Faulkner vs. Mann: Who Masters the Longest Sentence?
This essay discusses events disclosed in Chapter VI of Absalom, Absalom! and a passage from the prelude to Joseph and His Brothers.
Thomas Mann writes Joseph’s name six times before the main verb. William Faulkner keeps saying Jones until a man once forbidden to approach the front of a plantation house carries its owner up the stairs. You could replace several of those names with pronouns and save a little breath. You would also lose the sound of Mann calling a boy out of the ancient world and the succession of roles in which Faulkner asks us to see the same man.
Mann’s sentence runs to roughly 350 words in the German prelude to Joseph and His Brothers. Faulkner’s runs to roughly 1,300 in Chapter VI of Absalom, Absalom! and begins midway through a comparison in Quentin Compson’s mind. Read Mann’s full sentence and Faulkner’s full sentence.
Six Josephs before the verb
Mann begins with young Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, then starts again with Joseph in his own time. Three temporal clauses begin with the German als, or when. In the first, a king holds court in Babylon and a pharaoh shines before his subjects in Thebes. Then Assyria grows in strength and caravans carry lapis lazuli and stamped gold between courts. In the third, worship varies by city. El, in Gebal, requires neither temple nor cult. An entire political and religious geography acquires its verbs before the boy in the opening words gets his main one. [1]
Kurigalzu’s beard curls are arranged as neatly as a rank of shield bearers. The order of his rule extends as far as his own face. Lapis lazuli and gold travel between courts, giving the rulers a reason to appear in the same stretch of prose. Then come four towns that worship Astarte. By the fourth, the reader has already seen what the clause establishes about the spread of her cult and is still waiting for Joseph. [1]
The fourth Joseph comes after a colon. We are back with the boy, his father’s camp near Hebron, and the likeness he bears to Rachel. The fifth comes just before a parenthesis in which the narrator counts the fifth and sixth appearances and imagines that possessing the name might confer the power to summon him. The sixth Joseph finally gets the governing verb, erblickte, or saw. He sees in Ur the beginning of everything, then the last words narrow everything to what concerns him personally. The next sentence takes that limit seriously. An ancestor set out from Ur, and Joseph himself is hazy about how far back it happened. [1]
The third Joseph is easy to miss. Inside the first time clause, he uses his own names for Egypt. When Ur comes up at the end, Mann again specifies what Joseph calls it in his own speech. The narrator has spent hundreds of words recovering a person by name. That person has his own names for places and his own idea of where history starts. Put Joseph’s judgment about Ur up front and follow it with a separate paragraph on the ancient Near East, and everything loses its momentary reach. We have to pass through several centers of power and worship before we can feel what it costs to call one city the beginning. [1]
In the cistern passage in Death in Venice, Mann starts with a complete action and repeats it after a long interruption. Here he brings back the name with the action still outstanding.
The scythe in the parenthesis
At Harvard, Quentin listens to his roommate Shreve tell the story of Thomas Sutpen, a Mississippi plantation owner. Shreve sounds like Quentin’s father, who has told the story before. The first father in “Just exactly like father if father” names the man Shreve sounds like. The second belongs to an if clause. The resemblance depends on an impossible change in timing, with Quentin’s father knowing before Quentin’s visit to the plantation what he knew afterward. Shreve’s voice has the familiarity of an inherited story and the freedom of someone telling it with the later knowledge already in play. [2]
When Quentin imagines Sutpen surveying what remains of his family, he starts with the vanished son, who might live and have children under a name that conceals his descent. After a semicolon comes the daughter, still an object of Sutpen’s first look. Judith appears destined for spinsterhood and then, in the relative clause, as having chosen it. The aunt who comes to comfort her can see only a face she cannot read. A dress and a sunbonnet frame it, and the next relative clause makes the face itself something Judith “wore.” By the time we see her at the front door years later, that composure is as familiar as the sunbonnet and just as uninformative about her grief. [2]
A parenthesis inside that description makes room for the help the women received from Wash Jones, a poor white man living on Sutpen’s land. His fishing camp has a rotting porch. It takes several clauses for the rusty scythe against it to reach its verb. Sutpen was to “lend him, make him borrow” it, and in the end forced him to use it. Only after that escalation do we learn that the scythe would lean there for two years. Shreve has just made an emblem of the blade in the conversation. Quentin puts it back among the terms of an ordinary favor and lets three verbs show how a man can be obliged to accept a loan. [2]
Who is allowed through the door?
Jones returns as the man Sutpen permitted to live on the land, as his partner at the store, and as the clerk who takes out the candy, beads, and ribbons that Sutpen uses to seduce Jones’s granddaughter. The items come round again in a second pair of hands. Quentin can place Jones at the showcase. The possibility that Jones delivered the gifts himself enters as a parenthetical guess, right beside the detail of whose hands fetched them. [2]
Then the name comes back beside a doorway. Before the war Jones was barred from the front of the house. During the war he brought food the household needed as far as the kitchen door, where Clytie, Sutpen’s Black daughter, could keep him outside. When Quentin pictures the two men drinking after the war, the fact that Jones gets to sit prompts a memory of earlier afternoons. Sutpen reclined in a hammock and Jones squatted by a post, getting up to pour. When Sutpen collapses, Jones takes him in through the front, and Judith, wearing that same unreadable face, holds the door. The man who used to get up to fill the planter’s glass now has to lift him to bed. [2]
The sentence could have ended there with a reversal of fortune. It stays with Jones long enough to complicate his judgment. Quentin supposes Jones “must have seen” that restoring the plantation was hopeless before Sutpen saw it or would admit it. Then comes “blind Jones,” who still sees in the ruined man the figure who once rode a black thoroughbred across his land. Jones can see that the estate is finished and still address its owner as though the old rank held. The closing words move from Jones’s sight to land so vast that “the eye could not see” two of its boundaries from any one point. It is the sort of fact a proud owner might once have offered to show the extent of his property. At the end of a sentence full of conjectures about what someone saw, it also describes a limit on the person doing the looking. [2]
Who wins?
Mann has the cleaner finish. He makes the reader wait for a verb and then uses the last few words to change the reach of its object. Faulkner sometimes spends more of our patience than he needs. By the time Quentin takes up Shreve’s image of Faustus and his creditor, the pony governed by a clock and the cannon good for one last shot have already made us feel Sutpen’s dwindling time and power. The allusion is easier to spare than the country-store nouns or the two doors.
On these two sentences, I give Faulkner the edge. Jones first appears building a coffin in a subordinate clause that tells us when someone saw Judith’s face. By the end, the grandest view of the plantation depends on what Quentin imagines Jones still sees. A man introduced almost in passing ends up determining what remains visible of the place where he used to wait at the door.
Sources
[1] Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, vol. I, Die Geschichten Jaakobs, “Vorspiel. Höllenfahrt,” §1, paragraph beginning Der junge Joseph zum Beispiel. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990, German text. English glosses are from the German. Full German passage.
[2] William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Chapter VI, Quentin’s thought immediately after he notices that Shreve sounds like his father. Random House first-printing text (1936), reproduced in the Distributed Proofreaders Canada digital edition, Faded Page no. 20190331. Full English passage.
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