The Faulknerian Echo That Lingered in Every Sentence

I still remember the afternoon I cracked open The Sound and the Fury for the first time. I was nineteen, sitting in a humid room in Adelaide with a glass of something cold going flat on a side table, and within ten pages I had lost track of who was speaking. Benjy Compson's section had folded my sense of time into a single rippled sheet. I closed the book, walked to the window, and watched the street for a while, because I needed a different kind of clock before I could return.

That first encounter is the one every reader of Faulkner seems to carry around like a small scar. You remember the weather, the chair, the moment your knees first gave out under the weight of a prose style that asked you to rebuild the world out of broken syntax. The voice that poured out of those pages stayed with me through graduate seminars in Melbourne, through long Brisbane winters writing my first novel, and across the many revisions that eventually produced Gideon's Children. There was never a clean separation between the writer I had become and the writer Faulkner had quietly insisted I also be.

This is an attempt to trace that echo honestly. It is not a critical study, and it makes no claim to scholarship. It is closer to a confession, the kind a writer offers when they finally admit they have been speaking in a borrowed accent for decades and have only lately begun to hear their own voice underneath it. Faulkner gave me a way of seeing place, race, memory, and time that I have spent the rest of my career trying to translate into the quieter landscapes I actually knew.

The first page that undid me

Before I reached the Compson family, I had been a tidy student of literature. I admired Hemingway for his clean architecture and Borges for his pocket-sized infinities, but I had not yet met a writer who treated grammar as a form of weather. Faulkner taught me that a sentence could be a storm system, and his clauses rolled and broke against each other the way summer storms roll and break across the Adelaide Hills, gathering dust and light before they crack open.

The page was crowded with relatives. Grandmothers, cousins, the household help who carried trays of food and opinions across decades, all of them speaking in a voice that fused past and present into a single exhale. I remember writing in the margin, "How does he do this?" Then I crossed it out. The question was unanswerable, and the asking was the point. You learn more from a writer who defeats your analytical instincts than from one who flatters them.

What stayed with me was the sense that a novel could be a kind of oral history told by someone who had been there for every generation. The Faulknerian echo I have never been able to escape is not a turn of phrase or a trick of structure. It is the conviction that fiction can hold the entire weight of a community's memory in the mouth of a single narrator who has outlived them all.

Prose that thought out loud

The technical influence is harder to admit. I tried, for several drafts of my early work, to write the way Faulkner wrote, with his qualifying parentheses and his willingness to spend half a page inside a single dependent clause. Most of those drafts were disasters. A man writing about contemporary Sydney does not need the same machinery as a man writing about the collapse of a Mississippi family over a hundred years. The machinery is the message.

What I did borrow was the habit of letting thought work itself out on the page. Faulkner trusted the reader to wait while a sentence found its own shape. He trusted himself to let a paragraph take thirty minutes of real time inside the mind of someone who was simply remembering. I began to write scenes where a character sat at a kitchen table and let an old wound rise to the surface in the same unhurried way.

This is also where Australian writing entered my ear in a more serious way. Patrick White's long spiraling sentences, Peter Carey's willingness to let a narrator lie and contradict himself within the same paragraph, the rolling interior monologues of Tim Winton when he turns his eye toward a Western Australian town — all of these writers showed me that the Faulknerian inheritance had crossed the Pacific and taken root in a different soil. I read Voss in the year I began Gideon's Children, and I felt less lonely in my own experiments.

Australia as a second Yoknapatawpha

There is a moment in every Australian writer's life when they realise their continent is also a kind of fictional county. Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's invention, a postage stamp of north Mississippi that contained all of human history. Australia has its equivalents. White's Scone, Carey's fictional suburbs, Winton's midwest coastal towns, Thomas Keneally's Brockley — each becomes, in the right hands, a self-contained world with its own gravity.

When I lived in Melbourne, I used to walk through the laneways of the CBD and think about how a writer could turn those narrow passages into a cartography of memory. The coffee was strong enough to keep you awake for three drafts. The trams rattled past with a rhythm that felt almost like a recurring motif. A friend who ran a small literary press out of Fitzroy told me once that Australian fiction had finally stopped trying to imitate London and was beginning to imitate its own weather.

I went to a session at the Melbourne Writers Festival where an older novelist confessed that the only way he could write about Brisbane was to imagine it as if it had been dreamed by a Faulkner character. The room laughed, but the joke carried a real diagnosis. We were all carrying maps drawn by other hands, and the work of a generation was to redraw them in our own ink. That, more than any quotation, is what the Faulknerian echo meant to me.

Race, region, and the burden of inheritance

It is impossible to write about Faulkner without writing about race. The South he depicted was a place of intimate violence, and his fiction refused to soften that violence even when his characters wanted to. Quentin Compson could not think about the South without thinking about the people his family had owned. Joe Christmas could not walk into a town without dragging the entire history of American racism into the room with him.

This is the part of Faulkner that mattered most to me when I sat down to write Gideon's Children. The novel deals with civil rights, with the inheritance of prejudice, and with the question of what a community owes the people it has excluded. Faulkner gave me the courage to stay inside the uncomfortable interior of his white characters without either forgiving them or letting them off the hook. He showed me that fiction could hold contradiction without resolving it.

I am aware, writing this from Australia, that the racial inheritance I grew up with was different from Faulkner's. My Black friends in Sydney taught me more about the texture of prejudice than any novel ever could. But the technique Faulkner offered — the willingness to let a white narrator expose himself — was a tool I could still pick up. The Faulknerian echo, in this sense, was a method of self-interrogation rather than a style of ornament.

Why the echo would not fade

There is a particular kind of literary influence that does not diminish with distance. Some writers become period pieces; you read them with affection but no longer feel their pulse. Faulkner kept his pulse. I picked him up again in my fifties, after my memoir An Irish Experience was published, and I found him more demanding than I remembered. He was also more generous. He had stopped being a teacher and become a colleague.

I think his voice stays in the ear because he wrote about the things that do not change. Family. Land. Shame. The way a child can carry an entire ancestral disaster inside a single gesture. These are not southern topics. They are human topics, and they translate into any postcode, including the ones I have lived in around Parramatta, Carlton, and West End.

The Australian literary tradition has its own ways of handling these themes. Winton's coastal communities, White's outback homesteads, the Brisbane suburb in a Jessica Au novel — all of them circle around the same questions Faulkner asked. We do not have to import Yoknapatawpha to think about inheritance. We only have to look.

When imitation becomes conversation

A writer who lives too long inside another's voice eventually has to choose between homage and theft. I chose, more or less by accident, conversation. I began treating Faulkner as a character in my own imagination, a sort of ghost interlocutor who sat in the corner of my study and made sceptical noises whenever I reached for a familiar trick. If a sentence began to sound too much like him, I cut it. If a metaphor depended on his weather, I translated it into local weather.

This is also where I learned to read other writers who had done the same thing. If you are interested in writers who carried an inheritance without being crushed by it, the Vheissu literary archives collects a great many of them in one place, with essays that show how a borrowed voice can become a private language over time. I came back to it often when I was drafting the second half of Gideon's Children.

The trick is to read your influences so closely that you can hear them thinking. Once you can hear them thinking, you can begin to argue with them. Once you can argue with them, the conversation has truly begun.

A reading list for those who feel the echo

• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner — the most architecturally daring of his novels, and the one that most rewards a slow first reading
• Voss by Patrick White — an Australian writer who built his own Yoknapatawpha out of colonial New South Wales
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers — a contemporary novel that shows the Faulknerian inheritance still alive and still evolving
• True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey — a brilliant demonstration of how a borrowed voice can become a wholly original instrument
• An Irish Experience by Howard G. Franklin — a memoir-travelogue that carries the long-breath inheritance into a different landscape
• Gideon's Children by Howard G. Franklin — a novel that owes its gravity to a Faulknerian sense of inherited sin

Pick up a novel by Howard G. Franklin and listen for the older voice underneath the new one. Browse the back catalogue, read the blog, and see what your own ear has learned to do. Then return to Faulkner with a pen in your hand, the way you would return to a city you once lived in, and notice how much of it you still recognise, and how much of it you have finally made your own.