/lit/ - Literature

>>8049677
I have a little difficulty in explaining it, but even with his circumlocutions, the best of Faulkner always drives toward a resolution, a denouement. It's not like Joyce or Proust where they just talk about extremely topical events that don't even cohere by the end of the book. I mean, who cares about that Prince that you met and his inconsistency and shallowness? What does mentioning it even bring to the reader?

To me the later works of Joyce and Proust are just masturbatory tracts (that possess meaning and are great works of literature) that ultimately tell me nothing. Faulkner creates characters that one eventually could sympathize with, even Joe Christmas, for example. So not only does his work have an overarching plot, Faulkner also creates characters one feels for. And while your point is perfectly valid, I think that having a cohesive plot with well-written characters constitutes good storytelling.

>>8049379
Joyce, post-Portrait, seems too meandering for me. I just don't like Proust (still read through Guermantes Way, though).

No. Faulkner is difficult.

It's a decent introduction to Faulkner, too, since it's short.

>>8048795
I would also like to add that I try to make my reading of classics to be holistic, and that I've read classics from all of the world's continents (except Antarctica). Faulkner is just that impressive for me because he admixes creativity with competent storytelling especially in his greatest works. Although I do tend toward modernist works, I prefer him best.

(I've also read Joyce, Boll, Bely, Woolf, Proust, and even Djuna Barnes, but Faulkner just has that exquisite balance.)

>>8048795
It's more that I prefer reading older, 20th century classics than anything. I did read some Roth and Pynchon, I just prefer Faulkner because he strives to ultimately tell a story, and the oldfag in me likes good stories.

No, I average one book every three days. I still have work to do. (Light in August took me over a week, though.)

>>8047427
I failed reading The Sound and the Fury twice before I finally figured out that each change in font face was actually a different memory. After realizing I still didn't understand much, I re-read the novel another time and that's the reason why Faulkner's one of my favorite authors. When I got to Absalom, Absalom! it no longer was as tough because I already had been there and done that with The Sound and the Fury.

The novels I do end up re-reading usually also end up as my favorites. I did the same thing with Petersburg, totally devoid of help, and I enjoyed it too. I also did the same with Finnegans Wake, but that was shit.

>>8047418
Do you like other works by Faulkner?

>>8047439
This happens with Faulkner, too. Just keep reading.

>>8047512
I guess like some anon wrote in this board he doesn't get much love because the stream-of-consciousness technique was already put into practice by masters like Proust and Joyce. I've always found Faulkner the most readable among them, however. The former are more concerned with aesthetics in contrast with Faulkner who uses it as a device to tell a good story.

Faulkner had some turds like Mosquitoes and Fable, but he also has more masterpieces than most authors I've read.

>>8046328
Light in August is a great Faulkner, but Absalom, Absalom! is his best work. So if you've time and patience to keep on despite your disappointment, I think you'll like Absalom, Absalom!

>>8047328
Light in August is 'easier' than Absalom, Absalom! but is also a good read. While I respect people who have The Sound and the Fury as their best Faulkner, no Faulkner novel is both as cohesive and as good as Absalom, Absalom! It was also ranked by writers to be the best Southern novel of all time.

I think it's really, really good. But if you want less challenging Faulkner to ease yourself into reading him, Light in August, while longer, is a lot more easy to digest.

Faulkner is at the peak of his serpentine writing with Absalom, Absalom! so there's a sentence that runs on about a thousand words. My technique for reading it is just to read as fluidly as possible, only looking back after I've read entire paragraphs, because Faulkner often expands on what he talks about within the paragraphs he's written.

>>8046341
I think the best Faulkner novel, and my favorite novel, is Absalom, Absalom! The story is set in Mississippi (I don't really remember now), and is about a Thomas Sutpen. He tries to get land through unscrupulous means from Indians and tries to build his posterity. He has two children, Henry and Judith. Judith eventually falls in love with a certain Charles.

You have to read the rest of the story for yourself. It features unreliable narrators that possess only part and parcel of the story that reveal more and more about Thomas and his family as the story unfolds. It is Thomas's overbearing concern about race and miscegenation that makes him fail to see love towards people still his family.

It's the only book I threw away in reality because I was so jealous Faulkner wrote it instead of myself. Of course I picked the novel back up, but you get the idea.

I think you'll also like its first sentence: 'From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.'

>>8045730
Here in the Philippines, most English teachers hate Faulkner because he's hard to read. I was called by my lit professor ages ago weird because I actually persevered in reading him.

They usually pick Steinbeck or Hemingway for American literature. Sometimes Morrison is also recommended. No one's heard of Gaddis or Gass, and I've had to do my own stumbling on Hawkes.

I will read Gaddis one of these days, though. Thanks for reminding me.

Just finished reading Light in August. I finally completed reading Faulkner's major works, and I think he's the great American writer simply because I can't think of an American with five masterpieces to their name. Faulkner has The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and The Unvanquished. One can even mention The Mansion.

I thought I read the best Southern Gothic novel when I read O'Connor's Violent Bear it Away, but this also takes the cake. This is probably Faulkner's best work with regard to characterization, with such vivid outcasts featured throughout the novel. Joe Christmas is also an inscrutable, well-made, damned character.

Any thoughts about Light in August?

>>7990457
Jewel was a young kid from what I remember, and he recalled in a previous chapter all this stuff that made him conclude that his mother was, indeed, a fish.

These were hicks, after all.

>>7993099
Actually bought this stack in a surplus store, buried in children's toys since no one reads here anymore.

I'm not selling any of them. Thanks for noticing it! It's my best book stack bought in one day - ever.

>>7988862
Yeah, I think you're on point, though I haven't read The Waves as yet.

>>7988787
Mine would be The Idiot. I thought that BK was too didactic, but The Idiot has both a robust story, and great characters.

Stumbled upon the best book sale in my life, because it was a surplus sale and the books were buried under children's toys.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - Borges

>>7988549
George Meredith, fuck.

>>7988336
(2/2)

I do understand that Blood Meridian wasn't written to be a traditional, plot-based story. From how I understand the novel, it was written to demystify the Wild West and also to illustrate the nadir of man's worst natures. Man, when divested of all the accoutrements of society and civility, can become even worse and even more primal than the creatures we deem to be beasts. This is illustrated when a bear dancing like a human is brutally shot even though it acted with more propriety than most of the heathens inside the bar.

Why did someone shoot a circus bear? The judge answers it in a different section: 'war is god.' Man likes to see blood flow. Goodness is just an artificial construct:

'Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test.'


Sadly, with all the unintelligible murders that occur across the world today, Judge Holden may have been right. He never sleeps, the judge. He says he will never die.

I tried to elucidate my thoughts regarding Blood Meridian. Here it is:

(1/2)

Ever since I read Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, I've been occasionally reading novels that have been regarded as in contention for The Great American Novel. I've slowly read some Hemingway, some Steinbeck, O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, and some more Faulkner.

This novel was among the newer novels I discovered that could pass muster as a great American novel. Whether I agree as to whether it is The Great American Novel, however, will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

I haven't read McCarthy for the longest time because I wanted to begin with his masterpiece, and most critics consider this novel to be his best. I was only able to obtain a copy about a few months ago, however, and were a buyer not interested in this novel I would have damned my copy to either him or to obscurity.

Let me begin by effacing any doubt: Blood Meridian is undeniably a masterpiece. But it's more a masterpiece of writing than or plot or characterization, as all the reader is privy to are glimpses of the novel's characters. I think that all we really wish for are the glimpses, seeing that this novel features unscrupulous and amoral individuals in an even more brutal environment. McCarthy makes up for his shadows, however, by writing so beautifully. He rivals Faulkner in sharp verbal illustration: his words inhabit the anomie of both the characters and the time they're situated in. One example of his writing that stuck with me was his description of a shotgun's barrel as a lemniscate prior to a rider shooting a horse.

His matter-of-fact narration of the most horrific of perversions performed by the inhuman, inchoate posse creates a masterful contrast. In this manner, he subverts the often-cliched plots of Western novels and turns it around by providing not a plot, but a protracted paroxysm of arrant ultraviolence. This subversion is comparable to Clark's Ox-Bow Incident where, instead of focusing on positive, picaresque adventures, the novel instead focuses on the characters and the repercussions they have to face because of their bigotry. McCarthy essentially removes the romantic in his novel by engorging and deluging the reader with arcane and profuse violence.

To me, the novel is nearly perfect.

But it's not Absalom, Absalom! First, Blood Meridian is more fragmented and diffuse than the former. Absalom, Absalom! remains to me the towering work of American fiction because all the asides, all the circumambulations - everything coalesces and makes sense as the novel closes.

>>7987881
That's it. Faulkner on an off day is still other writers' masterpieces.

>>7987319
The violence punctuated by more violence was indeed graphic, but Absalom, Absalom! made me stop reading it in awe. BM never did that.