3. Dirty Face
Shel Silverstein
Where did you get such a dirty face,
My darling dirty-faced child?
I got it from crawling along in the dirt
And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt.
I got it from chewing the roots of a rose
And digging for clams in the yard with my
nose.
I got it from peeking into a dark cave
And painting myself like a Navajo brave.
I got it from playing with coal in the bin
And signing my name in cement with my
chin.
I got if from rolling around on the rug
And giving the horrible dog a big hug.
I got it from finding a lost silver mine
And eating sweet blackberries right off the
vine.
I got it from ice cream and wrestling and
tears
And from having more fun than you’ve had
in years.
6. Lecture: Historical Context
Any discussion of William Faulkner in a historical
context necessarily involves a discussion of
modernism. In modernism, as we have discussed,
we observe a conscious breaking with traditional
ideas about style, content, and purpose. Faulkner, like
Pound and Fitzgerald, typify the moral atmosphere of
modernism, which could be summed up as despair
over the condition of humanity in the aftermath of the
soul-wrenching and materially devastating First World
War (1914-18).
7. • Modernism is complex, and while some of these formal
experimenters rejected traditional values (Pound), others
wanted to uphold old values by new means (Eliot).
• Pound's work includes a sustained attack on Judeo-
Christian values and embraces the radical relativism of
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
• Eliot uses his experimentations to plead for the
continued validity of traditional morals in a morally
degenerate world.
• Faulkner is closer to Eliot than to Pound, which means that
he is formally a modernist while being morally and
philosophically a type of traditionalist. Faulkner could even
be called a reactionary—and in truth he was reacting,
negatively, to much of the transformation taking place in the
world of his time.
8. Style: Syntax
The most noticeable feature of Faulkner's style is his
sentence structure. His sentences tend to be long, full of
interruptions, but work by stringing out seemingly
meandering sequences of clauses.
The second sentence of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers an
example: It is 116 words long and contains between
twelve and sixteen clauses, depending on how one
parses it out; its content is fluid and sundry, moving from
Sarty's awareness of the smell of cheese in the general
store through the visual impression made by canned
goods on the shelves to the boy's sense of blood loyalty
with his accused father.
9. It is the subjectivity of the content—sense impressions,
random emotions and convictions—which reveals the purpose
of the syntax, which is to convey experience in the form of an
intense stream-of-consciousness as recorded by the
protagonist.
The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded
room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he
could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat,
dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not
from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the
scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which
he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines
believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and
brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a
little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull
of blood.
10.
11. Style: Point of View
Faulkner was a perspectivist: He tells stories from a particular point of
view—or sometimes, as in the novels, from many divergent points of view,
each with its own insistent emphasis.
‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers a controlled example of perspectivism. Faulkner tells
his story primarily from the point of view of young Sarty, a ten-year-old boy.
This requires that Faulkner gives us the raw reportage of scene and event
that an illiterate ten-year-old would give us, if he could. Thus, Sarty sees the
pictures on the labels of the goods in the general store but cannot
understand the lettering; adults loom over him, so that he feels dwarfed by
them; and he struggles with moral and intellectual categories, as when he
can only see Mr. Harris as an "enemy."
There are few departures from this strict perspectivism, but they are telling,
as when, in the penultimate paragraph of the tale, an omniscient narrator
divulges the truth about Ab’s behavior as a soldier during the Civil War. But
even this is a calculated feature of Faulkner's style: the breaking-in of the
omniscient narrator is another way of fracturing the continuity of the
narrative, of reminding readers that there are many perspectives, including
a transcendental one in which all facts are known to the author. Sharing
Sarty's immediate impressions and judgments forges a strong bond
between the boy and the reader.
12. Style: Setting
The setting of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ is in the post-Civil War South, in which a defeated
and in many ways humiliated society is trying to hold its own against the
Northern victor. This South has retreated into plantation life and small-town
existence, and it maintains in private the social hierarchy that characterized the
region in its pre-war phase.
Slavery has been abolished, but a vast distance still separates the land-owning
Southern aristocracy from the tenant-farmers and bonded workers who do the
trench-labor required by the plantation economy.
The Snopeses are itinerant sharecroppers, who move from one locale to
another, paying for their habitation in this or that shack by remitting part of the
crop to the landlord. This is a setting of intense vulnerability and therefore of
intense resentment.
“Setting" is a word which needs to be qualified in reference to ‘‘Barn Burning’’
because, as Sarty notes, he has lived in at least a dozen ramshackle buildings
on at least a dozen plantations in his ten short years. In a way, then, the story's
"setting" is the road, or rather the Snopes' constant removal from one place to
another due to Ab's quarreling and violence. The wagon, heaped with miserable
chattel, is the setting, as is Abner's egomaniacal personality and Sarty's
miserable yet rebellious heart.
15. Abner Snopes: Name analysis
Abner is a biblical name which means “Father of light.”
While the name itself has a positive connotation, the
father in this story literally is a “Father of light,” for he
burns barns of his masters.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Snopes family are
“recurring characters in the Yoknapatawpha novels and
stories of William Faulkner,” in which “Faulkner contrast[s]
the verminlike rapacity of most of the Snopes family with
the failing old order of the Sartoris clan.” While Abner
Snopes is depicted as Faulkner’s hallmark villain, his son,
whose first name is Sartoris, represents a hint of sanity
within the broken family.
16. “Then with the same deliberation he turned; the boy watched him
pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of
the turning, leaving a final long and fading smear. His father
never looked at it, he never once looked down at the rug” (805).
This passage shows how much Abner despises the wealth and
power that his new master, Major de Spain, possesses. Ruining
de Spain’s expensive rug with horse poo-poo is Abner’s way of
expressing his frustration. Furthermore, leaving the “final long
and fading smear” on the rug even after Miss Lula shows her
disgust indicates Abner’s refusal to conform to social
expectations.
Abner Snopes: Attitude/Behavior
17. Sarty
Barn Burning is not written in the first person perspective, but Faulkner shares
the inside of the character, especially Colonel Sartoris Snopes’s. We can tell
the boy’s characterization by reading them: “[When his father called his son]
For a moment the boy thought too that the man meant his older brother until
Harris said, “Not him. The little one. The boy,” … and, he felt no floor under his
bare feet; he seemed to walk beneath the palpable weight of the grim turning
faces” (1). He does not want to stand in front of the people. We see he’s in an
uncomfortable situation. We also have the physical description of the boy:
“[Colonel Sartoris Snopes is] crouching, small for his age … in patched and
faded jeans even too small for him” (1). Apparently, in this part, we can find
that he is from a poor family. This description followed by a dialogue with the
justice. It also tells the boy’s personality:
“What’s your name, boy?” the justice said. “Colonel Sartoris Snopes,” the boy
whispered. “Hey?” the Justice said. “Talk louder.”
He’s lack of self-confidence; he is afraid of roaring his voice.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22. QHQ: “Barn Burning”
1. What compels Abner Snopes to burn barns?
2. What are the underlying issues which causes the
Father to act the way he does?
3. Is Abner anti-social? Or does he represent the evil of
humankind?
4. Are Abner and his actions effective in making a point
about the class systems present in this world?
23. QHQ: “Barn Burning”
1. Are the sisters afraid of Abner?
2. Why is it that the only animal used to
describe the siblings, both sisters and the
brother, is a cow?
The twins’ docile nature has nothing
to do with patience but with an
udder lack of caring combined with
extreme laziness
That is how
you milk a
joke!
24. QHQ: “Barn Burning”
1. Why did Faulkner make the narration so ambiguous
that it is difficult to figure out which character’s mind
you are in? Is there a reason there is very little
reference to the character’s names?
2. Why does Faulkner repeat the word “stoop”?
3. Does Faulkner attempt to blur the line between “good”
and “evil” by adding the complexity of family loyalty?
4. Are familial ties enough to justify the violation of
morality?
25. QHQ: “Barn Burning”
1. What does Sarty running away from the burning
barn symbolize?
2. Does Sartoris love his father?
3. Why is Sarty so loyal to his father, given that his
father treats him so poorly?
4. What makes Sarty finally turn against his Father,
given his previous loyalty to the family?
5. Did his father actually die or did Sarty only think
so because of the shots fired?
26.
27. Few authors of the twentieth century are more significant than
Langston Hughes. He is assured his status by his many
contributions to literature.
• The length of his career: 1921-1967
• The variety of his output: articles, poems, short stories,
dramas, novels, and history texts.
• His influence on three generations of African American
writers: from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil
Rights Movement
• His concern for the “ordinary” African American: The
subject of his work
• His introduction of the jazz idiom: the quality of black
colloquial speech and the rhythms of jazz and the blues.
28. During his long career Hughes was harshly criticized
by blacks and whites. Because he left no single
masterwork, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
(1952) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and
because he consciously wrote in the common idiom
of the people, academic interest in him grew only
slowly. The importance of his influence on several
generations of African American authors is, however,
indisputable and widely acknowledged.
29. A novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale
Hurston was the prototypical authority on black
culture from the Harlem Renaissance.
30. Zora Neale Hurston combined literature with anthropology. She first
gained attention with her short stories such as "John Redding Goes to Sea.”
After several years of anthropological research financed through grants and
fellowships, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel Jonah's Gourd Vine was
published in 1934 to critical success. In 1935, her book Mules and Men,
which investigated voodoo practices in black communities in Florida and
New Orleans, also brought her success. Hurston's greatest novel, Their
Eyes Watching God, was published in 1937.
Zora Neale Hurston was a utopian, who held that black Americans could
attain sovereignty from white American society and all its bigotry, as proven
by her hometown of Eatonville.
Her work did not address the issue of racism of whites, and as this became a
emerging theme among black writers in the post World War II era of civil
rights, Hurston's literary influence faded.
She further damaged her own reputation by criticizing the civil rights
movement and supporting ultraconservative politicians. She died in poverty
and obscurity.
31. Read: Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, too, sing America,”
and “The Weary Blues”
Post #16: Choose one
• What connections can be made between race and blues music in "The
Weary Blues"?
• What do you think it means to have a soul that is deep as rivers?
• How does “I, too, sing America” make you think about what it means to be
an American? How is "America" presented in this poem, and how does it
make you feel about America?
• Read Zora Neale Hurston: “The Eatonville Anthology” 530-38 and “How it
Feels to Be Colored Me” 538-541
Post #17 Choose one
• Community is the primary bond among the stories contained in "The
Eatonville Anthology." How does the image of a front porch act as a symbol
of the social concept of community? Cite specific incidents from the story
that prove this connection.
• How does the narrator's viewpoint direct the reader's understanding and
approval of the citizens presented in "The Eatonville Anthology"? Discuss
specific examples.
• QHQ: “How it Feels to Be Colored Me”
HOMEWORK
