Faulknerian Adjectives

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello. My name is Ellen, and I’m from Carmel, Indiana.

Hi, Ellen.

Hello.

I have a question about some language I found in a book I was reading by Faulkner.

The book is called A Light in August, or just Light in August.

And I kept coming across these combination adjectives that were combined.

That wouldn’t normally be combined.

And I finally started jotting them down because they were so expressive.

And I guess I had a question about the style, if there’s a name for that style,

And if it’s appropriate for anyone else to use it besides Faulkner.

Well, you know what, Ellen? Both Grant and I are big Faulkner fans.

Give us some examples.

Okay. Well, these kind of go together.

Shadow-dappled, and he’s talking about a street or a house, a horse, actually, one time.

Shadow-brooded, moon-blanched, and moon-dappled.

Moon-blanched and moon-dappled?

And these are all run in together as single words with no space and no hyphen?

Yes.

Yeah.

Very good.

I think the word for that is Faulknerian.

Oh, is it really?

It could be, yeah, definitely.

It’s a style that’s difficult to imitate without people realizing that you are imitating Faulkner.

So he kind of has that all to his own.

Oh, I didn’t know. I thought maybe it was a poetic, maybe you see it in poetry.

You do.

Well, it’s interesting that you say that because his first book that he ever published was a book of poetry.

Oh.

Yeah. And I also find it really interesting that he dabbled in oil painting.

And to me, this kind of writing reminds me of oil painting.

You know, it’s not like watercolor where you just sort of do these quick strokes.

It’s dab, dab, dab, dab, dab.

And that’s how he builds a sentence, one really vivid picture after another.

And it reminds me a lot of poetry.

Yes, it’s more than a mental picture.

It pulls you in.

And I can’t even describe why they work, but they give more of a feeling and a picture.

So you get the feeling that you know this person or you’ve been on that street.

That’s interesting.

I hadn’t seen anything like them.

And this was my first Faulkner book.

Of course, I’m hooked now.

Good, good.

Give us some more examples.

Okay.

Well, August Tremulous Lights.

I just love that one.

August Tremulous Lights.

What does that connote for you?

That they, well, they’re not, they’re quivering.

And maybe trembling.

And he wrote that about somebody was,

One of the main characters was taking a walk and was restless

And was about to commit a crime.

And that was the light that he saw.

Yeah, it’s so much better than just saying just the August light or just a light.

Yeah, I think it’s sort of that shimmering heat in the South.

And by pushing the two words together and not separating them,

He makes it clear that you’re supposed to be thinking about the intersection of those words, right?

One atop the other for a third meaning or almost a third word.

Yes. Oh, that’s good. Yes.

There’s an incredible amount of material that’s been written about this habit of his and this way of writing.

And a lot of it is worth reading.

But for me, it’s always come down to that I think he felt that English wasn’t doing the job.

And he felt that he could build new parts of English from English itself.

That’s the thing about English.

It is itself.

It becomes itself.

And it is created from itself.

And so by pushing words together like shadow doppled, he’s basically coining words.

But yet they’re completely comprehensible.

And one of the books that I read, and I’ll try to find it so that we can link to it, about Faulkner,

Mentioned that his habit of doing this was more akin to thinking than it was to writing or reading,

And that he was trying to indicate on the printed page the way his own brain worked.

And I don’t know if I buy that, but I thought it wasn’t a bad explanation.

So there you go.

From a couple of amateurs who thought a little bit about it, that’s our opinion.

Great.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you haven’t read Faulkner, make time to do so.

You can find him online.

You can also find, I should have mentioned this to Ellen,

That there is audio of Faulkner reading some of his work online.

It’s a real treat.

We should link to that on our website as well.

Okay, waywordradio.org.

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