Capturing The Sound And Blurry Of Faulkner

CHICAGO - Of all American novelists, William Faulkner may be the most easily and readily spoofed, because of his portentous repetitive run-on adjectives ("indomitable," "imperishable," "implacable," etc.), his bewildering punctuation (or lack thereof), his compound negatives, and his often unfathomable syntax, which can get muddier than Mississippi floodwaters, a stream of unconsciousness that rolls on and on and on, like this:

"And so the old Colonel used them the only way he knew how, the spices 11 of them and the chickens themselves countless untold bucket-and barrelfuls, the woman his wife not even waiting any longer for the day when he would walk into their dustbrown dwelling with the fur piece . . . waiting even until the day 27 years later when Ratliff would himself walk into the tiny well-lighted franchise in Jefferson ahead of a meager but unrelenting puff of dust and say `extry crispy' to the girl behind the register . . ."

Whoa there. Chicken? Extry crispy? On close inspection, the above is not just not a typical sample of Faulkner's rambling prose nor even genuine Faulkner prose, but the spurious work of a wicked but respectful Faulkner mimic, Gregory Sendi. He's a Chicago free-lance writer whose parody, "The Old Colonel," won the second annual Faux Faulkner Contest, founded by Faulkner's niece Dean Wells and her husband, Larry, who are co-proprietors of the Yoknapatawpha Press of Oxford, Miss. Sendi's winning entry will be included in "The Best of Bad Faulkner" to be published next month by Harcourt Brace Janovich.

No doubt it will also be a topic at the second annual meeting of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, which will celebrate Faulkner's birthday in New Orleans Sept. 24-25 with book exhibits and readings by authors Barry Hannah and Joan Williams.

A Faulkner reader since age 12, Sendi said he wrote the burlesque "The Old Colonel" during a two-hour break from his part-time job at the Chicago Metro Ethics Coalition, a nonprofit organization for honesty in government. "After I decided on the central joke, in which Faulkner's great-granddaddy, the `old colonel,' turned out to be Col. Harlan Sanders (founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken), who was the most absurd Southern colonel I could think of, it pretty much flowed along."

"I had a real blast down there - a mutifarious blast," he said of the week he spent in Oxford, Miss., Faulkner's hometown (also known as Jefferson in Faulkner's novels, the seat of his mythical Yoknapatawpha County).

"I got to hang out with Faulkner's relatives and a couple of my favorite authors," he said, referring to Hannah ("Airships") and Willie Morris ("North Toward Home"), both good ole Mississippians who, along with New Yorker George Plimpton, picked Sendi's parody from more than 750 submissions to the contest.

Sendi's first visit to Oxford coincided with the annual Faulkner Conference, where he was able to fully experience the academic sound and fury that accompany such somber gatherings. On the agenda were "Faulkner's Male Commedia: The Triumph of Manly Grief" and "Faulkner's Forensic Fiction and the Question of Authorial Neuroses," plus myriad other impenetrable topics, any one of which might provide the inspiration for a parody of Faulknerian scholarship.

"This year's theme was `Faulkner and Psychology,' " Sendi reported, "so it brought out all the Freudians, the post-Freudians and the neo-Freudians, who were having these very abstract discussions in the seminar hall. But we had plenty of antidotes to all the academic stuff."

As they have in previous years, Faulkner's kinfolk remained aloof from the exegetic bluster, Sendi said. The big exception was Jimmy Faulkner, William's nephew and son of novelist John ("Dollar Cotton"), who treated the visiting pedagogues to his patented family slide- and sideshow, which stresses his uncle's heroic achievements as a drinker and an eccentric, rather than as a writer.

Like a lot of other parodists, Sendi meant his prize entry - which appears in the Aug. 1 issue of American Way magazine, along with the also-rans - not so much as a sendup as an homage. "Honestly, I'm a huge fan," said Sendi, whose devotion to Faulkner began when he was a boy and discovered a copy of "Light in August" on the bookshelves of his family home.

"I was completely mystified by it," he recalled, a reaction not uncommon for adults picking up Faulkner for the first (and often last) time. "So my introduction to Faulkner wasn't a real revelation. It was more a big muddle. But I just kept on reading and reading, until I've pretty much gone through all his books. And he's become a big hero of mine."