How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Author:Thomas C. Foster
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-02T21:32:34+00:00

then he was twenty-one. He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land that was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man’s money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into the money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too…

Whew! And that’s just the start. It goes on for pages and pages and pages. It even has paragraph breaks, and dialogue, and the occasional full-stop, although those periods are part of a character’s statement rather than of the narrative. For me, this is one of the great performances in all of fiction. The only problem is, I don’t know where it ends. Or begins, really. The section begins and ends without a capital or period, so we might see the entire thing as a single utterance, a kind of freak sentence, an interior monologue going on forever but taking the form of one statement. Or do those periods within the passage actually constitute some sort of sentence changeover? I just can’t tell.

Of course, first-time readers generally have a different question.

Why?

Isaac McCaslin has been reading his grandfather’s farm ledgers regarding all aspects of plantation business—including the buying, selling, and misusing of human beings. He’s from Mississippi, so the concept of slavery itself isn’t shocking to him. What is shocking is that he finds that his grandfather, old Carothers McCaslin, has fathered a child with one of his slaves, Eunice, and then later fathered another child—with that first child, Tomasina. Eunice, the mother/grandmother, has subsequently drowned herself six months before the child, Terrel or Tomey’s Turl, is born, to which Ike’s father’s (Theophilus) only comment is to record the death as another loss of property. His more “humane” brother, Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) circles over the fact of that death, ultimately wondering whoever heard of a slave “drownding him self?” All of this is what Ike finds shocking: the compounded horrors of not only using slave women against their will for sexual pleasure but of practicing incest into the bargain, the callousness of the grandfather’s response, the depths of despair that led to Eunice’s suicide, the death in childbed of Tomasina, the routine, unthinking inhumanity of his father and uncle, both of whom were sufficiently progressive to have freed their own slaves before the Civil War, the inevitable intertwining of races into a single, enormously dysfunctional family. In other words, everything Faulkner wants us to understand as the terrible, logical outcome of owning other human beings.

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