“Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard, with grouped behind him his band of wild negroes like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men, in attitudes wild and reposed, and manacled among them the French architect with his air grim, haggard, and tatter-ran. Immobile, bearded, and hand palm-uplifted the horseman sat; behind him the wild blacks and the architect huddled quietly, carrying in bloodless paradox the axes and picks and shovels of peaceful conquest. Then in the long unmaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag grounds and formal gardens violently out of the silent Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and prolific, creating Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be light.”
From Absolom, Absolom, from The Second Pass’ now infamous (I just woke up, I’m assuming that descriptor obtains) post, “Fired From The Canon.”
Well, M/Me. Contributors (even your real name??) is “literate” in the barest, least-descriptive way possible. He can string together words that approximate or approach the lower limit of sense-making sentences. He seems to be able to remember what the preceding sentence conveyed and is able to make a fine guess as to what his present and next sentences should say. I’m sure he knows his way around a Ciffs Notes. Saying anything beyond that would be a hazard.
Let’s just say that in order to impeach something from Faulkner’s canon (dude, Faulkner wrote some duds!) he selected Faulkner’s greatest work, and in order to illustrate some no-brow, witless point about it he selected one of the greatest passages from the work.
If you don’t know, Absolom, Absolom is about a lot of things, but generally speaking it is about the mytho-American trope of creating something out of nothing, at which the American south was apparently adept owing to its abundance of slave labor—a particular fact that tends to dominate the literature. The passage quoted above is a brief recounting of the creation myth of Sutpen’s Hundred, the estate of the patriarch of the novel, Thomas Sutpen. Literally speaking, it describes a demonically-fixed-and-focused Thomas Sutpen tear-assing into town followed by a band of barely-discursive slaves and a literally chained and manacled French architect; after said tear-ass, building the manor and grounds in a “bloodless paradox” of “peaceful conquest.” This is a specific passage from a novel I read twice—seven and three years ago, respectively—that I think about maybe once a week.
Contributors is a goddamn idiot.
