Metacognitive: Faulkner Imitation

Tzivia Halperin
AP Lit
Mr. Gallagher
October 9, 2008

Metacognition for Emulating Faulkner’s Style

When first assigned the piece it became glaringly clear to me that I was going to write my paper emulating the style of Faulkner. My 10th grade English teacher and I once engaged in a very similar discussion about Faulkner vs. Hemingway, in which we established that I should strive to write a little less elaborately (Faulkner) and a little more simplistically (Hemingway). As a result, even before I determined whether or not I would write a myth, rewrite a short story in general, rewrite a short story of Hemingway, or merely create a conversation, I knew that I would use Faulkner’s style. In this case, I was going to use my verbose nature to my advantage. Having determined that, my difficulty lay in choosing to rewrite a short story or simply choosing a myth, eventually settling on a myth, desirous of fresh material to work with.

Faulkner’s style is so nuanced that I felt it most difficult to imitate. He employs very specific punctuation including semi-colons, colons, numerous commas in addition to italics, long sentence structure, high level diction, and periodic pacing. All the semantics of his style made it an especially arduous process to emulate. I grappled with the fact that his style doesn’t merely consist of long sentences but rather syntactically rich, extremely complex sentences. In an entirely different sense, I had great trouble with the setting of my story- ancient Greece. Since I had no prior background knowledge about the setting of ancient Crete, my descriptions of it, especially in the first draft, were sparse indeed.

The two members of my group independently came to the same conclusion about how to improve my paper, which helped my greatly in the second draft. While noting that I spent a great deal of time with the intricacies of his style, I failed to delve very deeply into the setting of the story. Faulkner writes lengthy paragraphs simply relaying the setting and the surroundings and it would aid my paper significantly to include more to catering to it. Their suggestions induced me to do research on Crete and Greece so I had a larger wealth of knowledge about the environment and natural setting. At that point, I added more details about the cliffs and the labyrinth. This accession of details especially of surroundings improved the piece significantly from the first to second draft.

The myth that I rewrote has a great deal of background knowledge. I could not simply write of Icarus without mentioning Daedalus and without also mentioning why the men were exiled to Crete. This created a weakness in the paper in which I breezed over the details concerning the exile: Daedalus’ murdering his nephew Talus, while I similarly glossed over details about their move into the labyrinth. I was gripped by the belief that such extraneous background information was not vital to my exploring Faulkner’s style and therefore I didn’t go into great depth in neither background nor setting. My lack of familiarity with the background and setting caused me to lob a lot of information at the reader very quickly and I am concerned if they fully understood it especially in terms of the initial exile.

In terms of strengths, I would note my imitation of Faulkner’s style. I spent a great deal of time reviewing the intricacies and attempting to present them in my own writing. This resulted in a myth that had syncretism with Faulkner’s writing in terms of pacing, diction, punctuation, sentence length, etc. The plot may have suffered at the expense of the style but nevertheless, the style was accomplished with the paper and that was the apex goal.