The Faulkner Book is an artist book that attempts to illustrate The Sound and the Fury by writing the entire text out by hand, layering drawings based on civil rights movement photographs with confederate currency, Reconstruction-era propaganda and images from Southern folklore.
A few days ago my oldest friend Mark Peikert, a fellow Southerner living here in New York City, and I were talking about our favorite authors; about how they are all Southerners. Truman Capote, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, John Kennedy Toole, Mark Twain and William Faulkner. "The thing is that I can put a face from home on every character ever created by Flannery O'Connor," Mark commented. And so it may seem odd to introduce a project about William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury with a passage from Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding but the great genius of Welty is also that of Faulkner; tragicomic characters who, in their profound isolation, embody the odd and anachronistic nature of the South. In this passage, Robbie, a woman who has married into the Fairchild family, an old aristocratic Mississippi family, feels herself a stranger to her husband and, by extension, a larger history.
She could not follow. Sometimes she thought when he was so out of reach, so far away is his mind, that she could blame everything on some old story... For he evidently felt that old stories, family stories, Mississippi stories, were the same as very holy or very passionate, if stories could be those things. He looked out at the world, at her, sometimes, with that essence of the remote, proud, over-innocent Fairchild look that she suspected , as if an old story had taken hold of him -- entered his flesh. And she did not know the story.
There are stories that enter our flesh. Stories that define our circumstance and determine our character. The Faulkner Book is an experiment in illustrating the inarticulation of the rising, falling and stagnation of the Compson Family in The Sound and the Fury.
A few days ago my oldest friend Mark Peikert, a fellow Southerner living here in New York City, and I were talking about our favorite authors; about how they are all Southerners. Truman Capote, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, John Kennedy Toole, Mark Twain and William Faulkner. "The thing is that I can put a face from home on every character ever created by Flannery O'Connor," Mark commented. And so it may seem odd to introduce a project about William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury with a passage from Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding but the great genius of Welty is also that of Faulkner; tragicomic characters who, in their profound isolation, embody the odd and anachronistic nature of the South. In this passage, Robbie, a woman who has married into the Fairchild family, an old aristocratic Mississippi family, feels herself a stranger to her husband and, by extension, a larger history.
She could not follow. Sometimes she thought when he was so out of reach, so far away is his mind, that she could blame everything on some old story... For he evidently felt that old stories, family stories, Mississippi stories, were the same as very holy or very passionate, if stories could be those things. He looked out at the world, at her, sometimes, with that essence of the remote, proud, over-innocent Fairchild look that she suspected , as if an old story had taken hold of him -- entered his flesh. And she did not know the story.
There are stories that enter our flesh. Stories that define our circumstance and determine our character. The Faulkner Book is an experiment in illustrating the inarticulation of the rising, falling and stagnation of the Compson Family in The Sound and the Fury.
