When William Faulkner set up the world record to write the longest sentence in the literature: Read the sentence of 1,288 words from Absalom, Absalom!

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“How did Faulkner do it?” is a question that a young writer asked himself when he struggled with a time of teaching materials like this novel author John Barth in his lecture “My Faulkner” from 1999. Barth “newly formed“His literary heroes, he says:” In search of my writer … invited my countless predecessors as just an insatiable green apprentice. “Certainly many writers can move into when Barth says:” It was Faulkner in his involved and summoned, who enchanted me the most. “For many writers, the Faulkner sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. Its syntax has the opportunity to get into that To interweave unconscious, which develops as a fair to mediocre imitation.

During his studies at Johns Hopkins University, Barth wrote in a pasti style by “Middle Faulkner and Late Joyce” about his home east coast of Maryland. Perhaps he won a certain praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus did not flew – on the one hand because Faulkner exactly knew His snops and compsons and sartorise, because I did not know my invented residents of the Maryland swamp. “The advice of just writing what you know is possibly not worth much as a universal bid. But to study, as Faulkner wrote when he turned to the topics of which he knew it is best to provide an object lesson about how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be.

Faulkner's deep belonging to the inner life of his characters not only increases his portraits well above the level of the local color or regionalist curiosity, but also encourages its sentences, but also move and breathe constantly. No matter how long and twisted, they are withered, withered or pulling; They run in a river, turn around, spray themselves and double and triple. Faulkner's intimacy is no serious, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center that illuminates with information seems to be of crucial importance.

It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that made it possible to get Faulkner with the longest sentence in the literature, at least according to 1983 Guinness book of the world recordsa passage Absalom, Absalom! CUnanimously of 1,288 words and who knows how many different types of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English. Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club ends with a 33-page long-wopper with 13,955 words. Whole novels hundreds of pages that have long been written in one sentence in other languages. All modernist contemporaries from Faulkner, including of course Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, dominated the use of run-ons differently.

But for a while Faulkner took as far as it could go. He may not have intended to inspire postmodern fiction, but one of his best-known writers, Barth, only found his voice by first wrote a “strongly faulknail Marsh-Oopera”. Many hundred experimental writers have had almost identical experiences to exorcise the voice of Oxford, Mississippi Modernist's voice. Read this unique sentence in the literature, all 1,288 words of it below.

Just like the father, if Father knew so much about it the night before, for damage that his situation must have seen as that of the show girl, the pony will recognize that the main mile that she does not from horn and violin and drum , but comes from a clock and a calendar, as the Cannon worn out by the old, realizes that it only has a more violent shot and crumbling to in his own angry explosion and To get used to the scene as if the son had been dead since then (if the son is still alive) would be his name differently and those who stranger him and whatever about Sutpen blood through the dragon , could the son on the body sow the strange woman would therefore continue the tradition, hereditary evil and the damage under a different name and among people who have never heard the right one; Daughter, who was sentenced to a spinning, who had already chosen as a virgin in a cloudy cords of chickens, while Jones built the coffin and which she was wearing next year while the aunt lived there and the three women her own clothing and her own Pieces of clothing and pulled their own food on and cut the wood with which they cooked it (apologized what they had from Jones His granddaughter lived in the abandoned fishing warehouse with a collapsing roof and a rotting veranda, against which the rusty Skythe, who should give him Sutpen, should, do, do, do, do, make, do, do, do it, do it Borrows to cut off the weeds from the door-and forced him not to cut the weeds, at least no vegetable herb, would lean and wear for two years Nevertheless, the aunt's outrage had returned to the city to live on stolen garden car, and from anonymous baskets that were left in their front stages at night, as the two daughters saw from the old demon, the old varicose and The desperate fistus, which now ran his last main aid with the creditor's hand of the creditor on his shoulder, and his little one leads Country Store now because of his Brotes and his meat the cheap ligaments and pearls and the stale, heavily colored sweets with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl to ruin the granddaughter of his partner, this Jones-This Ragling malaria, which was permitted for fourteen years ago had granted in the abandoned fishing camp with the years of grandchildren, partner Porter and employee who on the Command of the demon was removed with its own hand (and maybe also from the show case that have been delivered candy pearls and ligaments, exactly the cloth measured fashion a dress to walk past the loud men, the side and the tongues until you Increasing stomach your embarrassed teaching or maybe fear; Whoever came closer in the next four years than the kitchen door and only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables to which the woman and daughter of the increver (and also Clyie, who is a remaining servant Negro, the one who he would forbid, with what he brought to the kitchen door to pass, hung to keep life in them, but which now the house itself on the (quite often) afternoons When the demon suddenly cursed the shop by customers and block the door and repaired it back and to the back and in the same tone in which he addressed his ordinary or even his partnerships when he had (and in which he undoubtedly ordered Jones, To get the ribbons from the showcase and pearls and sweets) guide Jones to access the jug, the two (and Jones are now still sitting, who is still sitting in the old days Sunday afternoons monotonous peace are in the hammock, while Jones crouched against a post and rose from time to time to get more than a mile away from the demon to Gießen Spring and then crouched again, giggled and giggled and said 'Sho, Mister Tawm 'Every time the demon took a break)-the two of them drink and turn from the jug and the demon, which is now did not go and not even sitting after the third or second drink to ensure that the condition of the old man was impotent and angry immersion in which he rose, fluctuated, rushed and screamed so that his horse and his pistols would drive in Washington and Shoot Lincoln (one year or so too late here) and Sherman both, scream: “Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are! 'and Jones:' Sho, Kernel; Shoe now 'and caught him when he fell and commanded the first passing car to bring him into the house and to bring him up the front steps and formally formally without change through the painting, without change in this calm frozen face that they have been for four years Didn't worry because before the dawn the man would stir on the bed and groaned and Jones said: “Flyer, I am, kernel. Hit is fine. You haven't made us the air that you? 'This Jones, who had driven back with the regiment after the demon, when the granddaughter was only eight years old, believed the lie himself, who was one of the first to greet the demon when he came back to the goal at the goal To meet and say: “Well, Kernel, you kilter us, but you are not plagued by us? ' Who even worked, worked, worked, sweated on behalf of the demon in this first angry time, while the demon believed that he could restore the hundred of sutpen through mere indigestible willingness of the demon) that the task would be hopeless Jones was blind, who apparently saw the old fine figure of the man in this angry lechish wreck, who once galloped Black thoroughbred over these domain two limits, of which the eye could not see from any point.

Note: An earlier version of this article was published on our website in 2019.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him @Jdmagness