the sound and the fury the book and daisy miller the movie (may 19th, 2026)

 finally wrapped up with faulkner's the sound and the fury. what can i say besides: he had it? (he had it so much). there's so much to grab onto and never let go about him putting the words on the page that really blew me away (and will make up the majority of the next paragraph) but i just wanted to shout out faulkner's underrated "writing a good narrative" chops. straight up just the story beats would make for like a pretty good novel on their own even if he had none of the other literary sauce. (and let me tell you something about the literary sauce he has. a proverbial kitchen of literary sauce. a moveable feast of writing sentences).

faulkner's voices on the first 3 days (/sections/chapters) of tsatf really had their claws in me in just how unwilling they were to become flattenings of their characters. Jason is not /simply/ an angry bigoted manchild, nor Quentin III /simply/ this sort of wretched tortured intellectual (to say nothing of the kindnesses, although certainly imperfect, faulkner shows Benjy). there are these neat threads of repetition throughout every first person day that sort of define these three boys as family. i was literally cackling when Jason was walking around town going "nobody wants to work anymore".

but he (mr faulkner) just fucking ascends on easter sunday. (ascends. ha.). he starts to pull on Shakespeare stylistically (diving straight into its namesake, macbeth) where this (now third person, in some cases omnipotent) narration starts to crack into our character's heads and spill the content all over. you get like 250+ pages of these passages that are so colored by who they are being narrated and then on p.306 we get "Of his niece he did not think at all, nor of the arbitrary valuation of the money. Neither of them had had entity of individuality for him for ten year; together they merely symbolised the job in the bank which he had been deprived before he ever got it.", a (half) paragraph utterly jarring in its plainspokenness. faulkner is just like "here you go" and you've worked so hard to draw every other conclusion (or i did, anyway) in the book that is partially spoken but not laid out clearly and then like 20 pages from the end he just starts handing you signs that say "this is why Jason feels this way". it feels like a trap, almost. just insane shit. i was making coffee the other morning and walked into the living room where hellie was sort of idly flipping through it and just looks at me and goes "wait, faulkner goated?" and i could write more but she saved me alot of time by saying it.

of course we owe it all to daisy miller. (i owe it all to daisy miller, anyway. shout out dr. michelle moore for getting me into the moderns). i sort of went into peter bogdanovich's adaption braced for something entirely different; i was sort of expecting an adaptation that treats the novella as a 19th century romance (with a capital "19th"), sort of situating itself entirely in the worldview and aesthetic of Mrs Costello. basically, i thought this was going to be a Period Piece (tm). in hindsight this assumption was condescending to bogdanovich, who is clearly a pervert for Modernist Film and gave us what im going to lovingly call the daisy cut. no time to breathe in conversations because a 10 year old boy has to show me his missing teeth. he just throws you crazy visuals (see: the blog post image). the nouveau riche pastiche of the Miller family is just so fucking right to me. im coining what i call the "helliebelle cut" (sorry) where we end the movie ~3 minutes early whenever i end up showing this to people because pete bog almost had the perfect ending and then fumbled.

love you all!