/lit/ - Literature

1. The Idiot
2. The Sound and the Fury
3. Infinite Jest

How many of you actually read it?

One of the most prominent things I noticed that isn't exactly in the text is how different my reading of it was from what I've seen in literature lectures on Youtube (mostly Yale's, but others too). Academic readings seem to focus a lot more on (what are currently) politically-charged motifs that seem to me to be totally unfounded, unsupported, and pretty arbitrary. Relations between blacks and whites, especially contrasting Dilsey with Jason and the rest of the Compsons, Quentin and themes of guilt and deception (the South was never great, blah blah), etc.

Aside from that, I thought the book was really a masterpiece. Faulkner hits tragedy harder and more completely than anyone I've ever read. He's like the post-war Jap authors, which makes sense considering the similar circumstances, but to me it feels even more beautiful and human and tragic, perhaps because it's a generation removed or because I'm American and not Japanese.

Ultimately I think that's what the novel explores mostly, the tragedy of adherence to tradition in a world where tradition dies faster than the people that live by it and is replaced by what seems to the adherents to be pretty much nihilism and heresy (for lack of a better term).

What did you guys take away from it? Am I an idiot and the academics are right?

Reposting because I wanna see if anyone else has drastically different takes on the book.

How many of you actually read it?

One of the most prominent things I noticed that isn't exactly in the text is how different my reading of it was from what I've seen in literature lectures on Youtube (mostly Yale's, but others too). Academic readings seem to focus a lot more on (what are currently) politically-charged motifs that seem to me to be totally unfounded, unsupported, and pretty arbitrary. Relations between blacks and whites, especially contrasting Dilsey with Jason and the rest of the Compsons, Quentin and themes of guilt and deception (the South was never great, blah blah), etc.

Aside from that, I thought the book was really a masterpiece. Faulkner hits tragedy harder and more completely than anyone I've ever read. He's like the post-war Jap authors, which makes sense considering the similar circumstances, but to me it feels even more beautiful and human and tragic, perhaps because it's a generation removed or because I'm American and not Japanese.

Ultimately I think that's what the novel explores mostly, the tragedy of adherence to tradition in a world where tradition dies faster than the people that live by it and is replaced by what seems to the adherents to be pretty much nihilism and heresy (for lack of a better term).

What did you guys take away from it? Am I an idiot and the academics are right?

Why will this work go down in history as the premiere work of the canon of the 20th century? How did a hillbilly drunk write the most beautiful work of the century, and what was your reaction when you first read it?

Did Caroline screw her brother Maury in The Sound and The Fury? I can't remember one hint of actual incest between them in the text, but it makes way too much sense looking back. Benjy was originally named Maury and is retarded/idiotic, Jason is obsessed with mony and has a stutter (conceivably inbred), and Quentin while normal is obsessed with time and family honor and having some sort of incestuous relationship with his sister Caddy. Their father is a drunk, and Caroline constantly complains that Benjy's retardation/Quentin's suicide is God punishing her. Help me /lit/ i'm freaking out.

What the fuck am I supposed to take away from this? Are the narrations joined together at all? Benjy's and Jason's narrations seemed fucking pointless. Benjy's seems like it's just there for the puzzle of piecing together the narrative, and Jason's just a fuckin asshole. Why did Quentin's dad preach nihilism to him? Did he really not care that his own daughter was sleeping around? What the fuck is the recklickshun of the blood of the lamb, and what's it got to do with the novel?

I feel out of my depth

nope

What's the most interesting thing about this novel for you? Why haven't you read it yet?

What were Jason III (the father)'s motivations behind his nihilism? Did he truly believe what he told Quentin?

>the strange thing 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... until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realized that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman
Is he talking to Quentin about his future suicide?

How come nobody talks about the greatest novel ever written?

>It's not when you realize that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
How does Quentin's dad live with his own nihilist philosophy? It seems to me that his train of thought is the most depressing, void, empty way to view life and yet Quentin's dad not only lives with it for a number of years but even preaches it to his own son (and in doing so ultimately contributes to his suicide)

reposting this thread cause I didn't see any of the replies of the last one

Are any of Faulkner's other works as great and deep as The Sound and the Fury?
I'm about 150 pages into Light in August right now and I'm enjoying the story and the characters are interesting enough to carry the story, but thus far I haven't read anything that approaches many of the memorable parts of The Sound and the Fury.

On another note, how are his lesser-known novels and short stories? Having four works lauded as masterpieces, I can't imagine his other works could be bad, but I never see them discussed.

Was Sartre a hack? Can anyone elucidate me on his interpretation of Heidegger, or just on Heidegger’s ideas on time in general?

In Sartre’s criticism of The Sound and the Fury (http://drc.usask.ca/projects/faulkner/main/criticism/sartre.html)), Sartre posits his critical philosophy: “A fictional technique always relates back to the novelist's metaphysics. The critic's task is to define the latter before evaluating the former.” He states that “Faulkner's metaphysics is a metaphysics of time.”, and provides evidence for this (notably completely given by the Compson’s father through Quentin’s memory of conversations with him) and so judges the work based on this.

I primarily take issue with the Sartre’s metaphysics of time that he constructs for Faulkner. Sartre posits that in Faulkner’s metaphysics of time, the future does not exist: he provides a helpful image of the protagonists of the novel as sitting in a car, looking back.

The past is what is real from where all meaning comes from, Sartre says, and the present is “essentially catastrophic. It is the event which creeps up on us like a thief, huge, unthinkable - which creeps up on us and then disappears. Beyond this present time there is nothing, since the future does not exist. The present rises us from sources unknown to us and drives away another present; it is forever beginning anew.”

He also ascribes Faulkner’s present an aspect of “sinking in”, or “[an indication of a kind of] of motionless movement of this formless monster. In Faulkner's work, there is never any progression, never anything which comes from the future. The present has not been a future possibility[…] To be present means to appear without any reason and to sink in.”

Sartre then critiques this idea of metaphysics without a future: “A closed future is still a future. ‘Even if human reality has nothing more 'before' it, even it 'its account is closed,' its being is still determined by this 'self-anticipation.' The loss of all hope, for example, does not deprive human reality of its possibilities; it is simply a way of being toward these same possibilities.’” The last line is a quote from Heidegger’s Being and time.

In his critique, Sartre completely ignores the third and fourth sections, which are written in a much more conventional narrative (with exceptions), one from the perspective of Jason and one from a third person perspective. He doesn’t mention either of these sections even once. Perhaps he rationalizes this with a statement early in his critique that Faulkner believed time could only be explored in a “timeless” environment, that is one without time, as Benjy cannot tell time and Quentin symbolically destroys his fathers watch (“the mausoleum of all hope and desire...”). But the fact remains that Jason certainly is not condemned to only look back as his car goes on: indeed he importantly thinks of the future at multiple points in the novel. Im out of space

Would it be better if he'd printed the Benjy section in multiple colours as originally planned?

How come Faulkner uses the phrase, "You, Person!" in his writing so often.

Was it really that common of a saying back in the early 1900's?

>>8487339

Just finished The Sound and the Fury. not quite sure what I thought of it, Gonna some time to let it digest. I haven't read Faulkner before but this was certainly one of the more difficult novels I've read in quite some time.

What did you get out of it /lit/?

Artificial difficulty

"They endured." Okay, /lit/, so what am I supposed to make of this? And what are we supposed to make of this entire appendix? I had felt that the ending to the original text was a tad unsatisfying but I'm having trouble understanding where this appendix fits in with my interpretation of the entire book. Thoughts?

What kind of a fucking ending was that?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Caddy and Quentin Jr. The two most interesting characters, in my opinion.

What were we supposed to feel about these two women? Except for Benjy's part, It's really easy to find them unsympathetic, isn't it? It's obvious Jason was a prick, but then they were despicable sluts too? I'm guessing the entire point was that we weren't supposed to hate them, and yet that was exactly what I felt at times. Faulkner must have tricked me good, or maybe I'm just an euphoric fedora-tipper by nature, or maybe they were just as bad as Jason?