Which excerpt from Sullivan's article best reflects a tone that is critical toward
Faulkner's authorial decisions?
OA. It may represent the closest American literature came to
producing an analog for "Ulysses," which influenced it deeply-
each in its way is a provincial Modernist novel about a young man
trying to awaken from history - and like "Ulysses," it lives as a
book more praised than read, or more esteemed than enjoyed.
B. He's not concerned with holding us in suspense over the
unearthing of events but in keeping us transfixed, as he goes
about excavating the soil beneath them, and tracing their post-
mortem effects (embodied, perhaps, by the worm that comes to
light in a shovelful of dirt, "doubtless alive when the clod was
thrown up though by afternoon it was frozen again").
C. It may be crass for a white reader to claim that as significant, but a
writer with Faulkner's sensitivity to verbal shading might have
been better tuned to the ugliness of the word, and not a truth-
revealing ugliness, but something more like gratuitousness, with
an attending queasy sense of rhetorical power misused.
D. It attempts something that had never been tried before in the art
of fiction, and as far as I know has never been since, not in so pure
a form- to dramatize historical consciousness itself, not just
human lives but the forest of time in which the whole notion of
human life must find its only meaning.