Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation.
While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.
Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important.
It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of 1,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a 33-page long whopper with 13,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect.
But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all 1,288 words of it, below.
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 40 000 words long!
Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr
How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that.
I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all
omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day
i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C
Read this in an hour easily
hi!
I won yay
@arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at 2.5 million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. 4. A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.”
@arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at 2.5 million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. 4. A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.”
I got a sentence that was 5639 words long
i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read
I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm.…my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist…
shutcho pickel chin as up
i just wrote a sentence with 1,289 words so ha
oh really i doubt it
oh really i doubt it.
Maybe fact check before coming up with such blatant lies. 12083 is a mid length novelette.
hello, I like to play Fortnite it is a really good game.
i just read this in a day
owfrjtnrgkzcbvwruogjlvdajngwruojlnvdakjefnlvk aij hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
This was so long
jfeo’isbhoaubhfvionadkfvbskjvb efnvkjnbsxuhbgv hiiiii
Wow finally a worthy opponent.
this has one word in it first person to see the gets $100 cash app njhcewhfb whebfuewhfjwenifbewiubfiebfebwqjfbwejnfewihfiuhweniufjeuirhfiuerfburiebfiewbjfkwefqhcewfhepwuhfiuwerfuiwqerpifjbruegferiuhfiuerwhfuiifewiviiuhuihrgiobguhtrbiuhtreiubhriurhviuwrhiuvht4rnrijpewvpiefhwnovjibrfpierfnhvipuerbfviuphrwipjvnwefkjvnpwiefv pirfnhpiejpoerwpivherwpoivhwepriuvipr evijnreijnrojvwejrfvoijerreiobfr iuvfrvjo frvjrweoijbvweiojrfoiwervicebrwouvbwerouvu perivoerijvoiuwerbviouweroiuberouvberfoefubvouiwriuebrouweuberwiuvherivyherwiubvewiurobviuwervuwervouwrewoiuvherwiuoeHIewijvhferiucbuhewjdhfewiufdhiu3riuheriufheriuhfiuerhfiuhwreiufhirwhiufhwiurhfiuhreiuhfiuheriwfhriehfiuerwhufihreuifheirhfiuwheruifherwoiuwfheruhwifhreiuhwoiuhfuerhfhwruifhriuehfueri
is it the word “be” found in the 17th, and 18th letters?
this is not a long paragraph it is multiple
I am just not as pretty as my friend Haylee she is fab so give me a chance for this job
This has the word “his” in it
Had to translate this for history class so I chose this sentence(How fing stupid of me)
That Was A lot Of Words
Her.
womp womp
Bro I copied this and held paste and send it to my friend XD
no you did’t:>
i love you
Same lol