Scuttering Halt Again
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Yesterday, an argument deep into the night: What is the value of work that does not reach toward and appeal to the broader spectrum—that does not, through whichever (often mysterious) mechanisms this happens, become, in its own time, popularly known? An old question, certainly not original.
There were three of us, and on the table between us sat Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a book that I am re-reading for the fourth time which, when it comes to Faulkner and me, often feels like the first time, so wrangled and new are the sentences, the phrasing, the means of disclosure.
And I kept saying, or trying to say, or wanting to say, that those who stand in the margins taking risks, who fight against all odds to get their stories heard by some one, or two right now, today, matter (that is, they, too, have meaning) because they redirect the eye and ear, force a new kind of attending, herald emergent byways.
My words useless and inarticulate, and besides, I should have simply quoted from Faulkner himself, who didn't write sentences the way others did and didn't tell stories that had (over and over) been told and who wasn't writing (I would guess) for the "average" reader, whomever that is. Who mixed up language so newly that horse and his rider got rendered in rigid terrific hiatus and scuttering halt:
They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like, on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches into a scuttering halt again.
