Is it really “instant”?

Dirty Face

Shel Silverstein

Where did you get such a dirty face,

My darling dirty-faced child?

I got it from crawling along in the dirt

And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt.

I got it from chewing the roots of a rose

And digging for clams in the yard with my

nose.

I got it from peeking into a dark cave

And painting myself like a Navajo brave.

I got it from playing with coal in the bin

And signing my name in cement with my

chin.

I got if from rolling around on the rug

And giving the horrible dog a big hug.

I got it from finding a lost silver mine

And eating sweet blackberries right off the

vine.

I got it from ice cream and wrestling and

tears

And from having more fun than you’ve had

in years.

“Barn Burning”

by William Faulkner

Lecture: Historical Context

Any discussion of William Faulkner in a historical

context necessarily involves a discussion of

modernism. In modernism, as we have discussed,

we observe a conscious breaking with traditional

ideas about style, content, and purpose. Faulkner, like

Pound and Fitzgerald, typify the moral atmosphere of

modernism, which could be summed up as despair

over the condition of humanity in the aftermath of the

soul-wrenching and materially devastating First World

War (1914-18).

• Modernism is complex, and while some of these formal

experimenters rejected traditional values (Pound), others

wanted to uphold old values by new means (Eliot).

• Pound's work includes a sustained attack on Judeo-Christian values and embraces the radical relativism of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

• Eliot uses his experimentations to plead for the continued validity of traditional morals in a morally degenerate world.

• Faulkner is closer to Eliot than to Pound, which means that

he is formally a modernist while being morally and

philosophically a type of traditionalist. Faulkner could even

be called a reactionary—and in truth he was reacting,

negatively, to much of the transformation taking place in the

world of his time.

Style: Syntax The most noticeable feature of Faulkner's style is his

sentence structure. His sentences tend to be long, full of

interruptions, but work by stringing out seemingly

meandering sequences of clauses.

The second sentence of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers an

example: It is 116 words long and contains between

twelve and sixteen clauses, depending on how one

parses it out; its content is fluid and sundry, moving from

Sarty's awareness of the smell of cheese in the general

store through the visual impression made by canned

goods on the shelves to the boy's sense of blood loyalty

with his accused father.

It is the subjectivity of the content—sense impressions,

random emotions and convictions—which reveals the purpose

of the syntax, which is to convey experience in the form of an

intense stream-of-consciousness as recorded by the

protagonist.

The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded

room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he

could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat,

dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not

from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the

scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which

he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines

believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and

brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a

little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull

of blood.

Style: Point of ViewFaulkner was a perspectivist: He tells stories from a particular point of view—or sometimes, as in the novels, from many divergent points of view, each with its own insistent emphasis.

‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers a controlled example of perspectivism. Faulkner tells his story primarily from the point of view of young Sarty, a ten-year-old boy. This requires that Faulkner gives us the raw reportage of scene and event that an illiterate ten-year-old would give us, if he could. Thus, Sarty sees the pictures on the labels of the goods in the general store but cannot understand the lettering; adults loom over him, so that he feels dwarfed by them; and he struggles with moral and intellectual categories, as when he can only see Mr. Harris as an "enemy."

There are few departures from this strict perspectivism, but they are telling, as when, in the penultimate paragraph of the tale, an omniscient narrator divulges the truth about Ab’s behavior as a soldier during the Civil War. But even this is a calculated feature of Faulkner's style: the breaking-in of the omniscient narrator is another way of fracturing the continuity of the narrative, of reminding readers that there are many perspectives, including a transcendental one in which all facts are known to the author. Sharing Sarty's immediate impressions and judgments forges a strong bond between the boy and the reader.

Style: SettingThe setting of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ is in the post-Civil War South, in which a defeated and in many ways humiliated society is trying to hold its own against the Northern victor. This South has retreated into plantation life and small-town existence, and it maintains in private the social hierarchy that characterized the region in its pre-war phase.

Slavery has been abolished, but a vast distance still separates the land-owning Southern aristocracy from the tenant-farmers and bonded workers who do the trench-labor required by the plantation economy.

The Snopeses are itinerant sharecroppers, who move from one locale to another, paying for their habitation in this or that shack by remitting part of the crop to the landlord. This is a setting of intense vulnerability and therefore of intense resentment.

“Setting" is a word which needs to be qualified in reference to ‘‘Barn Burning’’ because, as Sarty notes, he has lived in at least a dozen ramshackle buildings on at least a dozen plantations in his ten short years. In a way, then, the story's "setting" is the road, or rather the Snopes' constant removal from one place to another due to Ab's quarreling and violence. The wagon, heaped with miserable chattel, is the setting, as is Abner's egomaniacal personality and Sarty's miserable yet rebellious heart.

Group

Discussion

Characters,

symbols, and

QHQs

de Spain

Sarty

Abner Snopes

Lennie Snopes

Fire

The soiled rug

Blood

Abner Snopes: Name analysis

Abner is a biblical name which means “Father of light.”

While the name itself has a positive connotation, the

father in this story literally is a “Father of light,” for he

burns barns of his masters.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Snopes family are

“recurring characters in the Yoknapatawpha novels and

stories of William Faulkner,” in which “Faulkner contrast[s]

the verminlike rapacity of most of the Snopes family with

the failing old order of the Sartoris clan.” While Abner

Snopes is depicted as Faulkner’s hallmark villain, his son,

whose first name is Sartoris, represents a hint of sanity

within the broken family.

“Then with the same deliberation he turned; the boy watched him

pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of

the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His father

never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug” (805).

This passage shows how much Abner despises the wealth and

power that his new master, Major de Spain, possesses. Ruining

de Spain’s expensive rug with horse poo-poo is Abner’s way of

expressing his frustration. Furthermore, leaving the “final long

and fading smear” on the rug even after Miss Lula shows her

disgust indicates Abner’s refusal to conform to social

expectations.

Abner Snopes: Attitude/Behavior

SartyBarn Burning is not written in the first person perspective, but Faulkner shares

the inside of the character, especially Colonel Sartoris Snopes’s. We can tell

the boy’s characterization by reading them: “[When his father called his son]

For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until

Harris said, “Not him. The little one. The boy,” … and, he felt no floor under his

bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning

faces” (1). He does not want to stand in front of the people. We see he’s in an

uncomfortable situation. We also have the physical description of the boy:

“[Colonel Sartoris Snopes is] crouching, small for his age … in patched and

faded jeans even too small for him” (1). Apparently, in this part, we can find

that he is from a poor family. This description followed by a dialogue with the

justice. It also tells the boy’s personality:

“What’s your name, boy?” the justice said. “Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy

whispered. “Hey?” the Justice said. “Talk louder.”

He’s lack of self-confidence; he is afraid of roaring his voice.

QHQ: “Barn Burning”

1. What compels Abner Snopes to burn barns?

2. What are the underlying issues which causes the Father to act the way he does?

3. Is Abner anti-social? Or does he represent the evil of humankind?

4. Are Abner and his actions effective in making a point about the class systems present in this world?

QHQ: “Barn Burning”

1. Are the sisters afraid of Abner?

2. Why is it that the only animal used to

describe the siblings, both sisters and the

brother, is a cow?

The twins’ docile nature has nothing

to do with patience but with an

udder lack of caring combined with

extreme laziness

That is how

you milk a

joke!

QHQ: “Barn Burning”

1. Why did Faulkner make the narration so ambiguous that it is difficult to figure out which character’s mind you are in? Is there a reason there is very little reference to the character’s names?

2. Why does Faulkner repeat the word “stoop”?

3. Does Faulkner attempt to blur the line between “good” and “evil” by adding the complexity of family loyalty?

4. Are familial ties enough to justify the violation of morality?

QHQ: “Barn Burning”

1. What does Sarty running away from the burning barn symbolize?

2. Does Sartoris love his father?

3. Why is Sarty so loyal to his father, given that his father treats him so poorly?

4. What makes Sarty finally turn against his Father, given his previous loyalty to the family?

5. Did his father actually die or did Sarty only think so because of the shots fired?

Few authors of the twentieth century are more significant than

Langston Hughes. He is assured his status by his many

contributions to literature.

• The length of his career: 1921-1967

• The variety of his output: articles, poems, short stories,

dramas, novels, and history texts.

• His influence on three generations of African American

writers: from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil

Rights Movement

• His concern for the “ordinary” African American: The

subject of his work

• His introduction of the jazz idiom: the quality of black

colloquial speech and the rhythms of jazz and the blues.

During his long career Hughes was harshly criticized

by blacks and whites. Because he left no single

masterwork, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

(1952) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and

because he consciously wrote in the common idiom

of the people, academic interest in him grew only

slowly. The importance of his influence on several

generations of African American authors is, however,

indisputable and widely acknowledged.

A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston was the prototypical authority on black

culture from the Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston combined literature with anthropology. She first

gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea.”

After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and

fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was

published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men,

which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and

New Orleans, also brought her success. Hurston's greatest novel, Their

Eyes Watching God, was published in 1937.

Zora Neale Hurston was a utopian, who held that black Americans could

attain sovereignty from white American society and all its bigotry, as proven

by her hometown of Eatonville.

Her work did not address the issue of racism of whites, and as this became a

emerging theme among black writers in the post World War II era of civil

rights, Hurston's literary influence faded.

She further damaged her own reputation by criticizing the civil rights

movement and supporting ultraconservative politicians. She died in poverty

and obscurity.

Read: Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, too, sing America,” and “The Weary Blues”

Post #16: Choose one

• What connections can be made between race and blues music in "The Weary Blues"?

• What do you think it means to have a soul that is deep as rivers?

• How does “I, too, sing America” make you think about what it means to be an American? How is "America" presented in this poem, and how does it make you feel about America?

• Read Zora Neale Hurston: “The Eatonville Anthology” 530-38 and “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” 538-541

Post #17 Choose one

• Community is the primary bond among the stories contained in "The Eatonville Anthology." How does the image of a front porch act as a symbol of the social concept of community? Cite specific incidents from the story that prove this connection.

• How does the narrator's viewpoint direct the reader's understanding and approval of the citizens presented in "The Eatonville Anthology"? Discuss specific examples.

• QHQ: “How it Feels to Be Colored Me”

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