Flower spaces and flower trees

Deep Reading, Famous First Lines, Sonnenuhr und Rondell

The opening of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is the beginning of a long and arduous journey into a reader’s paradise. It’s also perfect to practice a little deep reading:


Generally, a good way to kick off a deep reading is to demand something unusual from a book, and to demand it subito: So what, if anything, is remarkable about you, dear first sentence? It doesn’t reply. It plays dumb. Then it hands us a little note: “I consist of simple and unremarkable words?”

But beginning a narrative like this also points to the difference between the narrator’s point of view and ours. The use of definite articles (“the fence”, “the curling flower spaces” and “them”) suggests that the narrator refers to specific, perhaps familiar things and persons. But the reader can’t know what these are. The narrative does not gently introduce us to the world we have just entered but rather rudely shoves us into someone else’s way of seeing. We don’t know which or what kind of fence or flower bed or persons we are supposed to imagine. Perhaps we can hope that all will in time be explained, but perhaps not.

Did I say “flower beds”? This would already be an attempt to translate the narrator’s way of seeing into my own. What the narrator is actually saying is “curling flower spaces”.  The words are simple enough, but then, what are they referring to exactly? “Curling flower” doesn’t seem to be a very common species of flower, so “flower spaces” seems to be the real compound here, which I can’t help but turn into “flower beds”.

Interestingly, though, the recent German translation by Frank Heibert seems to read “curling flower” as a compound instead: the phrase becomes “zwischen den Stellen mit den Rankblumen.” One can also read “curling flower spaces” as “a coil or spiral of open spaces where flowers would normally be,” as John P. Anderson does in The Sound and the Fury in the Garden of Eden (2002), p. 92.

So where I saw flowers in flower beds, another reader sees tendrils, and yet another sees empty spirals. (Anderson sees even more: “the coil or spiral suggests the snake from the Garden myth and female genitals,” he writes, and this means that “Sex is the ticket out of the garden.”)

The word “hitting” is another example of a deceptively simple word. In common usage, “hit” is a transitive verb, which means you can’t use it without an object of some kind. So what are they hitting? We don’t know. What we know is that something that to many readers would be missing doesn’t seem to be missing for the narrator. So it’s safe to say the narrator has an unusual way seeing things.

It’s similar in the third sentence:

“Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree.”

As a verb, “hunt” doesn’t need an object, but it still strongly suggests, on a semantic level, an object. If you tell your friends that you are going to go “hunting” in your private forest, they may very well ask “for what, pray?” and you wouldn’t be flabberghasted. By the way, Heibert’s German translation, for reasons unclear to me, chooses, instead of the obvious “jagen”, a word that I have literally never heard before: “schnofeln”.

And more: what’s a “flower tree”? Google gives me “flowering trees” galore, but is that what the narrator means? Probably. But the fact that it’s a “flower tree” instead suggests that this is another of many more variations on a special point of view that the book will graciously offer you.

Help and Happiness

So there you go. A few words in, and already plenty of chances to feel confused. It’s understandable to want to seek help. And if you google the first sentences you’ll get some explanations and even pictures for what “they” are “hitting”, and why they are hitting, and who they are, who the narrator is, who Luster is,  and when and why it all happens; but I would be careful to do that just yet, because it spoils some of the fun that the book offers.

There’s warm waves of understanding in store for you if you work your way through the book and at some point suddenly grasp something that you totally didn’t think was even significant before. It may be a long journey though, almost impossible to complete in today’s world: For me, it happened after trying to read the book like any other book and giving up after ten or so pages, then trying it again and giving up again, then changing my approach and superficially browsing through the whole book once, then jumping around in it like a stray dog, and then starting it all over again, failing at that once more, then getting some help from the Internet, and then starting again.

Did I enjoy myself? No. But then, while reading the first few pages again, something amazing happened: I suddenly noticed that I saw things clearly, as clearly as I believe things can possibly be seen in books. Flower spaces and flower trees and quarters and cakes became flower spaces and flower trees and quarters and cakes. And they also became shining tetris pieces that were gently finding their own way down to the right slots, where they landed with what I can only describe as a delightful click. Everything made sense: every word was in its right place. I still didn’t get very far, though, because, you guessed it, I had other things to do. But I was happy.

Can you afford to miss this chance to be happy? Of course you can. But even if you want to go where the chosen ones go, it’s pretty difficult to take the journey all by yourself. But maybe you have to do it on your own? Of course you don’t.

Get some help: What I can recommend is a few visual displays of the book’s narrative structure that won’t spoil very much, found here. It would be awesome if on that site they actually had a real hypertext edition of the book as planned. But even this was pretty helpful to me. For a general reassurement that it all makes sense and you’re not wasting your time, there’s a fine article here. It’s on Oprah’s website no less, and it really helps, benevolently providing the timid first-time reader with a good frame of mind to get into. Because people, the risk of frustration with a book like this is just as high as the joy it gives you. And with this note, I think I have done all I can to save literature today.

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