I’m not going to use the word “overboard” exactly, but Faulkner’s descriptions of food in “Pantaloon in Black”… whew:
“…and raised a spoonful of the cold and glutinous pease to his mouth. The congealed and lifeless mass seemed to bounce on contact with his lips. Not even warmed from mouth-heat, pease and spoon spattered and rang upon the plate…” (135)
“He drank again, swallowing the chill liquid tamed of taste or heat with while the swallowing lasted, feeling it flow solid and cold with fire, past then enveloping the strong steady panting of his lungs until they ran too suddenly free as his moving body ran in the silver solid wall of air he breasted.” (141)
“Then, drinking, he discovered suddenly that no more of the liquid was entering his mouth. Swallowing, it was no longer passing down his throat, his third and mouth filed now with a solid and unmoving column which without reflex or revulsion sprang, columnar and intact and still retaining the mold of his gullet, outward glinting in the moonlight, splintering, vanishing into the myriad murmur of the dewed grass. He drank again. Again his throat merely filled solidly until two icy rills ran from his mouth-corners…” (142)
(And I cannot help but think, not for the first time, of Stella Gibbons: “The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it.”)
I could do a sort of careful literary analysis here – is the food representative of a sort of earthly solidity that Rider cannot achieve in this fugue state? His connection to humanity? His connection to humanity via his wife, with food as representative of hearth, nurturing, and home, and liquid as a sort of higher, purer order? I mean, sure. But it’s been done already, and with the prose here, I just literally can’t even. “Mouth-heat”?
Is Faulkner actually… parodying himself? In the same way that the commedia dell’arte has come, in its twentieth-century forms at least (thinking especially of pantomime), to parody modern theatrical conventions? I honestly… cannot tell.
This is very hard for me to parse, not least because I don’t have that much faith in Faulkner’s sense of humor, and not least because I’m not sure that I could tell Faulkner apart from good Faulkner parody. In this story, the dialogue, too, seems to be more of “too much”: “Lemme lone, Acey… Doan mess wid me now” (130); “Ah kin pass even wid miss-outs. But dese hyar yuther boys—” (146) But is that parody or is that… just Faulkner? Am I being dense here in not recognizing this as parody, or am I being totally boorish by refusing to believe that this can be “real”?
I think the reason that it’s so hard (for me at least) to identify parody (or not) here is that parody largely depends on taking a particular, recognizable aesthetic style to its extreme. But Faulkner’s style is already highly stylized. I’d be tempted to call it camp, but stylization alone is not enough to call something “camp” – something must also be earnest and unselfaware, as well as a failure according to conventional standards of aesthetic taste. Also, “camp is a tender feeling,” which in this case I do not feel (despite having felt it in absolute masses for many campy things, my favorite being an Off-Broadway musical called “Trip of Love.”)
So is this high literary camp, intentional parody, or merely bad? Do standard literary understandings of aesthetic / prose style fail to accommodate or describe high stylization like Faulkner’s? Am I giving Faulker too much benefit of the doubt based on his literary reputation, or too little based on my own aesthetic response and preference for novels that prioritize interiority? (Is this where I express my growing conviction that Faulkner has benefitted already from nearly a century of intense and still-extant lit-bro culture?) It’s possible that, as Faulkner might have it, “Ah just misread de sign wrong,” but… I really have no response to that sort of quote other than the strong, shuddery conviction that it is bad writing. And “Ah doan needs no mo of hit” (142, wince).
