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lunatica

(53,410 posts)
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 12:48 PM Sep 2018

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

reminds me of Trump’s base more and more.

When I first read it in high school it just seemed like an exaggeration. I couldn’t believe real people could be that stupid and ignorant. But since Trump was selected by the Electoral College I am forced to admit Faulkner was definitely on to something and it was profound and way too real.

For those who haven’t read Faulkner here is a synopsis:

https://www.shmoop.com/as-i-lay-dying/summary.html

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nolabear

(41,915 posts)
1. Yes, and also desperate and tragic. Faulkner tried to write from the inside.
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 01:05 PM
Sep 2018

Not that he could so much, being from a privileged family, but his characters weren’t the way they were from nothing. They were doomed and ill equipped and they did terrible things because they couldn’t do otherwise.

I’ll give you two more books. They are incredible. Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. They’re Jesamyn Ward’s work. She may well be the best author of Mississippi African American experience I’ve ever read. If you can love her people you can get a really great handle on those whose actions you would never take, but can have some empathy for.

lunatica

(53,410 posts)
12. I am ordering her book after reading reviews on it
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 12:37 PM
Sep 2018

I also saw videos with Jesmyn Ward talking about her experiences and writing. Thanks for the recommendation!

nolabear

(41,915 posts)
13. The place she grew up black is where I grew up white.
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 12:42 PM
Sep 2018

Mind you, she’s a lot younger, but our cultures are side by side and intimately connected.

And she can write the birds out of the trees! Do comectell me what you think. I’ve contemplated trying to start a Diversity Book Club here, to discuss and recommend really good books that depict lives in details we never think about. But DU is so argumentative I’m not sure I want to get into it.

Let me know, though!

lunatica

(53,410 posts)
15. I will
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 01:19 PM
Sep 2018

I’m looking forward to it with emotional trepidation after reading reviews of her book.

My mother grew up in the South and she was one of the ones who left it and rejected much of her heritage for the reasons discussed here. One example is she turned her back on religion which she avoided early in her childhood by swallowing the tithe to make herself too sick to go to church and be forced to listen to terrifying damnation sermons.

She was an ill fit as an intellectual in a large farm family and she left to go to college to never return to live there. In many ways though she was never free of the scars of the South and her roots.

Regarding religion, she gave us the freedom to choose our own faith. The important part of her gift is the freedom part, which is a great thing to be given. For my part, after dabbling in various faiths I chose to be an Agnostic Atheist if there is even such a thing.

nolabear

(41,915 posts)
2. On a far funnier note, there's a hotel in Jackson MS
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 01:08 PM
Sep 2018

whose rooms are all named after MS authors. I stayed in the Faulkner room once and had a choice. The headboard featured titles of his books painted quite elegantly into the tall wooden pieces. I could sleep beneath either As I Lay Dying or Go Down, Moses. 😃

greatlaurel

(2,004 posts)
3. Faulkner insights or race, class and gender are still needed and useful.
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 03:17 PM
Sep 2018

Faulkner was a revelation to me. I had not read Faulkner until I was an adult and I found his works enlightening. Time to read Faulkner, again.

His exposition of the ugliness of the plantation culture and what it has produced in generations of people is vital for people to understand. Unfortunately, a large portion of the American refuse toeducate themselves and revel in their bigotries.

Thanks for the post.

Solly Mack

(90,740 posts)
4. I'm often reminded of Faulkner's works, especially the Snopes family.
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 03:58 PM
Sep 2018

I grew up in the South along a cultural crossroads; a convergence between race, ethnicity, and class. I've known Snopes, Bundren, and Santoris-like families.

I've seen my childhood in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple", Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird, Fannie Flagg's "Fried Green Tomatoes", and in Richard Harling's "Steel Magnolias".

Carson McCullers captured my angst and the oppressive humidity that bubbles beneath both sky and skin, its droplets a refraction - filtering time through a haze of heat, with no seeming escape from the mirage created.

There's a self-imposed burden in being from the South that a lot of white people have to actively choose to overcome. There's the obligation all white people have to recognize the advantages to them in a racist society and to work toward a more just world - and then there's the burden some white people take on willingly by embracing the myth and mythos of being white and "Southern".

And it is a burden, make no mistake. To decide, by virtue of geography, that you are somehow honoring the past by carrying ignorance into the next generation. That you are somehow elevated by your skin hue and dreams of past glory restored - dreams that can only be experienced now because time and progress have moved away from the tenets of a rightfully destroyed feudal society. A long ago society that held little regard for poor white people or their needs.

Yet that's precisely what a lot of Trump supporters in the South do embrace. The misguided thinking that they would restored to their rightful place as the gentry of yore - when the truth is many of them hail from dirt farmers who lived subsistence lives while the landed gentry rode by in their carriages, never once to deign a passing glance.

They dream a dream of a past that was never theirs.

Ignorance is a burden. Hate is a burden. For poor white people to willingly choose to embrace their own oppression by believing their white skin gains them entrance into the wealthy white man's world. They're the same tools they ever were to those whose wealth and position require them stay exactly where they are - on the bottom of the Republican white man hierarchy.

No name, no land, no money - no prospects. All they had was white skin. It was and remains their talisman. They clung to it then as they cling to it now.

The GOP tells them to blame people of color, women - anyone and everyone else - defined as a threat to their position as white people - as white men. The only position those wealthy, racist white people are protecting is their own position. They want to keep the rest of us down - but they have to keep their poor white base down. Keep them angry. Keep them ignorant. Keep them blaming the rest of us for all the troubles poor whites experience.

In this way the GOP keeps that base cheering for their own oppression - they are too busy hating those who could actually help them to see the cycle they are in - a cycle they have chosen when they chose to see their white skin as some sort of saving grace. As something that made them superior to others.

If your white skin is supposed to mean you're better than everyone else but you still can't afford food and utilities, then something or someone else must be to blame.

The GOP tells them we are the threat, that we are to blame. That people of color, women, and "the" gays are holding them back from reaching their full potential as white people.

They choose to believe that, so they continue to support the very people who are creating the policies that prevent them from earning a living wage, that prevent them from getting healthcare, that prevent them from a decent education - that turn the very air they breathe into a toxic mix that will kill them.

All in the name of a lie. That their white skin makes them better.

They don't want to hear it but they are to be pitied. And if they were neatly tucked away as characters in a novel, sympathy and a recognition of their humanity might be more easily achieved. As it stands, they present a danger - a real danger - to the rest of us.

Yes, the greater threat is those in power who feed and benefit from the hate - but at some point the man and woman in the MAGA hats have to take responsibility for their own actions. For the lies they have chosen to believe. For the harm they are causing by embracing those with power whose goal is to oppress us all.



People of color, by and large, didn't fall for Trump's spiel. The LGBT community, by and large, did not fall for Trump's spiel.

When you're born a target of hate, you learn quick who holds the slings and arrows.







lunatica

(53,410 posts)
5. Thank you for this
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 11:19 PM
Sep 2018

It’s heartfelt and enlightening.

I lived in North Carolina when I was a Junior and Senior in High School, just at the time when they started integrating the schools. I was quite fortunate to spend my Senior year in a school that had already been integrated for years because a large number of the students were army kids. That was when I learned that Puerto Rican’s were in the army and were Americans, even though Puerto Rico is a Territory.

I’m glad I was there during a momentous time in our history. It was an incredibly progressive time when this country took a step forward into a better future. Now, with Trump we find out that so many resent that time so much that they would embrace Vladimir Putin as a hero just for recognizing them by helping to make Trump President.

What you say goes a long way towards explaining why this is happening. Thanks!

Solly Mack

(90,740 posts)
10. I was mainly woolgathering in type.
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 11:59 PM
Sep 2018

People are strange and complex and a wellspring of so much potential. But they are also capable of allowing the worst to take hold.

I don't pretend to know all the whys and can only speak to what I saw while growing up, but trips back home have shown me that a lot of the same remains.

The same fear, the same ignorance, the same belief that being white means the world should belong to you.

I've lived all over the U.S. and have seen variants of the same thinking in places outside the South, but there is something about the South - a sense of heroic tragic suffering - that fairly exudes from some white people. A wistful longing that simply doesn't make any sense at all. As if they the are the wronged but conquered foe living under the unfair oppression of the victors, stoically fighting against outside influences bent on taking their dream away.

It's warped. Mad. A complete denial of history.

And no matter how I sound, I will never understand it.



nolabear

(41,915 posts)
9. You put it beautifully.
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 11:48 PM
Sep 2018

I’ve been aware of a lifelong defense of mine, quite deliberately claiming (and correctly so) the strange and wonderful “Westernmost Caribbean” culture of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans rather than the more Snopesian aspects of the South. It truly is unique, and the dedication to art, religion and hedonism in about equal measure make many of its people recognize Trump for what he is. But many, even there, don’t. Many do have that peculiar feudal nostalgia and the need to believe others are less than because if they aren’t then they have nothing. Oddly, they are as devoted to their martyrdom as they are determined to deny it.

And boy do I have to remind myself every day of what I have the privelege of never thinking about.



Solly Mack

(90,740 posts)
11. Thank you.
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 12:10 AM
Sep 2018

I was fortunate to be born into a diverse family and to spend my early years in a large city where different people and cultures came together each day.

There were always elements of the "Old South" present but because of my raising that particular noise was seen for what it was - just plain wrong. Not a goal to aspire to but a trap the ignorant and fearful fell into as the only refuge they had.

Sadly, that noise seems to have gotten louder.

ProudLib72

(17,984 posts)
8. I never really thought of it that way
Sun Sep 9, 2018, 11:35 PM
Sep 2018

Most people detest As I Lay Dying. One of my friends in college called it As I Die Reading. I totally loved it and consider it to be his single most inspired piece of writing. Who could develop a dozen characters using their own voices for narration and manage to finish it in three weeks?!

Faulkner liked to write about the dissolution of the old South. Those novels can be depressing, yet I think he was trying to capture the South at a crossroads. Unfortunately, there are a heck of a lot of southerners who never made it past the crossroads. I remember being enamored of Faulker's novels; I never realized they would be relevant 80 years later. It's just sad! Pathetic!

peekaloo

(22,977 posts)
14. Another great southern writer also comes to mind when I see his
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 12:50 PM
Sep 2018

Evangelical followers : Flannery O'Connor.

lunatica

(53,410 posts)
16. Do you mind giving it a little review?
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 01:27 PM
Sep 2018

I like getting the opinions of the readers a lot! It’s always what will make me look for the book in the beginning.

peekaloo

(22,977 posts)
17. It's been a few years since I've read her.
Mon Sep 10, 2018, 01:52 PM
Sep 2018

and my books aren't handy but a couple of stories that I recall are, 'Good Country People' about a con man posing as a Bible salesman that totally humiliates a woman with a prosthetic leg who believes she so much better and smarter than everyone else.

'A Good Man is Hard to Find' another con man who commiserates with a family about the sad state of the world only to be their undoing.

O' Connor did not shy away from racial epithets but it was an honest adaptation of her characters and their life/(limited)world views.

There was always a religious element to her story telling and it resonated with me due to my southern upbringing.

I also read Faulkner but was more drawn to Ms. O'Connor as she had a brutal sense of humor.


p.s. *trivia* In the film 'Barton Fink' the drunk author played by John Mahoney who dabbles in writing wrestling movies is modeled on William Faulkner's later years.



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