Barn Burning
by William Faulkner
The store in which the justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on
his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he
could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose
labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet: "But what proof have you, Mr. Harris?"
"I told you. The hog got into my corn. I caught it up and sent it back to him. He had no fence that would hold it. I told him so, warned him. The next time I put the hog in my pen. When he came to get it I gave him enough wire to patch up his pen. The next time I put the hog up and kept it. I rode down to his house and saw the wire I gave him still rolled on to the spool in his yard. I told him he could have the hog when he paid me a dollar pound fee. That evening a nigger came with the dollar and got the hog. He was a strange nigger. He said, 'He say to tell you wood and hay kin burn.' I said, 'What?' 'That whut he say to tell you,' the nigger said. 'Wood and hay kin burn.' That night my barn burned. I got the stock out but I lost the barn."
"Where is the nigger? Have you got him?"
"He was a strange nigger, I tell you. I don't know what became of him."
"But that's not proof. Don't you see that's not proof?"
"Get that boy up here. He knows." For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until Harris said, "Not him. The little one. The boy," and, crouching, small for his age, small and wiry like his father, in patched and faded jeans even too small for him, with straight, uncombed, brown hair and eyes gray and wild as storm scud, he saw the men between himself and the table part and become a lane of grim faces, at the end of which he saw the justice, a shabby, collarless, graying man in spectacles, beckoning him. He felt no floor under his bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning faces. His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.
"What's your name, boy?" the justice said.
"Colonel Sartoris Snopes," the boy whispered.
"Hey?" the Justice said. "Talk louder. Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named for Colonel Sartoris in this country can't help but tell the truth, can they?" The boy said nothing. Enemy! Enemy! he thought; for a moment he could not even see, could not see that the justice's face was kindly nor discern that his voice was troubled when he spoke to the man named Harris: "Do you want me to question this boy?" But he could hear, and during those subsequent long seconds while there was absolutely no sound in the crowded little room save that of quiet and intent breathing it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.
"No!" Harris said violently, explosively. "Damnation! Send him out of here!" Now time, the fluid world, rushed beneath him again, the voices coming to him again through the smell of cheese and sealed meat,the fear and despair and the old grief of blood:
"This case is closed. I can't find against you, Snopes, but I can give you advice. Leave this country and don't come back to it."
His father spoke for the first time, his voice cold and harsh, level, without emphasis: "I aim to. I don't figure to stay in a country among people who…" he said something unprintable and vile, addressed to no one.
"That'll do," the Justice said. "Take your wagon and get out of this country before dark. Case dismissed."
His father turned, and he followed the stiff black coat, the wiry figure walking a little stiffly from where a Confederate provost's man's musket ball had taken him in the heel on a stolen horse thirty years ago, followed the two backs now, since between the two lines of grim-faced men and out of the store and across the worn gallery and down the sagging steps and among the dogs and half-grown boys in the mild May dust, where as he passed a voice hissed:
"Barn burner!"
Again he could not see, whirling; there was a face in a red haze, moonlike, bigger than the full moon, the owner of it half again his size, he leaping in the red haze toward the face, feeling no blow, feeling no shock when his head struck the earth, scrabbling up and leaping again, feeling no blow this time either and tasting no blood, scrabbling up to see the other boy in full flight and himself already leaping into pursuit as his father's hand jerked him back, the harsh, cold voice speaking above him:
"Go get in the wagon."
It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday
dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among
the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother's dowry. She was crying, though when she saw him she drew her sleeve across her face and began to descend from the wagon. "Get back," the father said.
"He's hurt. I got to get some water and wash his…"
His older brother had appeared from somewhere in the crowd, no taller than the father but thicker,
chewing tobacco steadily,
"Get back in the wagon," his father said. He got in too, over the tail-gate. His father mounted to the seat where the older brother already sat and struck the gaunt mules two savage blows with the peeled willow, but without heat. It was not even sadistic; it was exactly that same quality which in later years would cause his descendants to over-run the engine before putting a motor car into motion, striking and reining back in the same movement. The wagon went on, the store with its quiet crowd of grimly watching men dropped behind; a curve in the road hid it. Forever he thought. Maybe he's done satisfied now, now that he has ... stopping himself, not to say it aloud even to himself. His mother's hand touched his shoulder.
"Does hit hurt?" she said.
"Naw," he said. "Hit don't hurt. Lemme be."
"Can't you wipe some of the blood off before hit dries?"
"I'll wash to-night," he said. "Lemme be, I tell you."
The wagon went on. He did not know where they were going. None of them ever did or ever asked,
because it was always somewhere, always a house of sorts waiting for them a day or two days or even
three days away. Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he...
Again he had to stop himself. He (the father) always did. There was something about his wolflike
independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as
if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his
ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.
That night they camped in a grove of oaks and beeches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths - a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father's habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight? Then he might have gone a step farther and thought that that was the reason: that niggard blaze was the living fruit of nights passed during those four years in the woods hiding from all men, blue or gray, with his strings of horses (captured horses, he called them). And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father's being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity, else breath were not worth the breathing, and hence to be regarded with respect and used with discretion.
But he did not think this now and he had seen those same niggard blazes all his life. He merely ate his
supper beside it and was already half asleep over his iron plate when his father called him, and once
more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth-a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin:
"You were fixing to tell them. You would have told him." He didn't answer. His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger: "You're getting to be a man. You got to learn. You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain't going to have any blood to stick to you. Do you think either of them, any man there this morning would? Don't you know all they wanted was a chance to get at me because they knew I had them beat? Eh?" Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, "If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again." But now he said nothing. He was not crying. He just stood there.
"Answer me," his father said.
"Yes," he whispered. His father turned.
"Get on to bed. We'll be there to-morrow."
To-morrow they were there. In the early afternoon the wagon stopped before a paintless two-room house identical almost with the dozen others it had stopped before even in the boy's ten years, and again, as on the other dozen occasions, his mother and aunt got down and began to unload the wagon, although his two sisters and his father and brother had not moved.
"Likely hit ain't fitten for hawgs," one of the sisters said.
"Nevertheless, fit it will and you'll hog it and like it," his father said. "Get out of them chairs and help your Ma unload."
The two sisters got down, big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons; one of them drew from the jumbled wagon bed a battered lantern, the other a worn broom. His father handed the reins to the older son and began to climb stiffly over the wheel. "When they get unloaded, take the team to the barn and feed them."
Then he said, and at first the boy thought he was still speaking to his brother: "Come with me."
"Me?" he said.
"Yes," his father said. "You."
"Abner," his mother said. His father paused and looked back - the harsh level stare beneath the shaggy,graying, irascible brows.
"I reckon I'll have a word with the man that aims to begin to-morrow owning me body and soul for the nexteight months."
They went back up the road. A week ago - or before last night, that is - he would have asked where theywere going, but not now. His father had struck him before last night but never before had he paused afterward to explain why; it was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered but not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of its events.
Presently he could see the grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs where the
house would be, though not the house yet. They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and
Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a sweep
of drive, he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and
despair both, and even when he remembered his father again (who had not stopped) the terror and
despair did not return. Because, for all the twelve movings, they had sojourned until now in a poor
country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before.
Hit's big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not
have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that's all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive ... this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow.
Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could not have thought this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could even want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the iron like black coat before him. Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe he couldn't help but be.
They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father's stiff foot as it came down on the boards with
clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore and which was not dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and evening minimum not to be dwarfed by anything - the flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had once been black but which had now the friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies, the lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw. The door opened so promptly that the boy knew the Negro must have been watching them all the time, an old man with neat grizzled hair, in a linen jacket, who stood barring the door with his body, saying, "Wipe yo foots, white man, fo you come in here. Major ain't home nohow."
"Get out of my way, nigger," his father said, without heat too, flinging the door back and the Negro also and entering, his hat still on his head. And now the boy saw the prints of the stiff foot on the doorjamb and saw them appear on the pale rug behind the machinelike deliberation of the foot which seemed to bear (or transmit) twice the weight which the body compassed. The Negro was shouting "Miss Lula! Miss Lula!" somewhere behind them, then the boy, deluged as though by a warm wave by a suave turn of carpeted stair and a pendant glitter of chandeliers and a mute gleam of gold frames, heard the swift feet and saw her too, a lady - perhaps he had never seen her like before either - in a gray, smooth gown with lace at the throat and an apron tied at the waist and the sleeves turned back, wiping cake or biscuit dough from her hands with a towel as she came up the hall, looking not at his father at all but at the tracks on the blond rug with an expression of incredulous amazement.
"I tried," the Negro cried. "I tole him to…"
"Will you please go away?" she said in a shaking voice. "Major de Spain is not at home. Will you please go away?"
His father had not spoken again. He did not speak again. He did not even look at her. He just stood stiff in the center of the rug, in his hat, the shaggy iron-gray brows twitching slightly above the pebble-colored eyes as he appeared to examine the house with brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation he turned; the boy watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His father never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug.
The Negro held the door. It closed behind them, upon the hysteric and indistinguishable woman-wail. His father stopped at the top of the steps and scraped his boot clean on the edge of it. At the gate he stopped again. He stood for a moment, planted stiffly on the stiff foot, looking back at the house. "Pretty and white, ain't it?" he said. "That's sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain't white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it."
Two hours later the boy was chopping wood behind the house within which his mother and aunt and the two sisters (the mother and aunt, not the two girls, he knew that; even at this distance and muffled by walls the flat loud voices of the two girls emanated an incorrigible idle inertia) were setting up the stove to prepare a meal, when he heard the hooves and saw the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom he recognized even before he saw the rolled rug in front of the Negro youth following on a fat bay carriage horse - a suffused, angry face vanishing, still at full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his father and brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs; and a moment later, almost before he could have put the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched the sorrel mare go back out of the yard, already galloping again.
Then his father began to shout one of the sisters' names, who presently emerged backward from the
kitchen door dragging the rolled rug along the ground by one end while the other sister walked behind it.
"If you ain't going to tote, go on and set up the wash pot," the first said.
"You, Sarty!" the second shouted, "Set up the wash pot!" His father appeared at the door, framed against that shabbiness, as he had been against that other bland perfection, impervious to either, the mother's anxious face at his shoulder.
"Go on," the father said. "Pick it up." The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.
"If I thought enough of a rug to have to git hit all the way from France I wouldn't keep hit where folks
coming in would have to tromp on hit," the first said. They raised the rug.
"Abner," the mother said. "Let me do it."
"You go back and git dinner," his father said. "I'll tend to this."
From the woodpile through the rest of the afternoon the boy watched them, the rug spread flat in the dust beside the bubbling wash-pot, the two sisters stooping over it with that profound and lethargic reluctance, while the father stood over them in turn, implacable and grim, driving them though never raising his voice again. He could smell the harsh homemade lye they were using; he saw his mother come to the door once and look toward them with an expression not anxious now but very like despair; he saw his father turn, and he fell to with the axe and saw from the corner of his eye his father raise from the ground a flattish fragment of field stone and examine it and return to the pot, and this time his mother actually spoke: "Abner. Abner. Please don't. Please, Abner."
Then he was done too. It was dusk; the whippoorwills had already begun. He could smell coffee from the room where they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal, though when he entered the house he realized they were having coffee again probably because there was a fire on the hearth, before which the rug now lay spread over the backs of the two chairs. The tracks of his father's foot were gone. Where they had been were now long, water-cloudy scoriations resembling the sporadic course of a lilliputian mowing machine.
It still hung there while they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up and down the two rooms, his mother in one bed, where his father would later lie, the older brother in the other, himself, the aunt, and the two sisters on pallets on the floor. But his father was not in bed yet. The last thing the boy remembered was the depthless, harsh silhouette of the hat and coat bending over the rug and it seemed to him that he had not even closed his eyes when the silhouette was standing over him, the fire almost dead behind it, the stiff foot prodding him awake. "Catch up the mule," his father said.
When he returned with the mule his father was standing in the black door, the rolled rug over his
shoulder. "Ain't you going to ride?" he said.
"No. Give me your foot."
He bent his knee into his father's hand, the wiry, surprising power flowed smoothly, rising, he rising with it, on to the mule's bare back (they had owned a saddle once; the boy could remember it though not when or where) and with the same effortlessness his father swung the rug up in front of him. Now in the starlight they retraced the afternoon's path, up the dusty road rife with honeysuckle, through the gate and up the black tunnel of the drive to the lightless house, where he sat on the mule and felt the rough warp of the rug drag across his thighs and vanish.
"Don't you want me to help?" he whispered. His father did not answer and now he heard again that stiff foot striking the hollow portico with that wooden and clocklike deliberation, that outrageous overstatement of the weight it carried. The rug, hunched, not flung (the boy could tell that even in the darkness) from his father's shoulder struck the angle of wall and floor with a sound unbelievably loud, thunderous, then the foot again, unhurried and enormous; a light came on in the house and the boy sat, tense, breathing steadily and quietly and just a little fast, though the foot itself did not increase its beat at all, descending the steps now; now the boy could see him.
"Don't you want to ride now?" he whispered. "We kin both ride now," the light within the house altering now, flaring up and sinking, He's coming down the stairs now, he thought. He had already ridden the mule up beside the horse block; presently his father was up behind him and he doubled the reins over and slashed the mule across the neck, but before the animal could begin to trot the hard, thin arm came round him, the hard, knotted hand jerking the mule back to a walk.
In the first red rays of the sun they were in the lot, putting plow gear on the mules. This time the sorrel mare was in the lot before he heard it at all, the rider collarless and even bareheaded, trembling,
speaking in a shaking voice as the woman in the house had done, his father merely looking up once
before stooping again to the hame he was buckling, so that the man on the mare spoke to his stooping
back:
"You must realize you have ruined that rug. Wasn't there anybody here, any of your women…" he
ceased, shaking, the boy watching him, the older brother leaning now in the stable door, chewing,
blinking slowly and steadily at nothing apparently. "It cost a hundred dollars. But you never had a hundred dollars. You never will. So I'm going to charge you twenty bushels of corn against your crop. I'll add it in your contract and when you come to the commissary you can sign it. That won't keep Mrs. de Spain quiet but maybe it will teach you to wipe your feet off before you enter her house again."
Then he was gone. The boy looked at his father, who still had not spoken or even looked up again, who was now adjusting the logger-head in the hame.
"Pap," he said. His father looked at him - the inscrutable face, the shaggy brows beneath which the gray eyes glinted coldly. Suddenly the boy went toward him, fast, stopping as suddenly. "You done the best you could!" he cried. "If he wanted hit done different why didn't he wait and tell you how? He won't git no twenty bushels! He won't git none! We'll gether hit and hide hit! I kin watch…"
"Did you put the cutter back in that straight stock like I told you?"
"No sir," he said.
"Then go do it."
That was Wednesday. During the rest of that week he worked steadily, at what was within his scope and some which was beyond it, with an industry that did not need to be driven nor even commanded twice; he had this from his mother, with the difference that some at least of what he did he liked to do, such as splitting wood with the half-size axe which his mother and aunt had earned, or saved money somehow, to present him with at Christmas. In company with the two older women (and on one afternoon, even one of the sisters), he built pens for the shoat and the cow which were a part of his father's contract with the landlord, and one afternoon, his father being absent, gone somewhere on one of the mules, he went to the field,
They were running a middle buster now, his brother holding the plow straight while he handled the reins, and walking beside the straining mule, the rich black soil shearing cool and damp against his bare ankles, he thought Maybe this is the end of it. Maybe even that twenty bushels that seems hard to have to pay for just a rug will be a cheap price for him to stop forever and always from being what he used to be; thinking, dreaming now, so that his brother had to speak sharply to him to mind the mule: Maybe he even won'tcollect the twenty bushels. Maybe it will all add up and balance and vanish - corn, rug, fire; the terror and grief, the being pulled two ways like between two teams of horses - gone, done with for ever and ever. Then it was Saturday; he looked up from beneath the mule he was harnessing and saw his father in the black coat and hat. "Not that," his father said. "The wagon gear." And then, two hours later, sitting in the wagon bed behind his father and brother on the seat, the wagon accomplished a final curve, and he saw the weathered paintless store with its tattered tobacco and patent-medicine posters and the tethered wagons and saddle animals below the gallery. He mounted the gnawed steps behind his father and brother, and there again was the lane of quiet, watching faces for the three of them to walk through. He saw the man in spectacles sitting at the plank table and he did not need to be told this was a Justice of the Peace; he sent one glare of fierce, exultant, partisan defiance at the man in collar and cravat now,
whom he had seen but twice before in his life, and that on a galloping horse, who now wore on his face an expression not of rage but of amazed unbelief which the boy could not have known was at the
incredible circumstance of being sued by one of his own tenants, and came and stood against his father and cried at the justice: "He ain't done it! He ain't burnt…"
"Go back to the wagon," his father said.
"Burnt?" the Justice said. "Do I understand this rug was burned too?"
"Does anybody here claim it was?" his father said. "Go back to the wagon." But he did not, he merely
retreated to the rear of the room, crowded as that other had been, but not to sit down this time, instead, to stand pressing among the motionless bodies, listening to the voices:
"And you claim twenty bushels of corn is too high for the damage you did to the rug?"
"He brought the rug to me and said he wanted the tracks washed out of it. I washed the tracks out and
took the rug back to him."
"But you didn't carry the rug back to him in the same condition it was in before you made the tracks on it."
His father did not answer, and now for perhaps half a minute there was no sound at all save that of
breathing, the faint, steady suspiration of complete and intent listening.
"You decline to answer that, Mr. Snopes?" Again his father did not answer. "I'm going to find against you, Mr. Snopes, I'm going to find that you were responsible for the injury to Major de Spain's rug and hold you liable for it. But twenty bushels of corn seems a little high for a man in your circumstances to have to pay.
Major de Spain claims it cost a hundred dollars. October corn will be worth about fifty cents. I figure that if Major de Spain can stand a ninety-five dollar loss on something he paid cash for, you can stand a fivedollar loss you haven't earned yet. I hold you in damages to Major de Spain to the amount of ten bushelsof corn over and above your contract with him, to be paid to him out of your crop at gathering time. Courtadjourned."
It had taken no time hardly, the morning was but half begun. He thought they would return home and
perhaps back to the field, since they were late, far behind all other farmers. But instead his father passed on behind the wagon, merely indicating with his hand for the older brother to follow with it, and he crossed the road toward the blacksmith shop opposite, pressing on after his father, overtaking him, speaking, whispering up at the harsh, calm face beneath the weathered hat: "He won't git no ten bushels neither. He won't git one. We'll…" until his father glanced for an instant down at him, the face absolutely calm, the grizzled eyebrows tangled above the cold eyes, the voice almost pleasant, almost gentle: "You think so? Well, we'll wait till October anyway."
The matter of the wagon - the setting of a spoke or two and the tightening of the tires - did not take long either, the business of the tires accomplished by driving the wagon into the spring branch behind the shop and letting it stand there, the mules nuzzling into the water from time to time, and the boy on the seat with the idle reins, looking up the slope and through the sooty tunnel of the shed where the slow hammer rang and where his father sat on an upended cypress bolt, easily, either talking or listening, still sitting there when the boy brought the dripping wagon up out of the branch and halted it before the door.
"Take them on to the shade and hitch," his father said. He did so and returned. His father and the smith and a third man squatting on his heels inside the door were talking, about crops and animals; the boy, squatting too in the ammoniac dust and hoof-parings and scales of rust, heard his father tell a long and unhurried story out of the time before the birth of the older brother even when he had been a professional horse trader. And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year's circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings and convolutions of tulle and tights and the painted leer of comedians, and said, "It's time to eat." But not at home. Squatting beside his brother against the front wall, he watched his father emerge from the store and produce from a paper sack a segment of cheese and divide it carefully and deliberately into three with his pocket knife and produce crackers from the same sack. They all three squatted on the gallery and ate, slowly, without talking; then in the store again, they drank from a tin dipper tepid water smelling of the cedar bucket and of living beech trees. And still they did not go home. It was a horse lot this time, a tall rail fence upon and along which men stood and sat and out of which one by one horses were led, to be walked and trotted and then cantered back and forth along the road while the slow swapping and buying went on and the sun began to slant westward, they - the three of them - watching and listening, the older brother with his muddy eyes and his steady, inevitable tobacco, the father commenting now and then on certain of the animals, to no one in particular.
It was after sundown when they reached home. They ate supper by lamplight, then, sitting on the
doorstep, the boy watched the night fully accomplished, listening to the whippoorwills and the frogs, when he heard his mother's voice: "Abner! No! No! Oh, God. Oh, God. Abner!" and he rose, whirled, and saw the altered light through the door where a candle stub now burned in a bottle neck on the table and his father, still in the hat and coat, at once formal and burlesque as though dressed carefully for some shabby and ceremonial violence, emptying the reservoir of the lamp back into the five-gallon kerosene can from which it had been filled, while the mother tugged at his arm until he shifted the lamp to the other hand and flung her back, not savagely or viciously, just hard, into the wall, her hands flung out against the wall for balance, her mouth open and in her face the same quality of hopeless despair as had been in her voice. Then his father saw him standing in the door.
"Go to the barn and get that can of oil we were oiling the wagon with," he said. The boy did not move.
Then he could speak.
"What…" he cried "What are you…"
"Go get that oil," his father said. "Go."
Then he was moving, running outside the house, toward the stable: this the old habit, the old blood which he had not been permitted to choose for himself, which had been bequeathed him willy nilly and which had run for so long (and who knew where, battening on what of outrage and savagery and lust) before itcame to him. I could keep on, he thought. I could run on and on and never look back, never need to see his face again. Only I can't. I can't, the rusted can in his hand now, the liquid sploshing in it as he ran back to the house and into it, into the sound of his mother's weeping in the next room, and handed the can to his father.
"Ain't you going to even send a nigger?" he cried. "At least you sent a nigger before!"
This time his father didn't strike him. The hand came even faster than the blow had, the same hand which had set the can on the table with almost excruciating care flashing from the can toward him too quick for him to follow it, gripping him by the back of the shirt and on to tiptoe before he had seen it quit the can, the face stooping at him in breathless and frozen ferocity, the cold, dead voice speaking over him to the older brother who leaned against the table, chewing with that steady, curious, sidewise motion of cows:
"Empty the can into the big one and go on. I'll ketch up with you."
"Better tie him to the bedpost," the brother said.
"Do like I told you," the father said. Then the boy was moving, his bunched shirt and the hard, bony hand
between his shoulder-blades, his toes just touching the floor, across the room and into the other one, past
the sisters sitting with spread heavy thighs in the two chairs over the cold hearth, and to where his mother
and aunt sat side by side on the bed, the aunt's arms about his mother's shoulders.
"Hold him," the father said. The aunt made a startled movement. "Not you," the father said. "Lennie. Take
hold of him. I want to see you do it." His mother took him by the wrist. "You'll hold him better than that. If
he gets loose don't you know what he is going to do? He will go up yonder." He jerked his head toward
the road. "Maybe I'd better tie him."
"I'll hold him," his mother whispered.
"See you do then." Then his father was gone, the stiff foot heavy and measured upon the boards, ceasing
at last.
Then he began to struggle. His mother caught him in both arms, he jerking and wrenching at them. He
would be stronger in the end, he knew that. But he had no time to wait for it. "Lemme go!" he cried. "I don't want to have to hit you!"
"Let him go!" the aunt said. "If he don't go, before God, I am going up there myself!"
"Don't you see I can't?" his mother cried. "Sarty! Sarty! No! No! Help me, Lizzie!"
Then he was free. His aunt grasped at him but was too late. He whirled, running, his mother stumbled
forward on to her knees behind him, crying to the nearer sister: "Catch him, Net! Catch him!" But that wastoo late too, the sister (the sisters were twins, born at the same time, yet either of them now gave the impression of being, encompassing as much living meat and volume and weight as any other two of the family) not yet having begun to rise from the chair, her head, face, alone merely turned, presenting to him in the flying instant an astonishing expanse of young female features untroubled by any surprise even, wearing only an expression of bovine interest. Then he was out of the room, out of the house, in the mild
dust of the starlit road and the heavy rifeness of honeysuckle, the pale ribbon unspooling with terrific
slowness under his running feet, reaching the gate at last and turning in, running, his heart and lungs
drumming, on up the drive toward the lighted house, the lighted door. He did not knock, he burst in,
sobbing for breath, incapable for the moment of speech; he saw the astonished face of the Negro in the
linen jacket without knowing when the Negro had appeared.
"De Spain!" he cried, panted. "Where's…" then he saw the white man too emerging from a white door
down the hall. "Barn!" he cried. "Barn!"
"What?" the white man said. "Barn?"
"Yes!" the boy cried. "Barn!"
"Catch him!" the white man shouted.
But it was too late this time too. The Negro grasped his shirt, but the entire sleeve, rotten with washing,
carried away, and he was out that door too and in the drive again, and had actually never ceased to run
even while he was screaming into the white man's face.
Behind him the white man was shouting, "My horse! Fetch my horse!" and he thought for an instant of cutting across the park and climbing the fence into the road, but he did not know the park nor how high
the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath
roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the
galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the
urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again, knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots, pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying "Pap! Pap!," running again before he knew he
had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run,
looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees,
panting, sobbing, "Father! Father!"
At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how
far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had
called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath
was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My
ather, he thought. "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: "He
was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris' cav'ry!" not knowing that his father had gone to that war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty - it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.
The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be
hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His
breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been
asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the
whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned
and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was
no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which ocean he liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.
- -
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Barn Burning
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
'a personal list'
"After The Wild Palms was translated into Spanish by Borges, it influenced an entire generation of Latin American writers. A series of brilliant, semi-Dadaist novels followed in the footsteps of The Wild Palms, and transformed the pleasure of reading into the quest for a center. Here is a personal list: Vladinir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963), Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers (1967), V. S. Naipul's In a Free State (1971), Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1973) and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), Mario Vargas-Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), George Perec's Life: A User's Manual (1978), Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Julian Barnes's History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989). These novels, all of which were received with great interest and immediately translated into many languages, reminded readers worlwide and budding novelists like me of something that had been known since Rabelais and Sterne - namely, that anything and everything could be included in a novel (...)"
Pamuk em The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist.
(o diabo para 'tagar')
Monday, October 1, 2012
ghost town
o capítulo 45 de Canada é admiravelmente visual e tenho vontade de o ler várias vezes, como penso que o farei, talvez com atenções diferentes a cada detalhe, como se de cada vez escolhesse um lado diferente da rua. antes mesmo de o ler já o tinha visto inúmeras vezes no cinema e nos momentos de alguns fotógrafos. como o personagem tivesse sido colado sobre aquelas imagens -que percorre as ruas desertas tentando encontrar a sua própria identidade. é no vazio que a oportunidade de ser alguma coisa se apresenta, uma ideia tão americana. o métis, meio índio, meio trapper, é um facilitador.
interessante que no final deste capítulo tão descritivo o museu seja o lugar da imobilidade no espaço (a mãe era um museu, então). a vida é o fluxo.
"If my walks in Fort Royal were in pursuit of that town's difference from life I'd known, and to render myself reconciled to the new, then my inspections around Partreau, ony four miles distant, were of a museum dedicated to the defeat of civilization - one that had been swept away to flourish elsewhere, or possibly never.", na p. 250
"But when I inspected the little commercial frontages - an empty, pocket-size bank, a Masons' building of quarried stone from 1909, the Atlas shoe store with shoes scattered inside, a shadowy pool hall, a gas station with rusted, glass-top pumps, an insurance office, a beauty parlor with two silver hair dryers pushed over and broken apart, the floors littered with bricks and broken furnishings and merchandise racks, the light dead and cold, the busted back doors letting the damaging elements in, all establishments emptied of human uses - I found I always thought of the life that had gone on there, not of life cast aside. And not, as opposed to what I'd first thought, like a museum at all. I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else - but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt."
na p. 253 (com uma pergunta que não é importante, uma hipótese: o que sucede primeiro, essa mudança subtil no decurso de Dell ou a criação de Partreau, o espaço vazio.) a favor da segunda hipótese, fala o próprio: “The first time and every time since then, it was sort of like being hit by lightning,” said Ford. “It just was a place that cried out to be put into language.” desse momento até à entrada de Dell decorrem uns vinte anos, possivelmente as duas décadas que estão entre uma página e a outra.
Stephen Shore.
do you think that novels have pivotal lines?
Métis culture.
sobre as fronteiras, um dos grandes temas deste século, relembro Muntadas. ou a exposição temporária no Towner, em Eastborne (The Edge in Landscape), sobre boundaries and borders, onde gostei tanto de ver João Penalva, The Roar of Lions (aqui também). quando se passa uma fronteira, não se consegue regressar ao local de partida, diz Ford na entrevista.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
passado dourado
"While they were eating they all talked. From this conversation Yegorushka gathered that all his new acquaintances, in spite of the differences of their ages and their characters, had one point in common which made them all alike: they were all people with a splendid past and a very poor present. Of their past they all -- every one of them -- spoke with enthusiasm; their attitude to the present was almost one of contempt. The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living. Yegorushka did not yet know that, and before the stew had been all eaten he firmly believed that the men sitting round the cauldron were the injured victims of fate. Panteley told them that in the past, before there were railways, he used to go with trains of waggons to Moscow and to Nizhni, and used to earn so much that he did not know what to do with his money; and what merchants there used to be in those days! what fish! how cheap everything was! Now the roads were shorter, the merchants were stingier, the peasants were poorer, the bread was dearer, everything had shrunk and was on a smaller scale. Emelyan told them that in old days he had been in the choir in the Lugansky works, and that he had a remarkable voice and read music splendidly, while now he had become a peasant and lived on the charity of his brother, who sent him out with his horses and took half his earnings. Vassya had once worked in a match factory; Kiruha had been a coachman in a good family, and had been reckoned the smartest driver of a three-in-hand in the whole district. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, lived at ease, enjoyed himself and had known no trouble till he was twenty, when his stern harsh father, anxious to train him to work, and afraid he would be spoiled at home, had sent him to a carrier's to work as a hired labourer. Styopka was the only one who said nothing, but from his beardless face it was evident that his life had been a much better one in the past. ",
Chekhov, em A Estepe, para ler toda aqui.
a viagem de Chekhov fez-me em tudo lembrar As I Lay Dying, de Faulkner- um, o princípio, e outro o final. que relacionamento interessantíssimo.
"Shortly before Chekhov's death, Faulkner listed him among the writers whose books he reread every year."
(ou "Only Chekhov, in "The Steppe," has recorded a more vivid journey through barren prairie country.", num artigo que não consigo ler)
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Morrison - Faulkner
"William Faulkner reprised: isolation in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon'"
Lorie Watkins Fulton
daqui, onde se pode ler todo o artigo. e também neste livro.
A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF ALMOST ANY AUTHOR IN CONJUNCTION WITH modernist giant William Faulkner risks treating Faulkner's work as a master text. This potential for privilege perhaps accounts for Toni Morrison's sensitivity to such comparisons early in her writing career. One can practically hear the irritation in her voice when she stated in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay, "I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense" (152). Morrison has elsewhere said, "I'm not sure that he [Faulkner] had any effect on my work" and "I don't really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner's" ("Faulkner and Women" 296-97). However, Morrison has also expressed praise and admiration for Faulkner's work, particularly for his unique style. (1) She once described teaching a class in which she traced for her students the way that Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! forces readers "to hunt for a drop of black blood [by trying to ascertain Charles Bon's lineage] that means everything and nothing." Morrison elaborated, "No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care, but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this" ("Art of Fiction" 101). She developed that fascination early on; as she told the audience at the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, "in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell." Morrison added, "there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect" ("Faulkner and Women" 295-96).
Critics have already identified several facets of Morrison's Faulknerian influence. Typical comparisons point out structural similarities such as syntax and cadence, and thematic similarities centering in historical concerns and social codes. Two pairings repeatedly emerge as scholars generally read Beloved with Absalom, Absalom! and Song of Solomon with Go Down, Moses. (2) However, Morrison's thesis, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated," also provides the basis for drawing thematic comparisons between Quentin Compson's story in the two Faulkner novels that it considers, Absalom, Absalom / and The Sound and the Fury, and Morrison's own bildungsroman, Song of Solomon. (3) Only Alessandra Vendrame has made a concerted effort to connect Morrison's interpretation of Faulkner in the thesis to her own body of work and I would argue that doing so affords valuable insight into her fiction, and into Faulkner's as well. (4) Morrison begins her thesis by defining "alienation," which she seems to use interchangeably with "isolation," as the predominant literary theme of the twentieth century ("Treatment" 1). After establishing this working definition, she analyzes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the Faulkner novels in light of their differing approaches to isolation. Essentially, Morrison determines that Woolf's characters can only become self-aware and honest with themselves in isolation, and that Faulkner's characters can never attain this sort of self-knowledge when isolated (2-3). That her thesis privileges Faulkner's insistence on the need for communal connection becomes apparent when she reads Faulkner's stance as the "antithesis" to Woolf's position, rather than vice-versa (4). Her chapter on Faulkner also seems more fully developed than the one on Woolf, and, after all, Morrison's later writings reveal where her sympathies lie. In her thesis introduction she writes, "Alienation is not Faulkner's answer" to the problems of modernity (3). Nor is it Morrison's.
- - -
Sunday, October 10, 2010
mais tarde ou mais cedo
iria esbarrar nesta citação. "The past is never dead. It's not even past.", Faulkner em Requiem for a Nun.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Agnès
as praias. para voltar à terra, a voz suave de Agnès.
"I seemed to be preparing a documentary, but part of the film was about a couple. (...) I had in mind a particular structure for the film. It would be two films in one, with alternating chapters, like a Faulkner novel I'd read The Wild Palms." Agnès Varda falando de La Pointe Courte.
Le cimetière marin
Paul Valéry
Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencee
O récompense après une pensée
Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!
Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
Maint diamant d'imperceptible écume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l'abîme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d'une éternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
Stable trésor, temple simple à Minerve,
Masse de calme, et visible réserve,
Eau sourcilleuse, Oeil qui gardes en toi
Tant de sommeil sous une voile de flamme,
O mon silence! . . . Édifice dans l'ame,
Mais comble d'or aux mille tuiles, Toit!
Temple du Temps, qu'un seul soupir résume,
À ce point pur je monte et m'accoutume,
Tout entouré de mon regard marin;
Et comme aux dieux mon offrande suprême,
La scintillation sereine sème
Sur l'altitude un dédain souverain.
Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,
Comme en délice il change son absence
Dans une bouche où sa forme se meurt,
Je hume ici ma future fumée,
Et le ciel chante à l'âme consumée
Le changement des rives en rumeur.
Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!
Après tant d'orgueil, après tant d'étrange
Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir,
Je m'abandonne à ce brillant espace,
Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe
Qui m'apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.
L'âme exposée aux torches du solstice,
Je te soutiens, admirable justice
De la lumière aux armes sans pitié!
Je te tends pure à ta place première,
Regarde-toi! . . . Mais rendre la lumière
Suppose d'ombre une morne moitié.
O pour moi seul, à moi seul, en moi-même,
Auprès d'un coeur, aux sources du poème,
Entre le vide et l'événement pur,
J'attends l'écho de ma grandeur interne,
Amère, sombre, et sonore citerne,
Sonnant dans l'âme un creux toujours futur!
Sais-tu, fausse captive des feuillages,
Golfe mangeur de ces maigres grillages,
Sur mes yeux clos, secrets éblouissants,
Quel corps me traîne à sa fin paresseuse,
Quel front l'attire à cette terre osseuse?
Une étincelle y pense à mes absents.
Fermé, sacré, plein d'un feu sans matière,
Fragment terrestre offert à la lumière,
Ce lieu me plaît, dominé de flambeaux,
Composé d'or, de pierre et d'arbres sombres,
Où tant de marbre est tremblant sur tant d'ombres;
La mer fidèle y dort sur mes tombeaux!
Chienne splendide, écarte l'idolâtre!
Quand solitaire au sourire de pâtre,
Je pais longtemps, moutons mystérieux,
Le blanc troupeau de mes tranquilles tombes,
Éloignes-en les prudentes colombes,
Les songes vains, les anges curieux!
Ici venu, l'avenir est paresse.
L'insecte net gratte la sécheresse;
Tout est brûlé, défait, reçu dans l'air
A je ne sais quelle sévère essence . . .
La vie est vaste, étant ivre d'absence,
Et l'amertume est douce, et l'esprit clair.
Les morts cachés sont bien dans cette terre
Qui les réchauffe et sèche leur mystère.
Midi là-haut, Midi sans mouvement
En soi se pense et convient à soi-même
Tête complète et parfait diadème,
Je suis en toi le secret changement.
Tu n'as que moi pour contenir tes craintes!
Mes repentirs, mes doutes, mes contraintes
Sont le défaut de ton grand diamant! . . .
Mais dans leur nuit toute lourde de marbres,
Un peuple vague aux racines des arbres
A pris déjà ton parti lentement.
Ils ont fondu dans une absence épaisse,
L'argile rouge a bu la blanche espèce,
Le don de vivre a passé dans les fleurs!
Où sont des morts les phrases familières,
L'art personnel, les âmes singulières?
La larve file où se formaient les pleurs.
Les cris aigus des filles chatouillées,
Les yeux, les dents, les paupières mouillées,
Le sein charmant qui joue avec le feu,
Le sang qui brille aux lèvres qui se rendent,
Les derniers dons, les doigts qui les défendent,
Tout va sous terre et rentre dans le jeu!
Et vous, grande âme, espérez-vous un songe
Qui n'aura plus ces couleurs de mensonge
Qu'aux yeux de chair l'onde et l'or font ici?
Chanterez-vous quand serez vaporeuse?
Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse,
La sainte impatience meurt aussi!
Maigre immortalité noire et dorée,
Consolatrice affreusement laurée,
Qui de la mort fais un sein maternel,
Le beau mensonge et la pieuse ruse!
Qui ne connaît, et qui ne les refuse,
Ce crâne vide et ce rire éternel!
Pères profonds, têtes inhabitées,
Qui sous le poids de tant de pelletées,
Êtes la terre et confondez nos pas,
Le vrai rongeur, le ver irréfutable
N'est point pour vous qui dormez sous la table,
Il vit de vie, il ne me quitte pas!
Amour, peut-être, ou de moi-même haine?
Sa dent secrète est de moi si prochaine
Que tous les noms lui peuvent convenir!
Qu'importe! Il voit, il veut, il songe, il touche!
Ma chair lui plaît, et jusque sur ma couche,
À ce vivant je vis d'appartenir!
Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d'Êlée!
M'as-tu percé de cette flèche ailée
Qui vibre, vole, et qui ne vole pas!
Le son m'enfante et la flèche me tue!
Ah! le soleil . . . Quelle ombre de tortue
Pour l'âme, Achille immobile à grands pas!
Non, non! . . . Debout! Dans l'ère successive!
Brisez, mon corps, cette forme pensive!
Buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent!
Une fraîcheur, de la mer exhalée,
Me rend mon âme . . . O puissance salée!
Courons à l'onde en rejaillir vivant.
Oui! grande mer de delires douée,
Peau de panthère et chlamyde trouée,
De mille et mille idoles du soleil,
Hydre absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,
Qui te remords l'étincelante queue
Dans un tumulte au silence pareil
Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux rejouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
"now I like blurry images, especially in the foreground. (...) this whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me. It corresponds so naturally to questions of memory."
não sei se já tinha visto uma autobiografia em cinema assim.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Sanctuary
"William Faulkner é considerado, a par de James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust e Thomas Mann, entre outros, um dos maiores escritores do século XX.", diz a Pó dos Livros num pequeno post que deve ser lido e que li com o alívio de não estar a delirar quando penso de mim para mim. triste o que fazem as algumas editoras.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Saraband
que é preciso dizer: "Liv Ullmann is able to convey more complexity of emotion and thought when listening to and watching others than most actors can when in full flight.", também daqui.
"Cello Suite no. 5 in C Minor, Movement 4: Saraband"
Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
"Trio Sonata for Organ no. 1 in E Flat Major, Movement 1: Allegro"
Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
"Symphony no. 9 in D Minor, Movement 2: Scherzo"
Composed by Anton Bruckner
Performed by The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Herbert Blomstedt
"Organ Chorale", BWV 1117
Composed by Johann Sebastian Bach
"String Quartet no. 1 in C Minor, Opus 51"
Composed by Johannes Brahms
Performed by The Alban Berg Quartet
"Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Opus 44"
"Second movement: Un Poco Largamente (In Moda d'una Marcia)"
Composed by Robert Schumann
"The title evokes the beautiful cello suite by Bach. A saraband is actually a dance for couples. It's described as very erotic and was banned in 16th-century Spain. It eventually became one of the four set dances in baroque instrumental suites, first as the last movement and later as the third. The film follows the structure of the saraband: there are always two people who meet. In ten scenes and an epilogue."
desta entrevista com Bergman.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
se fosse dia
talvez passasse para aqui algumas das muitas marcas no livro. não costumava mutilar páginas assim, agora encho-as de dobras, as que sei que não devo vir a dar a ninguém como estas- umas duas ou três dezenas de cantos dobrados, alguns mais vincados do que outros.
Friday, August 27, 2010
words
"Cash's face is also gravely composed; he and I look at one another with long probing looks, looks that plunge unimpeded through one another's eyes and into the ultimate secret place where for an instant Cash and Darl crouch flagrant and unabashed in all the old terror and the old foreboding, alert and secret and without shame."
Thursday, August 26, 2010
a voz em As I Lay Dying
embora artifical como agora holisticamente se vê e quando já nada é só uma coisa, gostei sempre da ideia de pessoa como voz (todo o Beckett) uma das ideias centrais, talvez, nos cinquenta e nove monólogos interiores -ou outra expressão qualquer que arranjem para isto nos manuais escolares e nos qualquer-coisa-notes sobre o que se passa em As I Lay Dying. Como também a Voz Humana, presente sempre que se fale de voz como existência na minha ou qualquer opinião, é um dos dados adquiridos de quem "fala sobre", esta multidão furiosa de gente que tem algo a dizer sobre tudo, mania de ligações comparações e conclusões, onde me incluo, eu leitora-amadora. irónico mesmo o facto de ser aqui neste espaço que contrario essa voz-pessoa porque, por muito que me leiam em voz alta dentro das cabeças, qualquer um que faça o mesmo que eu sabe que estas palavras não nos contêm.
Faulkner's Nobel speech
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I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
The poet’s, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Faulkner em 1950. daqui.
o som e a fúria (2)
life is nothing but "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing." está em Macbeth e passa para o título de Faulkner.
"Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Macbeth na cena V.
Yoknapatawpha
"Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by the American author William Faulkner as a setting for many of his novels. Faulkner's fictional county is based upon and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner would often refer to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county." Faulkner added a map of Yoknapatawpha County at the end of Absalom, Absalom!"
da wiki
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Sherwood Anderson advised Faulkner to write about his "little postage stamp of native soil": the home territory and the people he knew best. Eventually, this is exactly what Faulkner did. Drawing of his family's history and tales he had heard on back porches on hunting trips during his youth, he created a mythical county called Yoknapatawpha. He invented its history and geography, elaborated upon them in astonishing detail in stories and novels written over thirty-five years. This immense cycle of interlocking stories spans nearly 150 years in the region's history, from the early nineteenth century, when the land was inhabited by Chickasaw Indians, to the middle of the twentieth century, as the county became modernized.
Bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River, Faulkner's "mythical kingdom" covers an area of approximately twenty-four hundred square miles, with a population of just over fifteen thousand. In the map of the county published in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), he wryly identified himself as "sole owner and proprietor". The Yoknapatawpha saga has been seen as a parable of the moral history of not just one northwest Mississippi county but of the South as a whole.
em Great American Writers: Twentieth Century de R. Baird Shuman.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
o som e a fúria
será para sempre a história que me acompanhou nas longas cinco horas de comboio que demora a viagem para Estocolmo. e de volta. vou lembrar os corvos nas estações. e o casal gentil que nos olhava com curiosidade. desenhos e Faulkner. no bar, uma mulher com um touro furioso na barriga da perna muito branca.
língua
a passagem, se bem que temporária, para As I Lay Dying. a pensar, como se torna visível na sucessão de personagens que falam, que estamos limitados e presos à linguagem que é nossa. e não é possível ver através dessas nossas palavras como se fossem um ponto de luz no escuro que nos cerca. 'é fixe', 'que coisa, agora é tudo fixe, podia ser delicioso, gostoso, bem-feito, ou outra coisa qualquer, não tens outra palavra senão essa?' nem sei se era de comer que falavam mas o que interessa.. este uso de superficialidades retrai-nos os sentidos e o pensamento, então, fechados no nosso próprio dialecto pouquíssimo profundo em que nada é expresso e em que os subentendidos não passam de bluffes de quem não tem nada a dizer, logo nada vivido. o que dizer se esta ideia se estender à prosa curta, ao linguajar profissional, aos jargões sociais e sem ir mais longe, à pobre língua dos manuais escolares com tvi's e novelas e revistas da moda. com calma que a prosa curta nada tem em comum com o restante listado a não ser os limites que se auto-impõe. ainda com o diário de Kafka na cabeça, mesmo que visto através de Vila-Matas, em que descrevia tudo até ao mais ínfimo detalhe, compulsivamente diz Vila-Matas, como surge nas páginas do diário. assim alargava o vivido, penso eu. Faulkner alargava empurrando os limites de si, por cada vez que alterava a língua de tal modo, como não tinha sido feito antes. em português 'temos' um meio antigo, pesado e rico, brocado e barroco, difícil (Eça, Aquilino, Saramago). mas julgo que tanto Kafka como Faulkner seriam os mesmos manipuladores de palavras fosse qual fosse a origem delas.
"Jewel
It's because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she's got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you. I told him to go somewhere else. I said Good God do you want to see her in it. It's like when he was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise some flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung.
And now them others sitting there, like buzzards. Waiting, fanning themselves. Because I said If you wouldn't keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man cant sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn't get them clean. I can see the fan and Dewey Dell's arm. I said if you'd just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you're tired you cant breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less. One lick less until everybody that passes in the road will have to stop and see it and say what a fine carpenter he is. If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the country coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that goddamn adze going One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet."
em As I Lay Dying de Faulkner.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
cold weather, cold people (come to Egypt!)
todas as cidades devem estar em Calvino, assim como o vejo, mesmo as visíveis como esta que trocou o mar pelo céu, uma ordem inversa no meu universo mas que aqui está totalmente certa como se fosse óbvia. depois desta ideia, veio um daiquiri de morango e amouse bouche sul-americano, aquecer depois da chuva torrencial. a sala vermelha com máscaras, qualquer coisa terra, um piano fechado, e as madeiras lascadas, rústicas, por acabar. [ontem, o chocolate branco e cinnamon roll, enorme, espalmado do Chokladkoppen]
Friday, July 30, 2010
chegou a tempo
do resto do verão.
