Pylon

by William Faulkner, Noel Polk (Editor)

The new Vintage edition of the corrected text.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, American, Literature, 20th Century, Southern

336 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".

Reviews

[☾da · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pylon به برج های مراقبتی گفته میشد که برای نشانه گذاری مسیر مسابقات هوایی ازشون استفاده میشد و خلبان ها باید دور این ستون ها میچرخیدن. پس از اسمش مشخصه درمورد یه مسابقه است، مسابقه ی هوایی.
راوی داستان یه خبرنگاره که از ابتدا تا انتهای کتاب ما اسمشو نمیدونیم (از این نظر منو یاد شخصیت کتاب شبهای روشن انداخت چون هم بی نام و بی اهمیت بود و هم عاشق)
وقتی به مناسبت افتتاح فرودگاه فاینمن یه کارناوال هوایی برگزار میشه و یه سری خلبان ها و جامپرها به اونجا میان ، این خبرنگار به خاطر کارش علاقمند به سبک زندگی یه گروه از اونها میشه که شامل یک خلبان ، یک جامپر(چترباز) و یک زن و کودک و یک مکانیک هستن. که برخلاف عرف جامعه و بدون هیچ قانونی زندگی میکنن، خلبان و جامپر این گروه همزمان عاشق زن ( لاورن ) هستن : یکیشون شوهر قانونیشه اون یکی پارتنر، و کودکی که توی گروه هست معلوم نیست متعلق به کدومشونه، این گروه محل زندگی مشخصی ندارن، به پول اهمیتی نمیدن تا زمانی که جای خواب و لباسی برای پوشیدن داشته باشن تا پلیس اون ها رو به جرم لخت بودن نگیره.
ولی چی میشه که برای یه مسابقه و جایزه ش این همه خودشونو به خطر میندازن؟
تا اواخر کتاب همه چیز ملو و آروم پیش میرفت، توصیف صحنه ها و استعاره ها و شخصیت ها و احساسات درونی اون ها و حتی شروع کتاب که با توصیف یک چفت چکمه توی یه مغازه در یک خیابون شلوغ بود، پر از معنا و مفهوم بودن، طوری که وقتی به انتهای کتاب رسیدم با خودم گفتم چه شروع و چه پایانی:))))
از نظر کاری که با روح و روان آدم میکنه منو یاد نخل های وحشی فاکنر میندازه، حتی بیشتر و شدیدتر از اون، نمیدونستم غصه ی کدوم یکی رو بخورم؟ راجر شومان؟ لاورن؟ جک کوچولو؟خبرنگار؟ یا حتی جیگز.

تحمل آدم چیز عجیبیه، تحمل شخصیت ها، پایداری روحشون با وجود اون همه سختی، انتخاب هایی که مثل مکافات به دنبال اون تجربه های سخت میان، انگار نه انگار که خود همون تجربه ها برای آدم زیادی بوده، باید تا ابد مکافات حاصل از تحملشون رو هم روی دوشمون حمل کنیم.

" -you cannot understand that, that you will or can ever reach a time when you can bear so much and no more; that nothing else is worth the bearing; that you not only cannot, you will not: that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace, even with bereavement and grief--nothing! nothing!

- tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just endure."

مرداد۱۴۰۴

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Been Slacking/Catching-Up on Reviews' Review:

Everyone will tell you to skip Pylon and stick with the biggies. Tell everyone 'eat shit' for me, ok? This is vital stuff, and the absolutely essential last step that brought us Absalom, Absalom! This is pretty damn experimental writing for the time, and the cinematic mise-en-scène reminds me of, I don't know, Linklater's Slacker. You catch my drift. God, I sound like an asshole...

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quasi una squadriglia acrobatica, o meglio, una squadra di acrobati aerei. Lui , pilota d’aereo; lei, pilota d’aereo, lui pilota e paracadutista, il meccanico Jiggs e il bambino di lei, sei anni. L’ambiente, una New Orleans, ribattezzata guarda un po’ New Valois, quasi sprofondata tra paludi e vegetazione, caotica, all’inizio della Quaresima. L’occasione, l’inaugurazione di un nuovo aeroporto, con gare di velocità tra aerei, air racing pylons credo si chiami, quasi una corsa all’interno di un circo massimo aereo nella costante sfida alla morte. Mènage á trois tra lui, lei, lui; girovagare continuo da un air racing all’altro, pochi o niente soldi; vita grama, vita d’espedienti. Un vissuto e un passato individuale, a volte scabroso, che si rivela lentamente nel corso degli eventi, parzialmente, in maniera molto confusa e sfocata. Come il flusso di coscienza del cronista di giornale che ci accompagna e ci dipana il racconto, confuso e offuscato dalla sua sbornia, dalla sua ansia e dalla passione per lei, che ha visto in tuta di meccanico, all’aeroporto, mascolina, disinibita, libertaria…durante le gare che segue per il giornale. La passione, o meglio la fascinazione di lei, per il tipo che incarna, spinge il nostro cronista a partecipare alla storia scalcagnata della squadra di acrobati, a profondersi in tempo, energie e denaro per sostenerla, sostentarla. Il tutto in una dimensione quasi di allucinazione, di confusione tra desiderio, speranza, delirio e realtà. Il cronista di cui non si da mai il nome ma che suscita sorpresa assoluta in chi ne viene a conoscenza, è una specie di relitto umano. Magrissimo, scheletrico, d’aspetto insano, come roso da una malattia, sente che la sua vita acquista senso solo nel partecipare in un qualche modo alla squadra acrobatica, il solo modo che ha per stare un poco vicino a lei. La realtà è ben dura, gli animi son ben gretti ed egoisti, non c’è spazio per la gratitudine e il disinteresse. Ci si appropria del denaro vinto insieme per comprare per sé un paio di stupidi e inutili stivali (il meccanico Jiggs). E su tutto sovrasta la tragedia. E il deserto degli affetti umani. “Chi è il tuo vecchio stasera” si diverte Jiggs a punzecchiare il bambino, scatenando la sua piccola ira e la microscopica violenza. Una New Orleans sporca, immersa in un postcarnevale che sembra permanente nei coriandoli e nelle stelle filanti sporche ai lati delle strade, notturna, affollata di individui chiusi in se stessi… Difficile libro, eppure affascinante.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

According to Polk, Faulkner wrote this novel in three months as a break from composing _Absalom, Absalom!_, and he revised in galley proofs. Considering that, the corrected text (which restores Faulkner's original sentence and paragraph lengths, as well as some four-letter words the original publisher found offensive) is, all things considered, a very good novel. It's certainly not Faulkner's best, probably because of the contemporary subject matter and issues (airplane racing, the poor state of safety standards and pay for pilots). However, the writing is wonderful (albeit complex); it often reminded me of William Burroughs' early works, which made me wonder if there was some sort of literary genealogy I wasn't aware of. The story is diffuse at first, though the focus sharpens incredibly as the narrative progresses, and is both comic and (ultimately) tragic on both a systemic and a personal scale. Even a minor Faulkner novel is a good novel in comparison with anything else around.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

A refreshing novel, with no N-words, idiot man-children, or tiresome Southern exegesis. People need to lighten up on Faulkner's lesser known works. They are just as wonderful, just as wonderfully written, with their run-on poesy, their dark humor, and their cantankerous and often cataclysmic denouements. Don't you think Falky got sick of writing about the South-as-snarky-palimpsest as much as a devotee of his works gets tired of reading about it?
"Pylon" is everything you wouldn't expect: an emotionally disturbed, alcoholic reporter hangs out with a pair of amateur airmen and the girl they both sleep with. She's their mechanic, sort of. Sort of like air-carnies, the barnstormers try to win big at a local air show with the reporter's help. That's pretty much it. It is darkly funny and sad and must have been a nice diversion for Falky. It was for me!

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't warm up to this outlier in the oeuvre right away, but it grew on me. It's a quirky tale of a newspaper reporter's obsession with a barnstorming ménage à trois plus that hits 1930s New Orleans (called New Valois here) for the air races at the dedication of a new airport, during Mardi Gras. In addition to exploring New Orleans, city newsrooms, and the barnstorming life of the era, Faulkner depicts the pathology of chronic alcoholism in excruciating detail, certainly from experience, and unpacks a suitcasefull of portmanteau words, among other literary fireworks. I wouldn't recommend this as a first, or even early, read for someone new to the author, but it was an interesting surprise after familiarizing myself with Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in the major works.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual with Faulkner, a work of art stunning the reader by the end and full of emotional impact. Unusual for Faulkner, it doesn't particularly focus on rural Southern cultural lifestyles and the hidden darknesses of their lives. Pylon is a book about the early 20th Century phenomenon called barnstorming. Shortly after aviation bloomed as an adventure and concurrent with Lindbergh, just like traveling freak shows or circuses, daredevil pilots were itinerant migrant workers who plied their trade by traveling around the country, showing off their skills in exhibitions and contests. At first, this novel seems to exploit the knowledge Faulkner gleaned by his own piloting experience. Lurid details (including a literal menage-a-trois), as well as some of the most horrifying literary passages depicting hopeless alcoholism, plunge us deeper into sensationalism. Perhaps these passages are why many readers rate this novel low among Faulkner's works.

This book is about the modern American experience as realized in 1935. Rather than depict the alienation and disillusionment of the Great Depression in Steinbeck's fashion, or ignoring it completely as Hemingway and Fitzgerald did, Faulkner transmogrifies it into the barnstorming experience. If the reader pays close attention to the central character of the reporter, one can detect deeply autobiographical revelations. And like all great fiction, the climax of the story doesn't serve to end the narrative, but rather opens it up to deeper revelations that transform our notions of the characters and deepen our understanding of the human condition. Don't fall asleep over the last ten pages as they are stunning in their depth of feeling and a whopper of a final paragraph that alters everything we knew about the novel. A deeply underrated novel from a deeply misunderstood writer. A fascinating challenge for the advanced reader, particularly as it contains some of Faulkner's more complex prose, which renders it inaccessible for the novice to Faulkner.

[Sbate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book could eat my brain. I do not like erotic stuff in books I just don't it makes me board I mean it board board like I yawn but this book had a part about a woman who changed her cloths. It was so incredible it made me shake. I shook like I was well moved to the innermost core. I have a hard time with this book because I do not read faulker well. I get stumped I like to be entertained and after they start flying and own boots I get all drifty

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poor “Pylon.” Stuck chronologically between two of the greatest novels ever written — “Light in August” (1932) and “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), also the best, in my opinion, of William Faulkner’s “big four” — it doesn’t get much love. But does it deserve any?

Well, yes to that, of course, because it’s Faulkner. And if it sits somewhere at the bottom of his 20 novels in quality — I suppose I’d put it there by default among the 12 I’ve read so far — it still has its scintillating moments.

Centered around aviation types at a competitive airshow in New Orleans (though the city is called by another name) during Mardi Gras, the story tilts around the axis of an unusual family, of sorts: a woman named Laverne and two men, and a little boy whose father is one of the two men, but no one knows which. An unnamed reporter covering the barnstorming show gets sucked into the vortex of these people. “Pylon” is an outlier — the rare novel not set in Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha — and though some would give it black marks from the get-go just for its setting, I don’t.

Of course, plot isn’t the most important thing in a Faulkner novel. He doesn’t address this ménage à trois directly or really all that much until the conclusion. “Pylon” is about the writing, and there’s a great deal to like here. Still, it’s an inconsistent beast. For spells, Faulkner piles on the dazzling wordplay in heavily concentrated bursts, flinging invented compound words at us that we happily let strike us or duck: porcelainfaced, fiercelyburning, wasplight, steelfiltered, woodensounding, ribbonstraight, decorouslyembattled. And then he largely abandons the practice.

It’s Faulkner, so of course there are enigmatic, hard-to-figure-out conversations, briefly maddening points where you wonder just what is happening. But these challenges give way to some gorgeous patches of writing. The novel catches fire when the reporter and the aviation folks get drunk. It’s as if Faulkner is cutting loose and letting his own guard down as well.

One of pilots dies in a crash during a competition, and unfortunately “Pylon” hits a rather dull rough stretch shortly thereafter, only to be redeemed with a fine conclusion.

An up-and-down novel, then, exciting, earth-teasing barrel rolls during which you think you're going to crash but don't. It's not one that should be ignored by Faulkner fans but not near his best, and definitely a bad first Faulkner for the newbie. But, yes, it’s still Faulkner, and the wonderful, head-spinning wordplay does come, albeit not as consistently as in his classics:

“All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man’s spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before triumph becomes dismay — the moral and spiritual waif shrieking his feeble I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster.”

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up Pylon because Hemingway said the novel captured aviation so well that he couldn't top it. Faulkner does capture the barnstorming spirit of aviation that included crashes. "[T]rying to make his living out of the air," the pilot risks a gravity-dominated life for the moments when they defy it.

While Pylon seems like mediocre Faulkner, it has elements that seem useful if contrasted to his other books. The plot is seen largely through the point of view of an alcoholic reporter who becomes intrigued with a particular group of barnstormers: a pilot Roger Shumann, his wife Laverne, an unnamed parachutist referred to as "the jumper," Laverne's young son whose father could be the son of several men including Roger or the jumper.

And rounding out the group is an alcoholic mechanic named Jiggs. While Jiggs is the reporter's physical opposite, they seem to be dopplegängers in their need to be tight. They don't drink after Shumann crashes. It's as if flight is a departure from the self, and those who can't fly but want to, they need a buzz to get high. The reporter stops drinking when he partners with Schumann to buy a new airplane or a "ship" as the novel would have it. Once the thrill of flight is out of reach, the reporter returns to writing and drinking.

While the reporter isn't a stand in for Faulkner himself, it's interesting to think about how this character gives the novelist a chance to talk about writing.

Faulkner's meta-writing might not be enough to make the novel great, but for writers it is interesting to see a master work through his own identity crisis. The reflexivity of the journalist and the editor is amusing. The passage seems to be a pre-emptive strike on the meaninglessness of Faulkner's Nobel Prize. Perhaps it is the journalist's rebuttal to the editor that gives a negated definition of what literature is: "[Whether] a man sleeps or not or why he can't sleep aint news...," which seems to say that why we can't sleep matters to a fiction writer like Faulkner (43).

The reporter scans the headlines for his story as if to find himself in the world. Pylon is partly about the story getting to the writer: "the fragile web of ink and paper, assertive, proclaimative; profound and irrevocable if only in the sense of being profoundly and irrevocably unimportant ...the dead instant's fruit of forty tons of machinery and an entire nation's antic delusion" (68). For all his words, Faulkner seems to have no romance for them or their ability to deceive. Without too much extrapolation, a similar cynicism could be expressed about reading the world through pixels over The Internet, a million digital bytes of distraction from the miraculous collision of a trillion cells into organism earth.

[carl theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction ominously states that 'Pylon' is Faulkner's 2nd worst book,
which depending on what you think of him, could be saying something!

Friends and I were discussing the old biplanes and one of them mentioned
having read this book and that it was about barnstorming. I thought I'd read
enough Faulkner in my life, not really feeling extremely about him in either
direction, so I gave it a shot.

It is readable, you can actually tell what's going on, which is notable in
the Faulkner context. The life of a barnstormer I would compare to a carny, as
far as quality goes, except you can get killed pretty easily, and a carny has more of a home life.

There's not a lot flying going on, enough to give you an idea of the barnstorming days in the hanger, but the story centers on the relationship between a reporter who becomes entranced with a flying family: a pilot, a mechanic, a parachute jumper and their woman.

The sordid angle, must have been racy for 1935, the pilot and one of the crew
share the woman, who is officially married to the pilot cause they rolled
the dice one day when they found out she was expecting, and they have a child,
no one sure who the father is.

The intro also claims that you must read the book twice, once to get the airplane story past you, then to get the symbolism at work, well thanks to the clues given, I think i can handle it in one swoop.

Interesting also is that Faulkner was a pilot, learned in the service, and he bought his brother a plane to go barnstorming. Shortly after the book was published, his bro died while barnstorming, an eerie coincidence.

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not one of Faulkner's better books. It follows a small group of airshow barnstormers. They include a pilot, a parachutist, a mechanic and the wife of the pilot who is, also, involved in a relationship with parachutist along with her son whose father could be either the pilot or the parachutist. The story is about their efforts to scrap out a living from their meager winnings and is told by an unnamed reporter.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This year, I have resolved to read the four William Faulkner novels I have not yet read. Curiously, they were the four novels that did not deal with the author's mythical Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Pylon is set in New Valois, Franciana -- for which read New Orleans, Louisiana. It deals with a newspaper reporter (the narrator, who is unnamed) fascinated by the disorderly lives of an airplane racing team consisting of a pilot, a parachute jumper, and an airplane mechanic.

Oh, and there is a woman involved -- Laverne, who is shared in a menage à trois between the pilot and the parachute jumper. There is also Laverne's son, whose father may be the pilot or the jumper, but who bears the pilot's name out of convenience. The reporter circles around Laverne with mixed lust and compassion.

This novel was made into a 1957 film which is at least as good as Faulkner's novel: The Tarnished Angels, starring Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, and Rock Hudson as the reporter.

[Leif Quinlan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The highs and lows of Faulkner - some of the most beautiful, unique, important American novels to... not that. Pylon felt wayward and distracted. 20% of an exciting story (the misbegotten "family," the dangerous flights for never-enough cash, the rush to escape but where from and where to, the borrowed time/plane/money/lives) and 80% whatthefuck? (the reporter - I didn't find a single sentence about him interesting - the rest of the story that felt like so much stalling)
Precious little about Pylon felt like Faulkner and it's truly shocking to learn that he wrote this within 5 years of As I Lay Dying, and Light in August which are two of the 15 most important American novels written
I do not believe in being a completist - all artists have misses and while some are interesting for reasons of overreach or ambition, many are uninteresting for all the human reasons (age, decline, drink, &c.)
Pylon is eminently skippable

[Pyramids Ubiquitous · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pylon is perhaps Faulkner's most flagrant example of style over substance. I say this fully acknowledging that not much technically happens in any Faulkner novel. As always, I am obsessed with the cadence of reading Faulkner – there is a certain chaos to his sentence structures and he will sporadically take-off into intense and beautiful descriptions in the middle, beginning, or end of a more pedestrian thought. With Pylon, he seems particularly uninterested in writing a gripping narrative or developed characters and, similar to his earliest novels, he uses his impossible and infinite prose to half-assert atmosphere, mood, and meaning.

Reading Faulkner is a unique experience in that each novel feels like a painting of a scene; the edges and borders are vivid and detailed but the inside parts are sometimes detailed but mostly just colors with no shapes to them with the colors where the shapes should be. And it never feels unfinished. In Pylon, the minimal story is used to contemplate the impermanence and overall flaccidity of life and its surrounding dramas (as paralleled through the trend of barnstorming and our barnstormers), the ability of media to mold the world and fund obsession particularly over things that would be otherwise uninteresting by default (paralleled through our narrator's journey), and our never-ending boredoms as a species (we aren't content with having developed massive industrial flying machines for convenience, we also have to make a sport of it). Or at least those were my key takeaways.

[Soledad Perotti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pylon es una novela de William Faulkner poco leída y por cierto no es la mejor, pero para quienes amamos el estilo de este autor la disfrutamos mucho.
La historia trata sobre un grupo de aviadores de espectáculos aéreos que viven de forma muy precaria económicamente. Un joven periodista alcohólico se obsesiona con ellos y trata de ayudarlos. En un angustiante ganar y perder dinero la historia termina trágicamente.
El periodista presenta como notas al periódico las historias de este grupo excéntrico y poco convencional de pilotos y no es recibido de forma favorable , le aclaran que los dueños y auspiciantes del diario buscan noticias y no "piezas literarias", hasta que el fin infortunado de la historia de los pilotos lleva al periodista a escribir esa "noticia" tan buscada por los dueños y a él a abandonar el periódico.

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

(See review under American Library Edition edition)

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is this an American style? Bloated sentences & lush phrases seek to convey (spiritual) authenticity & inspiration more than (clear) perceptions & ideas.

[Mateusz Swietoslawski · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can also check this and my other reviews here.

I meant to grab Faulkner's novel for a while now. Any novel to be honest. He is one of the great American authors and getting to know his body of work seemed a a duty to me. So when I snatched a vintage copy of Pylon just for around 1 euro ( a price at which it is difficult to buy a bookmark) I considered myself lucky. In a hindsight it is obvious that I have chosen wrong book to start my expedition into the literary world of a new author. My Faulkner hype train did not even leave its station. 

Usually I encourage reading books that are thematically outside of one's comfort zone. A story about 1930's group of stunt pilots in a fictionalized New Orleans is so far out there that you can't see the passport controls on the border of my comfort zone. I feared it might be too foreign for me, but I was wrong. After all, the setting is just a pretext for a story to unfold. What story you might ask? A group of vagabond barnstormers, three men, a woman romantically involved with two of them and her son prepare to participate in a competition get involved with a creepy and enigmatic local reporter planning to write a story about them. Journalist's stalking turns into an obsession as he seemingly falls in love with a woman.

Doesn't sound that bad, right? Unfortunately, the story is not engaging at all. Characters are distant and unnatural, the reporter's love is just my interpretation, because he is almost impossible to understand in his never-ending sewer of a speech.

It brings me to another problem I had with this book: the writing. This novel is a pile of unorganized volumes of text that constantly shift the narration from one character to another, exponentially confusing the reader. Many ideas and events of the story must be assumed or half-guessed; not because of any mystery, but because of the sloppy explanations. It is unnecessarily convoluted and pretentious.  And what is going on with the penultimate chapter? It is named after a terrific T.S. Elliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, yet it has nothing to do with it, or at least I fail to see a connection.

The only saving grace of this book is its ending. It delivers a surprising emotional twist and FINALLY some consequential insight into the characters' feelings. Too bad it was too late to save this pulp fiction of a novel.

VERDICT

Two out of five barrel rolls.

[Lauli · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me some time to begin to appreciate this book. I was expecting the usual Faulkner (the South, the usual cast of Yoknapatawpha families, tragedy, gothic twists, fires), and ended up watching stunt pilots in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I felt that what was on my plate was not what I had ordered. Plus,the novel is extremely experimental in its use of compound words, and riddled with aviation jargon from the period between the world wars: it might as well have been written in Chinese.
However, as the reading progressed, I warmed up to the cast of characters and got the intertextuality with Macbeth and Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland", and that changed the way I read it. It's extremely complex and full of imagery that refers to death, to sexuality, to boredom and meaninglessness. I would definitely not place it among Faulkner's masterpieces, but it makes an interesting read. Plus, the film adaptation, Douglas Sirk's "The Tarnished Angels", IS a masterpiece in itself, so even if the novel had only served to provide Sirk with the material for his movie, its existence would have been justified!

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yair! Yair! After watching Douglas Sirk’s bizarre masterpiece “The Tarnished Angels” I sought out “Pylon”, the source for this weirdo extravaganza.
The dialogue in the book maintains that laughable “Showgirls” vibe in spades = “Yair! Why, they don’t have blood running through their veins, but crankcase oil, see?”, or “He was born on a parachute in an aircraft hangar, yair!!!”
I’m assured from the cover blurbs that William Faulkner is a “master” and a “genius”. That makes him almost as superhuman as the daring stunt pilots in his book! Yair!!!!

[Joe Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a description of a man going through the urges of an alcoholic that made me fall in love with the writing of Faulkner all over again. Faulkner is able to do that with almost every book.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years after the fact, Faulkner told a class at the University of Virginia that he wrote Pylon because Absalom, Absalom! had become “inchoate” and he needed to take a break from it. Only William Faulkner would take a break from writing a novel by writing another novel. He wrote the book at furious speed, beginning in October of 1934 and finishing it by December 15th, though he did a lot of revising in galleys. The novel was published the following March (those were the days), and he took up Absalom, Absalom! again. Faulkner was in the midst of his most frantically creative period (from 1926-1936 he wrote nine novels, four of them masterpieces).

Pylon also moves at breakneck speed (while Absalom, Absalom! moves like pouring molasses; nothing occurs but that several people have to comment on it with the most complicated vocabulary and rhetoric possible). Again, like everything Faulkner wrote during this period, it seems completely different from everything else, so you’re thinking, the same guy wrote this who wrote [insert title here]? And though it’s a fairly straightforward narrative, about some rather bizarre people, every now and then Faulkner the rhetorician comes barging in, as if he just can’t help himself. For instance:

“And here also the cryptic shieldcaught (i n r i) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to the interminable long corridor of machine plush and gilded synthetic plaster running between anonymous and rentable spaces or alcoves from sunrise to sunset across America, between the nameless faience womanface behind the phallic ranks of cigars and the stuffed chairs sentineled each by its spitooon and potted palm;–the congruous stripe of Turkeyred beneath the recentgleamed and homesless shoes running, on into an interval of implacable circumspection: a silent and discreet inference of lysol and a bath—billboard stage and vehicle for what in the old lusty days called themselves drummers: among the brass spittoons of elegance and the potted palms of decorum, legion homeless and symbolic: the immemorial flying buttresses of ten million American Saturday nights, with shrewd heads filled with tomorrow’s cosmic alterations n the firm of pricelists and the telephone numbers of discontented wives and highschool girls.”

Whew.

The novel tells the story of barnstorming airplane pilots at a Mardi Gras competition in New Orleans at roughly the time he was writing (he mentions that Prohibition is over, so now it’s legal to drink. Not that Prohibition seemed to slow anybody down). There’s a small cluster of characters: a pilot, a parachute jumper, a woman involved with both of these men (shocking stuff in 1934), a child who may be the son of either man, a reporter fascinated by the whole situation (and halfway in love with the woman himself) and a mechanic named Jiggs. Jiggs is the first one who answers in the affirmative with the strange locution Yair. From then on in the novel, everyone uses the same word. Is it something about New Orleans, or Mardi Gras, or pilots, or 1934? I’ll never know.

Flying was not an idle interest for Faulkner. He began to take lessons early in 1933 (and traveled to New Orleans to work on a film script set there). He bought a biplane in the fall, and arranged to have his teacher train his brother Dean as well. By 1934 he traveled to New Orleans and participated in an airshow with his teacher and his brother, entitled “William Faulkner’s (Famous Author) Air Circus.” He continued flying now and then, but sold the biplane to Dean. In November of 1935, Dean was killed when the plane crashed. Dean’s wife was pregnant, and Faulkner took financial responsibility for her. Faulkner’s mother was depressed to the point of being suicidal.

One can only imagine the guilt that Faulkner felt.

Pylon is not autobiographical (though it’s startling how it portrays events that came close to actually happening). The characters in this novel are barnstorming low lifes, leading as hand-to-mouth an existence as anyone in all of Faulkner. We’re close to Bukowski territory here. They literally don’t know where they’re going to stay on any given night, or where their next meal is coming from. At the end of the novel Faulkner writes a chapter which supposedly explains their motivation, why the pilot was so interested in a good payday, to the point that he was willing to risk flying two airplanes that had serious structural defects, but these people lived this way because they wanted to, risked life and limb every day because they enjoyed it, and there was an element of that in Faulkner himself, all his life. He was still jumping horses toward the end of his life, when he had numerous health problems and had no business doing so. He fell off a horse just a couple of weeks before he died.

I keep talking about all the drinking in Faulkner, and there’s heavy drinking in all of his books, but this is the first time he portrayed a down and out alcoholic, the mechanic Jiggs, who opens the novel by buying a pair of boots out of a New Orleans store window even though he doesn’t have the money for them (he puts down two bucks and later makes the final payment by stealing from his boss’ prize money) and doesn’t know what size they are (he winds up wearing them over his tennis shoes). He must be a good mechanic, because he’s a dreadfully undependable human being; it’s because he was sneaking off to get a drink that the pilot’s first plane became unusable, because Jiggs didn’t change the valves as he said he was going to. And though Faulkner said in public that his own excessive drinking, and huge binge drinking, was a perfectly healthy impulse (I remember reading that somewhere, though I can hardly believe it as I type it), this novel is in part the story of an alcoholic, and of the nature of addiction in general. Here is Jiggs contemplating a morning drink.

“He could have heard sounds, even voices, from the alley beneath the window if he had been listening. But he was not. All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man’s spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before the triumph becomes dismay—the moral and spiritual waif shrieking his feeble I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster. He raised the jug; his hot bright eyes watched the sticky glass run almost half full; he gulped it, raw, scooping blindly the stale and trashladen water from the dishpan and gulping that too.”

You know you’re an alcoholic when you use dishpan water as a chaser.

Maybe that’s what the whole novel is about. These men and women are addicted to this life in the same way Jiggs is addicted to booze, in the same way the reporter is addicted to stories (though he too has a serious alcohol problem). It’s a strange little novel about a group of people Faulkner would never come back to again, in a city which he apparently enjoyed, though he clearly saw its excesses. In a way it’s a trifle, a 200-page diversion before he got back to the important novel he was writing, in which he would give free rein to the rhetoric once and for all and create a defining myth for the South. He needed time to let that settle. In the meantime, he wrote this scorching novel about people who throw their lives away because they’re addicted to danger and excitement.

www.davidguy.org

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Faulkner aspired to be an aviator before he became a writer. I know this because I read a biography of him which shows that he enlisted in the Canadian air force during the First World War and trained to be a pilot, though he saw no action. What the world lost in a flyinflg ace, or yet more cannon fodder, it gained in one of the best writers to ever put pen to paper. And while this novel doesn't match the quality of his best work, it has a lot more going for it than I'd anticipated when I found myself bogged down in the opening chapters.

"Pylon," from 1935, is Faulkner's ode to those daring young men in their flying machines and the complications that await them when they have to land. An unnamed reporter is our guide to the world of air shows, where pilots risk it all to race one another for a prize of cash money at the height of the Depression. Here we find a menage a trois in the living arrangement between a pilot, a professional jumper, and the woman they both love, who has had a child with one of them (but she doesn't know or acknowledge which is the father). The reporter becomes obsessed with them, to the point of getting involved in their efforts to secure a new, untested plane for the big race happening one weekend at a new airport just outside New Valois (New Orleans, reimagined for the novel).

This was all sorts of confusing early on, but once I got settled into the rhythms of it, I found "Pylon" intriguing. I hovered over what star rating to give it while I was reading it, but the novel sticks the landing enough to merit four stars. It's not in the same league as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light In August," but it does some wonderful things with conveying the breathless nature of the air-sports world of the Thirties and how pilots and Parachute jumpers and mechanics are trying to make a living while not dying for their craft. Faulkner is at peak symbolism and verb usage here, and there are all the trademark Faulknerisms that I've come to love (huge paragraphs, bizarre asides from out of nowhere, dips into the internal lives of different characters from paragraph to paragraph, and so on). "Pylon" reminds me a lot of "Sanctuary," another "lesser" Faulkner which only really suffers in comparison to the masterpieces but which holds its own as a work in its own right. For all my hesitancy early on, "Pylon" rewarded my insistence on keeping on with it.

[Joseph Gulino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book. It isn’t necessarily worse than Faulkner’s other stuff, but it is definitely different.

Not only is the setting one of the few which was placed outside of a fictionalized Mississippi, this time being a fictionalized New Orleans, but the characters themselves are altogether wonky for Faulkner.

The whole book feels tepid and dreamlike, in a way I believe to have been intentional. This book is one of the most open and introspective of Faulkner’s works, when it comes to overtly talking about the mesmerizing and paradigm shattering nature of becoming connected with outcasts.

The protagonist of the book is a reporter - and a disillusioned one. His idea of “news” revolves around becoming infatuated with a band of Barnstormers who have a highly irregular (for the time) polygamous relationship, even sharing a child who does not know which of the parental trio is his father.

This reporter, perhaps tired of being peripheral to the outcasts of the world, thrusts himself into their matters, soon entering a grim world of poverty, nomadism, and danger. In time his sense of reality and grounding are destabilized, and much like Roger Shumann, the reporter himself takes flight in a way, unable to reconcile life on the ground with the bizarre life these fleeting and strange people live.

Maybe this is a sort of explanation for Faulkner’s obsession with writing outcasts in his stories, people who live as in dreams or nightmares, outside the structures of modern society. The reporter is a very fascinating character, especially when taken in this context.

Overall, Pylon is not as towering in prose as a lot of Faulkner’s other works, but it has its moments. I think that it is a weird and different installment in his written works, but I am glad to have read it.

[Rob Genuario · Rating 1 out of 5]

There’s something magnificent about picking up an old book at a tag sale and actually reading it. It journeyed through generations, bought for nickels, waiting on a book shelf as Kennedy and King speeches blare through the radio. Packed away in some crate that gets misplaced, and for its antiquated charm, it becomes an accent piece in a furniture store until some kid in the 90s steals it. And then he too packs it away, this sentimental artifact of his rebellious era, and it lives in different boxes, dodging dump runs and trash days until, much later and in a new home, that needs more room, his shrew of a wife breaks him down as he fails to withstand the umpteenth “if you’re not gonna read it we should get rid of it” and it ends up amongst hundreds of its kin at a church tag sale. Finally, per dictum of destiny, it finds itself in your hands, and your eyes give it the life it maybe had seventy-something years ago.

This is some low-grade Faulkner, though. Cool compound words but the narration is so chaotic. It’s confusing; a lot of his best stuff is, but this one lacks those transcendent moments of humanity. Bad read.

[Martin Hernandez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pilón (1935; 3/5) me pareció un poco aburrida; no entendí muy bien por qué tanto drama por el triángulo amoroso que se presenta en la novela. El reportero de un periódico local, fracasado y sin ilusiones, se siente atraído por la sensualidad y energía desbordada de los acróbatas aéreos, intenta comprender dicho triángulo y, por alguna razón que no me queda clara, trata desesperadamentec de ayudar a los dos hombres, Roger y Jack, la mujer de ambos, Laverne, el hijo y a un mecánico llamado Jiggs. El extraño título de la novela hace referencia a los dos altos postes o “pilones” entre los cuales un grupo de pilotos realizan sus acrobacias aéreas y sus carreras.

[arcobaleno · Rating 2 out of 5]

Non sono riuscita a volare alto. Piuttosto mi è sembrato di trovarmi in uno sciame di mosche impazzite che mi volavano intorno, sbattendo e cambiando direzione all'improvviso; sempre dentro la stessa stanza. Ecco, in questo romanzo mi sono persa in quei voli velocissimi, in quelle sterzate impreviste e fastidiose; cercavo di ripercorrerne ogni traccia, ricominciavo daccapo, ma non riuscivo a seguire nessun volo, né a vedere una meta comune, pur  provandoci e riprovandoci. Alla fine mi sono sentita come sopraffatta da mosche fastidiose e le ho abbandonate. Ammiro chi riesce a dominare la contorta scrittura di Faulkner e a trovare il filo conduttore nei suoi periodi lunghissimi, zigzaganti, senza respiro e senza continuità. Addio Faulkner!

(16 giugno 2020)

[Jack Kelley]

pretty fantastic. read over the course of like 4 months so probably don’t have the most cohesive take on this but. the whole thing is always flirting w incoherency until the reporter sobers up and then it becomes some of faulkner’s most beautiful, heartbreaking fiction. and then in the last paragraph the reporter gets drunk again and it’s the most bitter thing i’ve ever read. excellent.

[Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faulkner doesn't explain anything in coherent language. He just begins a sentence and throws words around in odd order and doesn't give exact references to who is speaking or who's in the room at the time or who's in the audience. The reader has to just accept the confusion and gather bits of information when offered. The first pass through I basically didn't understand much besides four men, one woman and a boy talking about breakfast or engine valves or cigarettes and drinking. Challenge to read like everything else of Faulkner which is why he is my favorite author.