If Hunter S. Thompson hadn’t blown his brains out, he’d be 85, perhaps too old to book a flight to Atlanta, too old to drive the back roads through Flannery O’Connor country past Blind Willie McTell’s grave, past that weird ass art installation that practically defies description, past the “Hell Is Real” billboards, over the Savannah River Bridge, through the desolation of the town of Allendale on his way to the Colleton County Court House in Walterboro to cover the double homicide murder trial of Alex Murdaugh.[1]
two photos of that “weird ass art installation” located outside of Thomson, GA
If you’re unfamiliar with the horror show, here’s a link to a New Yorker article that provides an excellent overview. New Yorker. Or, if you’d prefer a briefer version compressed into poetry, click HERE.
I would love to read Hunter’s drug-fueled take on the drug-fueled mess, what he’d make of the prosecution’s scattershot case, a shotgun blast of so much disassociated information that Immanuel Kant couldn’t follow it. Then there’s defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, shuffling papers, fumbling for his reading glasses, the food trucks outside the courthouse, the moss-draped oaks minding their own business as they always have.
But, alas, as the final song of the Stones’ album Let It Bleed says, “You can’t always get what you want.”
[1] I realize the phrase “homicide murder trial” is redundant, but it sounds so much better than either adjective by itself.
This piece was one of the winners of the 2002 Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open, and since it’s never been published, I thought I’d post it here so that if my house happens to burn down, the story will exist at least somewhere, if only in cyberspace.
A Wilderness of Mirrors
1 May 1991
In just two-and-a-half days, Jake has driven from Charleston, South Carolina, to Nowhere, Nevada.
360 degrees of blanched desolation surround him – there are no other vehicles to be seen – not through the windshield where a guitar string of a road twangs to the horizon – not in the rearview mirror horizon twangs road string . . .
Sage and cacti rush past through the side windows a blurrrrrrrrrrrr – but ahead the desert stays put, like a static postcard, too pretty he reckons, the sun sinking up ahead, rose tinting the godforsaken.
All he has for company in his VW bus is an AM radio and the cowboy songs his father sang him to sleep with. At this hour in this postmeridian desert space, no radio waves come a-callin’, so beneath the ocean roar of rolled down window wind, he sings in his best voice, “Get along little doggie/ Yo’ misfortune’s none of my own . . .”
A couple of hours pass, and things begin to cool and darken:
Static . . . faint buzzing . . . yakkedy sax, yakkedy sax, yakkedy sax . . . static . . . Ay candela, candela, candela me quemo . . . static . . . wash-ED in the sac-RED blood of JEEEEEEE-ZZZZUSSS . . . static . . . “Barry, okay, what I hear you saying is . . .”
Jake lets go of the steering wheel and snaps his fingers.
Forty-eight hours ago in Georgia, Jake discovered her, Dr. Tupper, a call-in therapist offering eight-minute sessions sandwiched between commercials for laxatives and smokers’ tooth polish. This is only the third time he’s heard her, but already he’s picked up a trace of transference.
Jake admires Dr. Tupper for offering callers keys to the cells of their personal prisons in the hope they might extricate themselves from their pitiful pasts. A couple of callers have broken down on the air, their sobs bouncing off satellites into radio receivers nationwide. Dr. Tupper answers in a calm firm voice, compassionate but strict. She won’t allow them to get repetitive with all those potential suicides on hold.
This caller Barry is having trouble with his partner. Barry loves the partner, but he “don’t” in his own words, “have the desire, you know?”
A pattern?
Great at first, then a cooling down to mere mechanical jack-in-the-box, around and around, monkeys and weasels, till pop goes the heartache.
“You know?”
She knows. Takes him there in no time. Has him blurting it out in under three minutes.
His junior High gym teacher. Coach.
Her advice is always the same. “Get help.” In the calmest and most patient of voices, she says, “Don’t bury a horrible thing inside of you, Barry. A horrible thing inside of you gnaws beneath the surface.”
3 May 1991
Head propped on her elbows, Cassandra lies stomach down on her comforter. The personal section of a newspaper is spread before her propped up on pillows:
Young, generous Orson Welles type seeks white female for
conversation, maybe more. Send photo and letter to “Rosebud” c/o Journal.
Orson Welles type. That spells f-a-t. Or maybe a racist 17-year-old prodigy who has penned his first screenplay! Her hand shyly covers her mouth as she giggles hoarsely.
A voice, a Southern male voice, from the radio, intrudes
. . . I see nowhere everywhere. That same ol’ Shoney ridden stretch leading into every town filling me with despair. Everything makes me sad, Dr. Tupper, everything. Fluffy clouds, Elvis, Otis, the Godfather, everything. Ain’t no white rabbit revelations for you to pull out presto. Got no other reason to be sad than I live in this world I see around me. My parents were good to me. My teachers left me alone . . .
White Rabbit revelations?
. . . Many depressions originate in chemical imbalances . . . seek medical attention . . . seemingly cosmic grief dissipated by merely swallowing a pill . . . the world is not necessarily dark, but existentially you’re viewing it through the lens of your depression . . . a miracle really . . . your life from drizzling rain to bright sunshine in just a few weeks . . .
Cassandra rolls over and switches off the radio, arises like a well-fed ghost in her white nightgown and stares into the mirror above her dresser. It opens to the reflections of another mirror, a full-length mirror on the door of her bathroom behind her. Ahead of her and behind her, mirror opens upon mirror upon mirror, diminishing her cloned reflection into nothingness.
“Eat me,” she says out loud.
She puts a cd on and gets out the latest Vanity Fair, flips to a photograph of a shirtless cowboy, and crawls back into bed with that manboy from the radio, Jack or Jake, her fellow desperado. She turns to her side and closes her eyes to the carefully curated statements of her room, then opens them to grab the remote and turn down the volume of the cd. Now, with eyes once again closed, she can barely hear the music as her hand – his hand – touches her stomach.
3 May 1991
After she got off the air, Alice Tupper talked to three people on hold who didn’t make it on. They were the lucky ones, she told them, because she could spend a bit more time with each one. But three was the limit. You had to draw the line somewhere. She had a visit to the hospital to make.
Two of the three were already in therapy and basically wanted her to confirm – validate – their treatments. The third was in worse shape. She had been molested by her stepfather and now had entered the confrontational stage. Alice was all too familiar with incest and its aftermath. Her own father had molested her when she was eight. The child Alice had not fully understood what had happened but sensed that it was too terrible to admit, like the eating of the Apple. She suffered the classic symptoms: a feeling of worthlessness, the misconception that it had been her fault, the propensity to have others dominate her. But luckily, a therapist had saved her. And now she was a therapist trying to save this young woman, to talk her into following through, to reinforce the importance of support groups. She gave her the rare option of calling X number next week at X time. She made the young woman promise to call. Alice waited to hear the click before she removed the headphones.
The LA air was exhaust-laden, but she hated air conditioning, and with the top down, she felt as if she were getting her money’s worth for this flashy car she could afford but not really enjoy. Palm trees and utility poles clicked past her in the rearview side mirrors where tinted SUVs shot up and past like rolling city states.
It had been a long day, but this was going to be the worst. Rosalita was dying. Alice had known her for eleven years, one of her first “saves,” a spirited reflection of Alice and also a reflection of the therapist who had saved Alice. Rosalita had done it, broken the cycle, educated herself at a community college, gotten a job in social work. But disastrously, one of her exes had been an intravenous drug user, and now she was little more than a breathing skeleton.
Rosalita had passed the point of complaining, passed the last outposts of vanity, her olive skin drained into a waxen deathmask, her flesh withered to the bone. She lay upon her back in an incongruous bright yellow gown, the hospital bed tilted up. Her grown children stepped back so Dr. Weinstein and Dr. Tupper could approach the bed. Alice stroked the dying woman’s limp hair, held her skeletal hand, told Rosalita goodbye in a speech she had sort of rehearsed. As tears streamed down Alice’s face, Rosalita wanly smiled, barely nodding. At its conclusion, she mouthed “thank you.”
Dr. Weinstein waited with Alice in the hall afterwards for the tears to subside.
“Jeff,” she said at last, punching the elevator button with the Kleenex still in her hand, “I got a call from this kid today, and he was like, ‘I-Am-a-Teenage-William-Faulkner,’ and I couldn’t really tell if he were putting me on or what, but basically, all he wanted to know was why bother.”
Jeff was ready to say something, but the elevator arrived and opened, so they stepped in and joined a short, middle-aged Pakistani woman.
“Anyway, I think I blew it. On the radio all you have are words, and I couldn’t find the right ones, but anyway, I kept thinking of the caller in light of Rosalita, you know, how she fought to the very end.”
As the bell politely sounded, the Pakistani woman brought her hand to her head and adjusted her scarf. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and she stepped out and away.
“But what about you, Jeff? You don’t get many happy endings, do you?”
“Nope,” he said, “they pretty much all die.”
“How do you deal with it?”
He was a tall man, bald and stooped, but he cracked a devilish, boyish grin.
“Like Pontius Pilate,” he said, “I wash my hands a lot.”
They were both laughing as the elevator opened to the lobby. A well-dressed woman with good posture frowned as she brushed past them into the cage. Alice bid Jeff good-bye and passed through the automatic doors into the night. Around the corner of the hospital in reserved parking, her red Z-whatever waited.
Once on the highway, she slid in a cd and tried to lose herself in the music, but with the top down, the thrash of night air drowned out the weak singing voices.
How about with invasion, muskets versus bows and arrows. Wind borne lamentations. Later, clinking chains, songs of woeful repetition. The worst kind of karma, evil spreading out in concentric circles, spreading like an oil spill, sullying every man, woman, and child.
This degradation is Faulkner’s great theme: the darkness of terrible wrongs blighting the landscape, passing from generation to generation, destroying both the rich and the poor, Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson.
These shadows – genocide, slavery, the War – incubate the genre’s monsters: incestuous aristocrats, necrophilic halfwits, sadistic Alabama sheriffs – not to mention the supernatural, hoodoo and haunts. No wonder Southern Gothic has become a genre unto itself.
WB Yeats is purported to have said, “All of the leprechauns are dying out because no one believes in them anymore.”[1]
You need people who believe in the supernatural for Gothicism to thrive.
When I was little, I remember asking our maid Alice who was part Cherokee and part African if she believed in ghosts, and she told me that she had seen her father standing in her backyard the night after his death. Sitting in a Ford Fairlane 500 in the parking lot of the Summerville Piggly Wiggly, I could see wonder and dread in her face when she told me about that visitation. I heartily believe if you had pumped Alice with sodium pentothal, she would have sworn she had seen her father’s ghost in that backyard. The dog was howling she said; a howling dog is a sign of a death.
Lots of white folks believe in ghosts as well. Even some of my students believe.
So, down here, or at least in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, I suspect that ghosts aren’t in any imminent danger of dying out.
* * *
Then, there’s that other non-supernatural strain of Southern Gothicism, the suicide hanging in the attic, the alcoholic great aunt who gave birth to the idiot child.
A few years ago at one of Shirley Gibson’s killer dinner parties, I got a heavy dose of that more mundane variety of Southern Gothic when I sat next to [potentially off-putting name-dropping warning] Walker Percy’s niece (Melissa). She told me the story of her grandmother’s death, her plunging her car into a creek with Melissa’s father in the car. Her father, only nine years at the time (six years younger than his brother Walker), somehow managed to extricate himself from the automobile, but his mother would or could not escape. Uncle Walker, she told me, regarded the death as a suicide. Suicide runs in the family. Walker Percy’s grandfather, the son of a Civil War hero, had killed himself with a shotgun; his son, Melissa’s grandfather (Walker’s daddy), also committed suicide.
After crawling his way up the creekside, Melissa’s father waited on the side of a desolate Mississippi road in the middle of nowhere, his mother a corpse in the car. He sat there alone for twenty minutes. Melissa said that the next car that came by was Uncle Walker’s. They, along with another brother, were now the orphans of suicides, fortunate to find a good home with their uncle but forever darkened by the ever-spreading shadow. At the time, her father was still alive – though not alive – in a nursing home, one of the living dead.
The Attic by Wesley Moore III
Of course, as they widen, concentric waves eventually dissipate, and it seems logical that with the passing of years and with the homogenization of the South, Southern Gothicism might well be on the wane as a literary genre. I do know that the Charleston brogue has about had it. A few of my students’ parents still motor aboot in boo-oats casting for shramp, but none of their sons and daughters do. They clept their mamas and daddies moms and dads. I’m a dad myself.[2]
Nevertheless, Southern Gothic seems more durable than our regional accents, at least as long as Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, and Ron Cooper dream into being their dark worlds where the ghosts of the past still rattle their chains, where bigotry, fanaticism, and incest still breed monsters. People seem to enjoy the macabre, get a rush from skulls and insanity. It makes them feel alive I suppose.
Some types of creepiness do possess a certain amount of charm:
Southern Gothic by Maggie Taylor
Others not so much.
Or so it is writ/tattooed . . .
[1]I can’t remember where I read this quote, and I so want it to be true that I dare not attempt to verify it.
[2] In fact, I’m starting to feel like a ghost myself sometimes.
One concept I attempt to convey to students when I teach tragedy is that when tragedy works, it exhilarates rather than depresses the audience. Much depends on the protagonist; he or she must outstrip us in stature, or as my translation of Aristotle puts it, be “better” than we are, i.e., more profoundly human, capable of greater deeds (and greater misdeeds).
However, Aristotle is not my man when it comes to tragedy. My man is Richard Sewell whose The Tragic Vision offers a brilliant description and analysis of the tragic landscape, that bleak Darwinian plain of pre-Christian darkness, an elemental shriek-filled darkness that hearkens to that time in human history before we had mastered fire.
Or, as Yeats puts it, when
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy.
Faulkner possessed this tragic vision, and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying beautifully articulates it:
And then [husband Anse] died. He did not know that he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of God’s love and His beauty and His sin: hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not the deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights.
What has set my mind to such dark contemplations is the penultimate episode of Season 1 of the HBO series Treme, and in the unlikely event if, like me, you’re four years behind and still on Season 1, you might not want to read any further, but then again, a careful viewer would already have noted the not-very-subtle foreshadowings of the character Creighton Bernette’s impending suicide.
Bernette, played by John Goodman, is an English professor at Tulane struggling with his beloved New Orlean’s destruction after Katrina and with the paralysis of writer’s block. Even though he has a loving wife, an early teen-aged daughter, and an intact, lovely house in the city, he pulls a Harte Crane and jumps off a ferry into the Mississippi River and drowns himself. Notably, he had just finished teaching Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, whose protagonist Edna Pontellier, also a New Orleans citizen, drowns herself over a failed extra-marital affair and in essence because marriage and motherhood don’t offer her enough satisfaction — despite the fact she has servants to do housework for her.
These two, Creighton and Edna, fail the tragedy test — they’re merely pathetic, i.e., worthy of pity — but there’s nothing exhilarating about their copping out over problems that pale compared to those of the wretches who follow below — my top six literary suicides, which I catalog in chronological order.
Jocasta
Sophocles presents us with a perverse and terrible vision of life. The drama takes place in a universe governed by malevolent deities who rain horror upon the otherwise innocent offspring of evil doers (Yes, Oedipus suffers from hubris but is the epitome of integrity and about as well-meaning as any tragic hero out there. He, his wife/mother, half-sisters/daughters and half-brother/sons don’t deserve their fates).
Near the close of the play, his wife and mother Jocasta stands on the stage mutely listening as Oedipus bullies an old shepherd in telling him the truth of Oedipus’s origins.
As he undergoes his anagnorisis, the agonizing recognition of his horrible situation, Jocasta runs off stage to hang herself.
Someone called “Second Messenger” fills us in in Dudley Fitts’ and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation:
When she had left us,
In passionate silence, passing through the court,
She ran to her apartment in the house,
Her hair clutched by the fingers of both hands.
She closed the doors behind her; then, by that bed
Where long ago the fatal son was conceived—
That son who should bring about his father’s death–
We heard her call upon [Oedipus’s father]Laius, dead so many years,
And heard her wail for the double fruit of her marriage,
A husband by her husband, children by her child [. . .]
[. . .] For with a dreadful cry
[Oedipus] hurled his weight, as though wrenched out of himself,
At the twin doors: the bolts gave, and he rushed in.
And there we saw her hanging, her body swaying
From the cruel cord she had noosed about her neck.
A great sob broke from him, heartbreaking to hear,
As he loosed the rope and lowered her to the ground.
I would blot out from my mind what happened next!
For the King ripped from her gown the golden brooches
That were her ornament, and raised them, and
plunged them down
Straight into his own eyeballs, crying, “No more.
No more shall you look on the misery about me,
The horrors of my own doing! Too long you have known
The faces of those whom I should never have seen,
Too long been blind to those whom I was searching!
From this hour, go in darkness!” And as he spoke.
He struck at his eyes—not once, but many times;
And the blood spattered his beard.
Bursting from his ruined sockets like red hail.
Othello
Of course, in Shakespeare we have several suicides from which to choose — Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia, Cleopatra — but I opt for Othello, who has just strangled to death his innocent bride Desdemona after having been cruelly convinced by the sociopath Iago that Desdemona had been unfaithful with Othello’s friend and confidant Cassio.
Here’s Othello’s great suicide speech.
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus.
[Stabs himself].
Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina
Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina might be considered the great-great grandmothers of Edna Pontellier, but they’re so much more alive, so much richer creations that their suicides, the first by poisoning herself, the second by throwing herself in front of a train, move us more — and they are certainly more terrible.
Here’s Emma’s in Paul De Man’s translation:
Suddenly from the pavement outside came the loud noise of wooden shoes and the clattering of a stick; and a voice rose — a raucous voice — that sang
Often the heat of a summer’s day
Makes a young girl dream her heart away.
Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair streaming, her eyes fixed staring.
To gather up all the new-cut stalks
Of wheat left by the scythe’s cold swing.
Nanette bends over as she walks
Toward the furrows from whence they spring.
“The blind man!” she cried.
And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, desperate laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch loom out of the eternal darkness like a menace.
The wind blew very hard that day
It blew her petticoat away.
A final spasm threw her back on the mattress. They all drew near. She had ceased to exist.
Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov
drawing by Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin
Of course, with its happy ending, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is not a tragedy. However, its supposed villain Svidrigailov’s suicide near the end of the narrative is so incredibly cool it makes my top six.
Svidrigailov has reached hedonism’s dead end, has been rejected by Dounia, the protagonist’s sister, and finds himself in a mouse-infested flop house suffering through one of the greatest nightmares ever conceived and rendered.(Here, Henry James’s admonition, “Tell a dream, lose a reader,” is proven false).
A description of Svidrigailov’s last few minutes from Constance Garnet’s translation:
“I’ve had nightmare all night!” He got up angrily, feeling utterly shattered; his bones ached. There was a thick mist outside and he could see nothing. It was nearly five. He had overslept himself! He got up, put on his still damp jacket and overcoat. Feeling the revolver in his pocket, he took it out and then he sat down, took a notebook out of his pocket and in the most conspicuous place on the title page wrote a few lines in large letters. Reading them over, he sank into thought with his elbows on the table. The revolver and the notebook lay beside him. Some flies woke up and settled on the untouched veal, which was still on the table. He stared at them and at last with his free right hand began trying to catch one. He tried till he was tired, but could not catch it. At last, realising that he was engaged in this interesting pursuit, he started, got up and walked resolutely out of the room. A minute later he was in the street.
“What do you want here?” [a soldier] said, without moving or changing his position.
“Nothing, brother, good morning,” answered Svidrigailov.
“This isn’t the place.”
“I am going to foreign parts, brother.”
“To foreign parts?”
“To America.”
“America.”
Svidrigailov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows.
“I say, this is not the place for such jokes!”
“Why shouldn’t it be the place?”
“Because it isn’t.”
“Well, brother, I don’t mind that. It’s a good place. When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.”
He put the revolver to his right temple.
“You can’t do it here, it’s not the place,” cried Achilles, rousing himself, his eyes growing bigger and bigger.
Svidrigailov pulled the trigger.
Quentin Compson
Too bad Treme’s Creighton Bernette wasn’t teaching The Sound and the Fury instead of The Awakening because pathetic, doomed Quentin Compson’s self-drowning would add some literary heft to Bernette’s own pathetic situation. Interestingly enough, although fictional, Quentin has a commemorative plaque on the Anderson Bridge over the Charles River that reads
“QUENTIN COMPSON
Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle.
1891-1910”
Here’s the first paragraph of the Quentin Section:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
This is Quentin’s last day. He wrenches the hands from this watch that once belonged to General Compson, CSA, but the watch keeps ticking.
Here is the last paragraph:
The last note sounded. At last it stopped vibrating and the darkness was still again. I entered the sitting room and turned on the light. I put my vest on. The gasoline was faint now, barely noticeable, and in the mirror the stain didn’t show. Not like my eye did, anyway. I put on my coat. Shreve’s letter crackled through the cloth and I took it out and examined the address, and put it in my side pocket. Then I carried the watch into Shreve’s room and put it in his drawer and went to my room and got a fresh handkerchief and went to the door and put my hand on the light switch. Then I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth, so I had to open the bag again. I found my toothbrush and got some of Shreve’s paste and went out and brushed my teeth. I squeezed the brush as dry as I could and put it back in the bag and shut it, and went to the door again. Before I snapped the light out I looked around to see if there was anything else, then I saw that I had forgotten my hat. I’d have to go by the postoffice and I’d be sure to meet some of them, and they’d think I was a Harvard Square student making like he was a senior. I had forgotten to brush it too, but Shreve had a brush, so I didn’t have to open the bag any more.
Lots of, if not most, people try to avoid tragic works because of the reasonable idea that the world is so full of woe — ISIS, Ebola, tornadoes, head-on collisions, etc. However, in great tragedies like Oedipus and Lear we can take solace in our shared humanity with these great figures, our shared woe. Antigone is my sister and Hamlet my brother. After hanging out with them, I can agree with Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god!
A while back, I posted a piece called “First Impressions,” which celebrated killer opening sentences from various novels like [cue Barry White] this here delicious, obsessive echo chamber of a love songfrom MrBaddass himself, Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
However, as Franz Kafka once told me, “Starten eines Roman ist eine verdammt viel einfacher, als Abschluss einer“* so I decided to lay 5 of my favorite closing lines on you, lines that rat-a-tat-tat the novels’ themes in sound and sense. (BTW, the actual quotes themselves should be read aloud).
*Starting a novel is a helluva lot easier than finishing one.
1. The Sound and the Fury: “The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
If Mr. Faulkner were employed by SparkNotes, he might “summarize” that last sentence like this: A description of Benjy — christened Maury — Compson, idiot grandson of the Confederate General patriarch of that fallen family, the drooping and broken flower an emblem of Ben’s beloved lost sister’s honor, Maury/Benjamin just having gone apeshit because the black tween servant Luster had swung the wagon bearing the family on their ritualistic visit to the grave of General Compson’s alcoholic son Jason Sr. to the left of the monument, provoking sounds of ”horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless, just sound,” from the that thirty-three-year-old with the mind-of-a-three-year-old, bellowing until the “only sane” Compson brother, Jason Jr., catches the reins to swing the horse Queenie in the opposite direction, calming Benjy, the sentence itself capsuling the fall of the House of Compson, the disappearance of the Old South, its doomed fetish for tradition.
Ulysses: O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Riding the rapids of Mrs. Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness as she contemplates her hubby Leopold, heroic cuckold, who has come home again, home again, jiggedy jig, and who lies in bed next to her, his feet facing the headboard and his head facing the footboard, and what can you say to the life-affirming ending of that concluding sentence but yes sir ree bob tail– Yes!
Y’all ready now for a slow dance?
The portrait of Abert Camus by Haeree Choi
3. The Stranger: For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
Mon Dieu, is smoking a cigarette during the absurd ritual of sitting up all night with your mother’s corpse or having casual sex the night after her funeral so wrong? How absurd! These acts by our narrator Meursault seem to shock his all-white Algerian jury more than the offing of a mere native (which in Colonial Africa is tantamount to jaywalking). You might say that Meursault’s jail sentence has been a Godsend – i.e., you might say that if he didn’t exist in an arid, godless abyss of a universe — but the good news is that in the fleeting ever disappearing now in which he types the concluding paragraph, he has discovered that he and the indifferent universe are one. OM.
4. The Sun Also Rises: A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Who knows if Viagra would have worked on narrator Jake Barnes. Did his war injury render him a gelding or sever his penis? No crisp declarative sentences answer those questions. Certainly, as a man Jake is the opposite of what the vulgar call “dickless.” Whatever, all I really care about is that mounted policeman raising his baton is an invaluable tool in convincing skeptical students that phallic symbols aren’t perverse illusions engendered by English teachers’ diseased minds .
5. “Midnight Rambler”: I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby, and it hurts!
Okay, as Condoleezza Rice’s and Colonel Kurtz’s lovechild might say, “Strictly speaking, ‘Midnight Rambler’ isn’t exactly a novel, but it is a narrative, sort of, and this post is getting too long, and goddammit, that last line of the Stones’ classic absolutely nails the sound and sense of the sort of narrative, and it‘s literally “killer”, so fuck you and your rigid mind-forged manacles.”
You Do Hoodoo 