Every writer has signature words and ways of stringing them together.
Sometimes a single word is enough to identify a writer. Take the word
“abnegation.” Please. As you know, I have read rather a lot of books, and I have
never found the word “abnegation” in any of them except by one writer. And he
uses it a lot. That would be William Faulkner, who finds uses for it, usually with
“self-” appended, in more works than one would think possible. It’s not in every
novel, but it turns up rather frequently. Show me that word in a sentence and I’m
guessing Mississippi Bill every time. Now, since that word often turns up
somewhere in a sentence with 130 friends, whose order is a bit of a jumble, the
guesswork is largely taken out, but you get my point. I could be wrong; I’ve
heard rumors of a use by Melville. “Self-abnegation” means self-denial or even
self-sacrifice and shows up in military commendations, particularly the sort
given posthumously. Faulkner, of course, has a lot of former military persons in
his work, what with General Compson and Major de Spain and Colonel Sartoris
and so on, and the notion of service and sacrifice runs strong throughout his
work, but he also tends toward a very formal and slightly archaic diction, so that
characters with sixth-grade educations sound like Daniel Webster with a drawl.
There are lots of words that indicate Faulkner, noble sounding words in odd
combinations or lowly places, as in this passage from Absalom, Absalom!
(1936).
…and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she
had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or
nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight and hard
chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if
she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of
impotent and static rage like children’s feet, talking in that grim haggard
amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self￾confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable
frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked,
quiet and inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and
victorious dust.
Be comforted: that sentence did have a main clause and wasn’t simply a
fragment of massive proportion. But we’ll stick to the interesting part. Who is a
“nothusband”? Have you ever thought of children’s feet as possessing
“impotent” or “static” rage? Really? Not even once? Hemingway (don’t worry,
he’s coming) counseled writers to write with nouns and verbs. Sage advice,
mostly. Unless you’re Faulkner, who writes with adjectives and says the most
amazing things. Think about the “biding,” “dreamy,” “victorious” dust. How is
dust ever victorious or biding, to say nothing of dreamy? The answer is, it never
was. Until he made it so. Or “outraged recapitulation.” Just magnificent. And I,
for one, would give up large chunks of my career to have written “that grim
haggard amazed voice,” although I know I would have lacked the courage to
have dropped the commas even had the words occurred to me. The thing is,
Faulkner requires a special kind of labor from readers, and I’m not talking here
about untangling those gargantuan sentences, although that’s labor-intensive as
well. What, for instance, does that voice sound like, all grim and haggard and
amazed? In what way is dust victorious or recapitulation outraged? His out-of￾the-blue adjectives and obscure, slightly archaic nouns make us sit up in
astonishment, but they also remind us of an obligation. We feel the rightness, the
aptness of his descriptors, but then we have to go to work.
Hemingway takes a rather different approach, not how much can I pack in
here, but how little can I say? For him, the real drama of life lies in what goes
unsaid, the meaning behind our conversations. Everyone knows his simple
sentences—a handful of words, subject-verb-object-and-get-out, hardly any
adjectives, fewer adverbs, nouns and verbs. I want to talk about his adjectives.
They’re just as amazing as Faulkner’s: “good,” “fine,” “all right,” “swell,”
“nice.”
Wait a minute. What’s so special about “nice”? It’s not “haggard,” or even
“victorious.”