To my knowledge, nobody has toppled the William Faulkner statue in Oxford, Mississippi, but residents, including Faulkner’s nephew, protested in 1997 when the Mayor ordered a magnolia tree to be cut down and replaced by the statue. But there is certainly much in his grotesque, gorgeously-written novels to offend ultra-sensitive people. In the comically grotesque short novel, As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren’s coffin falls off a wagon into a river. There is a one-sentence chapter: “My mother is a fish.” In The Hamlet, a mentally retarded man has an affair with a cow. I stopped reading at that point.
Many of Faulkner’s characters are poor white trash, like the unforgettable Snopeses, whom I sometimes wish I could forget, or the crafty, intelligent, immoral poor white, Thomas Sutpen, one of the main characters in Absalom, Absalom!, a man who claws his way to the top. And of course the white characters of the Old South use the “n” word.
I was admiring it, and then I got to a 50-page section in Italics–and the print was almost too small for me to read.
I need new glasses. But really, why so small?
That’s frustrating: it’s awkward reading with a magnifier!