I'd like to continue this conversation a little. I think that there are a lot of things left to say about Faulkner. Specifically, I'm still very interested in the time period. I'm no longer pursuing the Ph.D. in English as a Faulkner scholar - I think that was a mistake, even though I had some interest. There are a lot of reasons for this, none of which are very interesting. I think, though, that Faulkner can be extremely useful in a lot of different ways, not the least of which is as a writer of complex short texts. I teach middle school, and Faulkner would be a challenge for most of my middle school students. But that doesn't mean that they couldn't or wouldn't understand him, given the right approach. I think that sharing Faulkner with my students would also be a nice way to introduce them to something that I pursued prior to becoming a teacher - a kind of sharing of stories.
I think, off the top of my head, that chapters from As I Lay Dying might work on their own. Or separate, short chapters juxtaposed. I like the contrast, for example, between Cash and Dewey Dell. I think there's a lot that a middle school kid could get from that.
There are a lot of short stories, and some of them are downright incendiary. Sometimes there's language that needs to be dealt with, but I think there are enough stories that this could be a valuable pursuit.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Thinking again about proposal
I took a few more significant steps toward finishing the proposal last night. I was pretty happy that I was able to sit down and compose a few things that were on my mind, and the immense period of time between my last serious effort and this effort has worked in my favor.
First, I articulated the things that really get in the way - for me - of serious thinking about Faulkner. Or, more precisely, the things that make that kind of appropriate scholarship difficult.
1. That so many books and stories were originally edited and published, then un-edited and re-published. For example, Faulkner's original version of Sanctuary was heavily cut and edited by his publisher. Decades later, the original version - un-edited - was published. There are now two published versions of the novel. Which one is Sanctuary?
2. The "corrected" texts. Noel Polk went through and made adjustments to almost all of Faulkner's novels to correct typographical and printing errors that had caused multiple versions of several books. Supposedly, these "corrections" are a good thing. I'm not so sure.
3. Faulkner's constant re-working of his fiction - taking a published short story and expanding it into a novel ("Spotted Horses" becoming The Hamlet, several published stories revised and combined into Go Down, Moses), pulling parts of a story out of a novel and publishing it separately ("The Bear," with a section excluded, taken from Go Down, Moses).
4. The Yoknapatawpha cosmos - the way that Faulkner's novels constantly refer back to each other, and how they all take place in his fictionalized Mississippi county. Characters recur, sometimes with small shifts and inaccuracies. Plots and stories intertwine, as the Compson family - the stars of The Sound and the Fury - play an important part in the telling (and the listening) of Absalom, Absalom.
5. Faulkner's own confusing and misleading remarks about his work in Faulkner in the University. Too many critics have used his remarks as a way to interpret his work and found themselves fooled or otherwise taken in. Not only does he forget and make accidental mistakes - not unusual for someone speaking in detail about books completed decades in the past - but he also seems to be outright lying and exaggerating. Sometimes he even contradicts himself.
There are two ways to deal with these problems - give up on Faulkner and find someone less complicated to think about (I haven't yet mentioned the challenges of Faulkner's fiction without adding this context), or try to wade through the complexity and address some small part of this confusing (and confused) universe.
As I have already said in this blog, I am interested in the ways in which Faulkner makes use of form/genre. I believe that there are significant connections between regionalism (as in Mary Murfree, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and some of Willa Cather's work) and Faulkner, and local color (which isn't the same thing) and Faulkner, and - to some extent - realism (as in Dreiser and Norris) and Faulkner. All of these labels apply, in some way, to Faulkner's texts, and I want to make the case that Faulkner stretches the novel genre in ways that previous writers had not. One of the ways that he stretches the genre is through his choice of subject. More significant, though, is the way that he shapes his novels around his subjects. The Snopes trilogy, for example, is about the great evil that Flem Snopes represents, and the way that the petty vices of his relatives are pushed aside.
Yet the Snopes trilogy is an odd collection of books. The first book, The Hamlet, is often included in Faulkner's "major phase," and many more people are familiar with this book than either of the other two novels in the trilogy. The Hamlet uses several conventions of old Southwest humor, and is mostly a series of episodes in a hard-fought battles (of wits) between Flem and Ratliff. The second book, The Town, uses several first-person narrators, similar in some ways to the earlier As I Lay Dying. Many of the characters from the first book re-appear, and Faulkner continues to expand on the contrast between Flem and his lesser kin. In the final book, The Mansion, Mink Snopes occupies more narrative space than his importance to the story seems to warrant, and the microscopic setting of the books begins to stretch beyond Yoknapatawpha in ways that don't suit it.
The shifts in the books make them seem less like a trilogy than just a trio of books about related subjects.
The point that I want to make, for now, is just that Faulkner studies are extremely complicated, and someone needs to untangle the role that Faulkner plays in the shaping of the modern (and postmodern) novel.
First, I articulated the things that really get in the way - for me - of serious thinking about Faulkner. Or, more precisely, the things that make that kind of appropriate scholarship difficult.
1. That so many books and stories were originally edited and published, then un-edited and re-published. For example, Faulkner's original version of Sanctuary was heavily cut and edited by his publisher. Decades later, the original version - un-edited - was published. There are now two published versions of the novel. Which one is Sanctuary?
2. The "corrected" texts. Noel Polk went through and made adjustments to almost all of Faulkner's novels to correct typographical and printing errors that had caused multiple versions of several books. Supposedly, these "corrections" are a good thing. I'm not so sure.
3. Faulkner's constant re-working of his fiction - taking a published short story and expanding it into a novel ("Spotted Horses" becoming The Hamlet, several published stories revised and combined into Go Down, Moses), pulling parts of a story out of a novel and publishing it separately ("The Bear," with a section excluded, taken from Go Down, Moses).
4. The Yoknapatawpha cosmos - the way that Faulkner's novels constantly refer back to each other, and how they all take place in his fictionalized Mississippi county. Characters recur, sometimes with small shifts and inaccuracies. Plots and stories intertwine, as the Compson family - the stars of The Sound and the Fury - play an important part in the telling (and the listening) of Absalom, Absalom.
5. Faulkner's own confusing and misleading remarks about his work in Faulkner in the University. Too many critics have used his remarks as a way to interpret his work and found themselves fooled or otherwise taken in. Not only does he forget and make accidental mistakes - not unusual for someone speaking in detail about books completed decades in the past - but he also seems to be outright lying and exaggerating. Sometimes he even contradicts himself.
There are two ways to deal with these problems - give up on Faulkner and find someone less complicated to think about (I haven't yet mentioned the challenges of Faulkner's fiction without adding this context), or try to wade through the complexity and address some small part of this confusing (and confused) universe.
As I have already said in this blog, I am interested in the ways in which Faulkner makes use of form/genre. I believe that there are significant connections between regionalism (as in Mary Murfree, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and some of Willa Cather's work) and Faulkner, and local color (which isn't the same thing) and Faulkner, and - to some extent - realism (as in Dreiser and Norris) and Faulkner. All of these labels apply, in some way, to Faulkner's texts, and I want to make the case that Faulkner stretches the novel genre in ways that previous writers had not. One of the ways that he stretches the genre is through his choice of subject. More significant, though, is the way that he shapes his novels around his subjects. The Snopes trilogy, for example, is about the great evil that Flem Snopes represents, and the way that the petty vices of his relatives are pushed aside.
Yet the Snopes trilogy is an odd collection of books. The first book, The Hamlet, is often included in Faulkner's "major phase," and many more people are familiar with this book than either of the other two novels in the trilogy. The Hamlet uses several conventions of old Southwest humor, and is mostly a series of episodes in a hard-fought battles (of wits) between Flem and Ratliff. The second book, The Town, uses several first-person narrators, similar in some ways to the earlier As I Lay Dying. Many of the characters from the first book re-appear, and Faulkner continues to expand on the contrast between Flem and his lesser kin. In the final book, The Mansion, Mink Snopes occupies more narrative space than his importance to the story seems to warrant, and the microscopic setting of the books begins to stretch beyond Yoknapatawpha in ways that don't suit it.
The shifts in the books make them seem less like a trilogy than just a trio of books about related subjects.
The point that I want to make, for now, is just that Faulkner studies are extremely complicated, and someone needs to untangle the role that Faulkner plays in the shaping of the modern (and postmodern) novel.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Re-update
I'm still struggling with connecting these ideas. There are enormous bodies of work on Faulkner and on form/genre. I've had a few minor breakthroughs that have petered out, but I think I'm generally drifting toward some kind of major burst of work. I'm facing some personal deadlines that are motivating me - mostly frustration that I haven't produced anything meaningful in months.
Here's where we're at: individual acts of artistic creation are always created in a particular context, or a particular conversation. There are a lot of ways of talking about this relationship between individual texts and the world of texts outside of it: all authors make decisions about how closely to follow the numerous small- and large-scale conventions of creative writing. The interesting thing is how these conventions have changed in large bursts. One such burst, one might say, came about in the invention of the thing we call a "novel." Many claim that Samuel Richardson invented the novel as we know it, with Clarissa. Defoe and Fielding helped, as did many others who created things that resembled novels, or included elements that we now recognize as typical of the novel.
An important step in the development in the novel came about around 1900, as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf helped push the novel beyond the relatively rigid constraints of Victorian fiction. Again, it is unfair to say that these important artists invented something that had not existed before: considerable ink has been spilled making conflicting claims about the origins of the "modern novel," as it has come to be called. It is convenient to point to Joyce and Woolf as the crystallization of decades of slow change in the novel form.
Another key player in the change that came about in the novel was William Faulkner, of course. Some of his work was quite original, though his originality also made him mostly unpopular.
Here's where we're at: individual acts of artistic creation are always created in a particular context, or a particular conversation. There are a lot of ways of talking about this relationship between individual texts and the world of texts outside of it: all authors make decisions about how closely to follow the numerous small- and large-scale conventions of creative writing. The interesting thing is how these conventions have changed in large bursts. One such burst, one might say, came about in the invention of the thing we call a "novel." Many claim that Samuel Richardson invented the novel as we know it, with Clarissa. Defoe and Fielding helped, as did many others who created things that resembled novels, or included elements that we now recognize as typical of the novel.
An important step in the development in the novel came about around 1900, as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf helped push the novel beyond the relatively rigid constraints of Victorian fiction. Again, it is unfair to say that these important artists invented something that had not existed before: considerable ink has been spilled making conflicting claims about the origins of the "modern novel," as it has come to be called. It is convenient to point to Joyce and Woolf as the crystallization of decades of slow change in the novel form.
Another key player in the change that came about in the novel was William Faulkner, of course. Some of his work was quite original, though his originality also made him mostly unpopular.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Faulkner and the New Formalism
I just spent a little time with a recent essay on New Formalism, an uncomfortable label for recent critical work that tries to pay more attention to the literary form of a work. For the last twenty years or so, literary scholarship has focused mostly on New Historicism and other forms of cultural and/or ideological criticism. That is, literary scholars spend their research time trying to uncover ways in which the historical and cultural context of a work made its way into the work itself, or how the ideology of a period is instantiated in a work. Very little attention is paid to the shape of the work. I use that word reluctantly, I should say, because it's a little misleading to talk about a work of print in three-dimensional terms more fitting for sculpture. But it's a useful way to think about something like what a novel is.
I would like to say that this article does little other than to describe a "movement," or a kind of trend in some recent critical work. I don't think that it tells me much about how to go about doing it. I want to ask questions about what Faulkner does to the novel itself, and I want to think about how he changed the reader's (and the writer's) expectations for what a novel really is. But I'm not sure yet about the best way to do that. It's too much like an influence study, which is so intangible as to be meaningless.
I would like to say that this article does little other than to describe a "movement," or a kind of trend in some recent critical work. I don't think that it tells me much about how to go about doing it. I want to ask questions about what Faulkner does to the novel itself, and I want to think about how he changed the reader's (and the writer's) expectations for what a novel really is. But I'm not sure yet about the best way to do that. It's too much like an influence study, which is so intangible as to be meaningless.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Faulkner's Genres
I'd like to talk a little more about Faulkner's genres. As I'm thinking about him right now, it seems like there are a couple of principal genres that concern Faulkner. I'm eventually going to claim that Faulkner succeeded, in ways that other novelists had not, to stretch the Novel into something else, or something different, than what it was before him. That sounds like a silly and slippery claim right now, even to me, but that's what I'm after - I think.
First, back to his genres. Faulkner concerns himself principally with the Novel, the Short Story, and the Poem. We can also assume that his prolonged and repeated work as a screenwriter in Hollywood informed his understanding of literary form. In other words, we must assume that Faulkner's decision to sit down and write what he called a "detective novel," the work that would become Intruder in the Dust, was informed by his work on The Big Sleep and his correspondence with Raymond Chandler three years before.
There are two movements that I want to focus on. The first is the movement that occurred - constantly and repeatedly - between short story and novel. Not only did Faulkner borrow characters from his short fiction to populate his novels, he also rewrote his short fiction into novels altogether in some cases. And, of course, the process worked in reverse - as in "The Bear," a long short-story that appears in Go Down, Moses. The story "Spotted Horses" also occurs in The Hamlet, and is often packaged and sold separately as an independent work.
This re-shaping of narrative, both by Faulkner and by his editors (and that adds an almost unreasonable level of complexity to this whole discussion), seems to add something unusual to the already-unusual project that Faulkner had to use his narrative work to populate a unified and overlapping cosmos. Faulkner's novels, beginning with the already-mentioned Sartoris, all described a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha. The characters from one novel might appear in another, and often do. The same houses and places appear throughout. Quentin Compson, who kills himself in the middle of The Sound and the Fury, narrates or listens to the narration of much of Absalom, Absalom. Jason Compson appears in The Mansion to butt heads with Flem Snopes. This also applies to settings. The Old Frenchman's place in Frenchman's Bend is the setting for the rape and murder that occurs in Sanctuary and the place where Flem Snopes tricks Ratliff in The Hamlet. And so on.
As a node in a network, or a star in a constellation, Faulkner's own texts are important for much more than their individual content. There are complex intertextual relationships among characters and settings that escape the bounds of the individual work. A minor character who reappears in several books suddenly assumes added meaning despite the apparent irrelevance to the present context. In other words, Faulkner's work teaches us to read beyond the borders of the text, outside the events and details depicted in the covers of the novel, and to think about relationships to other texts and other people. It is a way of writing that admits to the limits of the page and invites speculation, denying the closure at the end of a novel. Quentin Compson is dead at the end of The Sound and the Fury, but much of Absalom, Absalom comes through him or concerns him.
The other movement that interests me is the movement between Faulkner's film career and his fiction. I'm curious about that period between Go Down, Moses in 1942 and Intruder in the Dust in 1948. I'm also curious about the extended periods that Faulkner was spending in Hollywood in the mid-thirties, while he was writing some of his most famous work, such as Light in August and The Hamlet. I'm curious about this influence on the writer. If we can succeed in blaming the pollution of Hollywood on his artistic downfall - many critics think that Faulkner's fiction was not very good after The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses - then why didn't it push him over the edge earlier in his career?
The movement that annoys me involves the ways in which Faulkner's work has been edited and re-released. I've mentioned this in an earlier post, but it's difficult to study a text that was unpublished during an author's lifetime, published in a heavily-cut version, and then reissued fifty years later while virtually replacing the original published version? Sartoris was the heavily-edited result of Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha book, but the unedited version, Flags in the Dust, is much more widely available now. For all of the important critics prior to this re-release, Faulkner's fictional cosmos was born in a book called Sartoris. For everyone since then, Faulkner's fictional universe was born in an edited and often unread Flags in the Dust.
It's interesting to think about these "movements," as I'm calling them, through the lens of genre. It is my contention that Faulkner was an important part of the shaping of the 20th-century American novel, and the modern novel as it came to be written and shaped internationally into the postmodern novel. One of the key elements in his re-shaping of the novel involved the closed form of the novel - that a novel should only present conflicts that it intends to resolve, and that it should only present characters who are important to the resolution of that conflict. A sense of unity.
I need to spend a lot more time clarifying what the hell that means. I'm not really sure about that - I should come up with some examples.
First, back to his genres. Faulkner concerns himself principally with the Novel, the Short Story, and the Poem. We can also assume that his prolonged and repeated work as a screenwriter in Hollywood informed his understanding of literary form. In other words, we must assume that Faulkner's decision to sit down and write what he called a "detective novel," the work that would become Intruder in the Dust, was informed by his work on The Big Sleep and his correspondence with Raymond Chandler three years before.
There are two movements that I want to focus on. The first is the movement that occurred - constantly and repeatedly - between short story and novel. Not only did Faulkner borrow characters from his short fiction to populate his novels, he also rewrote his short fiction into novels altogether in some cases. And, of course, the process worked in reverse - as in "The Bear," a long short-story that appears in Go Down, Moses. The story "Spotted Horses" also occurs in The Hamlet, and is often packaged and sold separately as an independent work.
This re-shaping of narrative, both by Faulkner and by his editors (and that adds an almost unreasonable level of complexity to this whole discussion), seems to add something unusual to the already-unusual project that Faulkner had to use his narrative work to populate a unified and overlapping cosmos. Faulkner's novels, beginning with the already-mentioned Sartoris, all described a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha. The characters from one novel might appear in another, and often do. The same houses and places appear throughout. Quentin Compson, who kills himself in the middle of The Sound and the Fury, narrates or listens to the narration of much of Absalom, Absalom. Jason Compson appears in The Mansion to butt heads with Flem Snopes. This also applies to settings. The Old Frenchman's place in Frenchman's Bend is the setting for the rape and murder that occurs in Sanctuary and the place where Flem Snopes tricks Ratliff in The Hamlet. And so on.
As a node in a network, or a star in a constellation, Faulkner's own texts are important for much more than their individual content. There are complex intertextual relationships among characters and settings that escape the bounds of the individual work. A minor character who reappears in several books suddenly assumes added meaning despite the apparent irrelevance to the present context. In other words, Faulkner's work teaches us to read beyond the borders of the text, outside the events and details depicted in the covers of the novel, and to think about relationships to other texts and other people. It is a way of writing that admits to the limits of the page and invites speculation, denying the closure at the end of a novel. Quentin Compson is dead at the end of The Sound and the Fury, but much of Absalom, Absalom comes through him or concerns him.
The other movement that interests me is the movement between Faulkner's film career and his fiction. I'm curious about that period between Go Down, Moses in 1942 and Intruder in the Dust in 1948. I'm also curious about the extended periods that Faulkner was spending in Hollywood in the mid-thirties, while he was writing some of his most famous work, such as Light in August and The Hamlet. I'm curious about this influence on the writer. If we can succeed in blaming the pollution of Hollywood on his artistic downfall - many critics think that Faulkner's fiction was not very good after The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses - then why didn't it push him over the edge earlier in his career?
The movement that annoys me involves the ways in which Faulkner's work has been edited and re-released. I've mentioned this in an earlier post, but it's difficult to study a text that was unpublished during an author's lifetime, published in a heavily-cut version, and then reissued fifty years later while virtually replacing the original published version? Sartoris was the heavily-edited result of Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha book, but the unedited version, Flags in the Dust, is much more widely available now. For all of the important critics prior to this re-release, Faulkner's fictional cosmos was born in a book called Sartoris. For everyone since then, Faulkner's fictional universe was born in an edited and often unread Flags in the Dust.
It's interesting to think about these "movements," as I'm calling them, through the lens of genre. It is my contention that Faulkner was an important part of the shaping of the 20th-century American novel, and the modern novel as it came to be written and shaped internationally into the postmodern novel. One of the key elements in his re-shaping of the novel involved the closed form of the novel - that a novel should only present conflicts that it intends to resolve, and that it should only present characters who are important to the resolution of that conflict. A sense of unity.
I need to spend a lot more time clarifying what the hell that means. I'm not really sure about that - I should come up with some examples.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Importance of Genre?
I've gone back to teaching for a bit, and I've gotten bogged down in teaching-related responsibilities. I haven't seriously dented any of the Faulkner books that I've been promising myself I would read. That will need to change, of course.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Big Sleep
I finally watched this movie. Faulkner was one of the screenwriters, and he wrote this Bogart-Bacall flick in the "dark ages" of his career. He published Go Down, Moses in 1942 and wrote almost nothing until Intruder in the Dust, and it took quite a bit of cajoling to get him out of the funk that he was in during this period. In other words, Faulkner appeared to have resigned himself to the fact that he was not a writer, or at least not a writer anymore. He was well aware that people in other countries - notably Jean-Paul Sartre - considered him a great writer, and I'm sure that there was considerable bitterness there.
In this movie, The Big Sleep, Faulkner's touch is difficult to discern. He was not the sole scriptwriter, of course. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman collaborated. I'm not sure about the details of this collaboration, though I might make that the subject of a later post. I really noticed some Faulknerian language/dialogue in the opening scene with General Sternwood in the greenhouse, with the "stink of corruption" and the description of the orchid. It was almost too heavy for the film, I think, and probably meant to be so.
I think it's interesting to wonder about the influence of this on Faulkner's writing. Many critics think that he fell apart as a novelist after this. His "major phase" ended by this time. Most critics put the end of this canonical period at 1940, with the publication of The Hamlet. Some extend that to Go Down, Moses. I think I've heard of one critic who considers Intruder in the Dust a major work, but that's the exception and not the norm. Intruder in the Dust became a film almost instantly, and was heavily promoted by Random House. It sold better than much of his earlier work, and it helped attract enough attention to get him the Nobel Prize two years later. It's interesting that it's not usually considered a "great work." It's a murder mystery not unlike Sanctuary; though considerably less shocking, it is not without some parallels.
I think it might be interesting to conjecture (and that's all that it is at this point) that Faulkner's Hollywood concerns, the War, and perhaps even the Portable Faulkner (published in 1946 by Malcolm Cowley) turned Faulkner away from the kind of work that made him a successful "great" writer in the 30's. Or, stated another way, the kind of writing that Faulkner produced after this interregnum (I think I like that word to describe this period) was not the kind of writing that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would champion in the 50's.
There are a lot of things rolled up into that paragraph. Let me think about this and try to untangle some of the claims in there.
For now, here are some clips from YouTube from The Big Sleep:
Here is the restaurant scene added to the 1946 version after requests from Lauren Bacall's agent to cut an earlier, more chaste scene involving Bacall and a veil in Bogart's office:
Here's an earlier scene, just after the greenhouse scene:
And a lame reference to Proust:
The plot is a little (okay, a lot) mixed up, with several murders and murderers. I've also heard the story about Faulkner calling Raymond Chandler to ask him who the real killer was, and Chandler sounding offended and insulting Faulkner's ability to figure it out. According to one version of the story, Chandler later called back and apologized, saying that it wasn't clear and that he wasn't sure who the killer was either. So Faulkner had to make a guess, and Chandler (I think) seemed to agree.
In this movie, The Big Sleep, Faulkner's touch is difficult to discern. He was not the sole scriptwriter, of course. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman collaborated. I'm not sure about the details of this collaboration, though I might make that the subject of a later post. I really noticed some Faulknerian language/dialogue in the opening scene with General Sternwood in the greenhouse, with the "stink of corruption" and the description of the orchid. It was almost too heavy for the film, I think, and probably meant to be so.
I think it's interesting to wonder about the influence of this on Faulkner's writing. Many critics think that he fell apart as a novelist after this. His "major phase" ended by this time. Most critics put the end of this canonical period at 1940, with the publication of The Hamlet. Some extend that to Go Down, Moses. I think I've heard of one critic who considers Intruder in the Dust a major work, but that's the exception and not the norm. Intruder in the Dust became a film almost instantly, and was heavily promoted by Random House. It sold better than much of his earlier work, and it helped attract enough attention to get him the Nobel Prize two years later. It's interesting that it's not usually considered a "great work." It's a murder mystery not unlike Sanctuary; though considerably less shocking, it is not without some parallels.
I think it might be interesting to conjecture (and that's all that it is at this point) that Faulkner's Hollywood concerns, the War, and perhaps even the Portable Faulkner (published in 1946 by Malcolm Cowley) turned Faulkner away from the kind of work that made him a successful "great" writer in the 30's. Or, stated another way, the kind of writing that Faulkner produced after this interregnum (I think I like that word to describe this period) was not the kind of writing that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would champion in the 50's.
There are a lot of things rolled up into that paragraph. Let me think about this and try to untangle some of the claims in there.
For now, here are some clips from YouTube from The Big Sleep:
Here is the restaurant scene added to the 1946 version after requests from Lauren Bacall's agent to cut an earlier, more chaste scene involving Bacall and a veil in Bogart's office:
Here's an earlier scene, just after the greenhouse scene:
And a lame reference to Proust:
The plot is a little (okay, a lot) mixed up, with several murders and murderers. I've also heard the story about Faulkner calling Raymond Chandler to ask him who the real killer was, and Chandler sounding offended and insulting Faulkner's ability to figure it out. According to one version of the story, Chandler later called back and apologized, saying that it wasn't clear and that he wasn't sure who the killer was either. So Faulkner had to make a guess, and Chandler (I think) seemed to agree.
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