Wordy, Complex, Stream of Consciousness
Prodigious, Mountainous, Dizzily Soaring Wordiness
No need to go digging around in the different stories for this one, folks. Let's crack open the very first section of the book (Section 1 of "Was") and there we have it: Faulkner's very own modernist style, which managed to make the anonymous reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement lose his or her mind and scream that Faulkner was "an exasperating writer" with his "prodigious, mountainous, dizzily soaring wordiness." So what exactly made the reviewer scream? Let's see if we can figure it out.
Here's the second paragraph of Section 1 of "Was":
This was not something participated in or even seen by himself, but by his older second cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet notwithstanding the inheritor, and in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slaves still bore the land. (1.1.2)
Perfectly clear, right? This is one of Faulkner's shorter long sentences, by the way. Since we already told you about one screaming critic, we can tell you about another one. Word has it Malcolm Cowley of The Saturday Review, who otherwise had nothing but praise for Faulkner, also protested when he saw a 1,600-word-long sentence in Go Down, Moses (Hint: it's in Section 4 of "The Bear").
Here's a conversation between Faulkner and a student from the University of Virginia in 1957:
Student: Mr. Faulkner, I spoke to you about your long sentences and asked you if one reason for them was that you were trying to give the past and the present and the future more or less all at the same time, to throw light on the present action by referring to the past and the future.
WF: […] the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and his future into the instant in which he does something. But to me, what he does is not quite as important as who he is, the fact that he is a continuity, that he has come a long way, that he has endured. […] I'm too busy trying to make my people come to life and then I run behind them at full speed trying to keep up with them and I put down the best I can. (Source)
Don't Omit, Exclude, Dismiss, Overlook, Neglect Needless Words
Here's another sentence from the beginning of "Was." This is about Isaac McCaslin:
[He] lived still in the cheap frame bungalow in Jefferson which his wife's father gave them on their marriage and which his wife had willed to him at her death and which he had pretended to accept, acquiesce to, to humor her, ease her going but which was not his, will or not, chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever, himself merely holding it for his wife's sister and her children who had lived in it with him since his wife's death, holding himself welcome to live in one room of it as he had during his wife's time or she during her time or the sister-in-law and her children during the rest of his and after. (1.1.2)
What, he couldn't just say "accept," but had to say "accept, acquiesce to, to humor"? Or why not just "possession," but " chancery dying wishes mortmain possession or whatever"? Maybe he did it to spite Strunk & White, who keep telling writers to "Omit needless words."
Or maybe he had no beef with Strunk & White, but just knew that this is how people think: not with one precise word for everything but with several words that give different shades of the same idea.
Streaming Through Consciousness
Finally, a word (or more) about being inside people's heads. Now, if you've read anything else by Faulkner, you know that he often writes in what's known as "stream-of-consciousness", where you write as if you were transcribing everything in the, well, stream of consciousness of a character.
People don't think in concise sentences or in chronologically ordered thoughts. We jump around from idea to idea and past to future. When we're in our own heads, and not under the influence, we can more or less keep track of things and how we got from one idea to another.
As readers, it's a different story. By jumping around in a character's head from one memory to another, or one time period to another, Faulkner can be disorienting. Here's an example. Isaac's thinking about his hunting days and just goes along until he thinks about his coffee-pot:
[…] and the iron cot and mattress and the blankets which he would take each fall into the woods for more than sixty years and the bright tin coffee-pot there had been a legacy, from his Uncle Hubert Beauchamp, his godfather […] (5.4.170)
And Faulkner's off and running into another incident years before regarding a coffeepot full of gold coins bequeathed to him by Uncle Hubert. Thinking of the coffeepot reminds him where he got it and, without notice, introduces a change of scenery and twenty-year flashback and a totally new story. In fact, most of "The Bear" is an extended visit to Isaac's meandering thoughts and memories.
Sometime the best way to read stream-of-consciousness writing is just to flow with it and not worry about the content. Just enjoy the dizzying experience.