My Mother Is a Fish

Ay, ay, ay. It's been quite a week. I planned to have my post up this weekend, but after a delayed flight and a night stranded in Houston, alas, it was not to be.

Gaping holes to be filled

I call myself a lover of literature, and I am, but it still pains me to realize how much of the greats I have yet to get a taste of. There's still a gaping hole as far as the Russians are concerned. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are still highly-regarded yet dusty and untouched statues on a pedestal in my literary gallery. I keep saying I'll get around to them.

As I Lay Dying

But I've finally made a decent effort on filling my William Faulkner hole. Faulkner being American and Southernly connected as I am, I had no excuse not to. In my defense, I have read a few Faulkner short stories here and there, but As I Lay Dying was my first Faulkner novel experience.

I won't sit here and give a book review, and I won't talk about stream of consciousness, or how Faulkner deftly weaves the story through interconnected perspectives, or existentialism, or the famed "My mother is a fish." I'll let you read it yourself if you haven't already. But I will say that an interesting detail to me is that the main characters, "country people," perceive their speech differently than the way the "town people" perceive the country people's speech.

The power of perception

What I mean is, when the country people of the story are reporting on their own dialogue, though it is simple and sometimes ungrammatical, words are spelled correctly without consideration of accent. It's clear though colloquial. On the other hand, when the town people depict the country people's speech, 'it' becomes 'hit,' 'can' becomes 'kin' and 'where' becomes 'wher.' Just the way the town people describe the "country" dialogue makes it clear that they view the country people, if not condescendingly, in a different way than the country people view themselves.

Here it comes . . .

I like the idea of applying literary postulations to things outside of the text. I wonder about the power of perception, how there is often a disconnect between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we are perceived. I wonder if that has any implications on us, as people who strive to be Christlike. Should others' perceptions of us hold weight?