Ontological Aspects of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Death, Irony, Faulkner

T he first words of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , those of the title itself, sound—indeed, resound—a note of irony. We know they are a quotation, an echo from beyond the text, and because they are coupled with what seems at this initial point the book’s subtitle, “Three Tenant Families,” if we do not recognize their origin we nevertheless feel a friction: baldly, members of tenant families are not famous. For all readers, this is a friction that will chafe until, even after, the still unsourced passage from which they come that is printed toward the very end of the text. 1 For some readers, the irony will be sharper and associated with death. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.