
Intruder in the Dust makes a compelling argument to ignore everything written in the last 50 years and go back to Faulkner, to Dreiser, to Tolstoy and Goncharev, and back to Balzac and further to Boccacio and Cervantes, to ignore this know-it-all world and sink into a more dignified past. Did I mention that Faulkner's style is infectious?
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