/lit/ - Literature

>>23280577
Ah yes, famed tard wrangler Faulkner, lol.

>>22819286
The strange this is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main, which he knows beforehand he assuredly has to face, without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child, until one day in very disgust he risks everything on the single blind turn of a card. Nobody does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement. He does it only when he realizes that even the despair or remorse or bereavement aren't particularly important to the dark diceman. [...] It's not when you realize that nothing can help you -- religion, pride, anything -- it's when you realize you don't need any help

Why is he considered the Shakespeare of novels? His prose isn't all that impressive, and he never writes grandiose characters like Lear or Richard III.

>>22269896
What's the difference

>>22252490
The Faulk was very prolific

he was pretty handsome too guys, especially for a midget

>>21460553
I'm not that anon, but The Sound and the Fury is easily the better work. I'll be the first to admit that Faulkner was a much better prose stylist by the time he wrote Absalom, and there are some beautiful passages in it, but what makes Faulkner great isn't his prose.

The Sound and the Fury has a huge thematic overlap with Absalom, but it's more personal, more focused, and more profound. It is Faulkner's attempt (and failure) to reckon with his cultural heritage which, after the desolation of the South in and after the Civil War, has become not only obsolete and deprecated but universally hated and offensive to the point that it is perceived as a black mark on all of humanity. Faulkner tries and finds himself almost completely unable to reject the values that have caused him so much psychological pain and suffering, even knowing that they are essentially arbitrary and contingent and doomed to cease to exist. In the attempt he hits up against something profoundly human, which is common in one form or another to all men. It is an extended exploration into the Shakespeare "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy that Faulkner gets the novel's name from. In my humble and worthless opinion, the novel is the closest the English language has come to Shakespeare, since Shakespeare.

Thomas Sutpen is explored as (and pretty much is) a mythical character who typifies Southern values and suffers from tragic flaws like a hero in classical mythology. Because we experience the story of Sutpen not from Sutpen himself but from others who betray their own thoughts and values in their recollections we cannot reach that same personal level in the story that we get from Quentin and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Yes Quentin returns and fights the same battle that he was fighting in The Sound and the Fury, as does Faulkner (I think this is the primary motif throughout his major works), and he does so in a very similar way to The Sound and the Fury, but it doesn't reach the same personal level as it does when we listen to Quentin's thoughts as he wanders around Cambridge thinking about Caddy and his conversations with his father, and so for me it was not nearly as relatable. Absalom has Quentin dealing mainly with the Southern mythos as such, aware of it, whereas The Sound and the Fury has him dealing more with the power the mythos has over him.

That's the major difference to me. I found Absalom deeply moving. But there are moments in The Sound and the Fury that hit me like a train and blow me away, that make me stop and feel exactly the same visceral feeling that Faulkner must've felt as he agonized over the South, or that Shakespeare had Macbeth feel as gives the soliloquy, and I know that because in some of the lowest moments in my life I've felt it too. That's why Faulkner is so celebrated, and I think across his major works he does it best in The Sound and the Fury.

>>21347615
>his incessant need to constantly assert himself as a revered figure
What are you referring to? Faulkner was twice the writer Joyce was. Faulkner certainly has moments in his prose that come off as jagged or wordy, but his prose is not why he's revered. He's revered because his capacity to explore and lay bare human emotions, thought, and conflict (inter- and intra- personal) is completely unmatched in the modern era. He's likely the best since Shakespeare to do it. Joyce had a better command of the language and is the better prose stylist (so I could see how one could find his writing to appear more "effortless"), but Faulkner's ability to consistently reveal and illuminate to the reader profound human truths, and to make them deeply relatable, is the reason his best work is endlessly re-readable and rewarding on a level Joyce's is not. Even the best of Faulkner's works are not without their faults, but when he's at his best he really is "not of an age, but for all time," like his favorite author, and that will become clear with time.

>drunken midget hick
>produces two of the greatest novels of the English language
How did he do it? How was he able to so perfectly capture the plight of modern man?

>>20772054
The tragedy is nuanced, and the anon above me gets it wrong. The book is about the Compsons, a Southern family falling apart in desolate Mississippi in the generations after the Civil War. The crushing defeat of the Confederacy had enormous material, spiritual, and cultural implications for Southerners after the war, and the novel lays bare the despair and suffering that results from coming to terms with those implications. The father is a fatalistic alcoholic that preaches something between existentialism and nihilism to his son while he drinks himself to death. The daughter Caddy grows up to be a whore that sleeps around and gets pregnant prior to marriage, necessitating her attempted marriage to a Northern carpetbagger banker. Jason is a greedy resentful prick that's left with the sorry remains of his family's holdings as well as a retarded brother, whore niece, and hypochondriac depressing mother to take care of. Quentin is the most disturbed by all this, having been raised on the doomed values of his father, his family, and his community, and while he goes great lengths to at last realize the contingency of his values (the idea being to his father that he can use the fact of that contingency in order to abandon his values and save himself from the profound despair that they are putting him through), he is ultimately unable to reject his attachment to those values and kills himself.

The work is basically a novelization of Shakespeare's tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy, and man's reaction to its implications. It is one of the most beautiful novels of the English language in my estimation. There's a passage in a work of Herman Hesse's (I think it's Steppenwolf) where he writes about how life becomes true suffering and complete hell when two eras overlap, and The Sound and the Fury is about that.

>attacked capitalism
>defended (or at least empathized with) Southern values
How do you reconcile this /lit/