/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18970242]

I've never read Faulkner but I'm interested in him because I've heard that his style is poetic, that he has blood and semen, the ovarian juices and brain fluids from the Old Testament, the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare within the flesh of his work.

Here, for example, from a book called "William Faulkner: The Making of a Novelist":

>Wright [Willard Wright, author of a critical book called “The Creative Will”] had also invoked Walter Pater to indicate the detrimental effects of stylistic homogeneity: "True style-one which attests to mastery—is an ability to change one's manner at random so as to harmonise the expression with the thing expressed. A great stylist can write suavely, simply and delicately, as well as robustly, complexly and brutally. Shakespeare is a stylist. Pater is the negation of style." As late as 1941 Faulkner apparently recalled precisely this formulation when he told one of his first critics, Warren Beck: “I had rather read Shakespeare, bad puns, bad history, taste and all, than Pater, and that I had a damn sight rather fail at trying to write Shakespeare than to write all of Pater over again so he couldn't have told it himself if you fired it point blank at him through an amplifier".


Could anons who like Faulkner post some of the passages they find most beautiful in his novels? I want to know what I'm getting into.

[Anonymous No.18970441]

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

[Anonymous No.18970459]

"Only she was running already when I heard it. In the mirror she was running before I knew what it was. That quick her train caught up over her arm she ran out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her heels brittle and fast clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses roses the voice that breathed o'er Eden. Then she was across the porch I couldn't hear her heels then in the moonlight like a cloud, the floating shadow of the veil running across the grass, into the bellowing."

[Anonymous No.18970471]

“All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.”

[Anonymous No.18970496]

This one always struck me, from Quentin's long neurotic chapter in The Sound and the Fury as he stares into a river contemplating suicide.
>And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lovely and inviolate sand.

[Anonymous No.18970626]

>>18970496
Quentin section is pure kino

[Anonymous No.18970801]

When I imagine the cosmos hatching out of emptiness I remember the arctic owl tearing the night in silver with its feathered ghost; I also remember that this bird, so beautiful when eating the darkness, is horrible when it disembowels the hare amid the woods. This is the cosmos: a molecule of glory and agony. It is a spider's egg and a pearl; light with a black pupil; It is a diamond with worms in it’s bowels; a midnight-colored sun; a God who nurses and suckles, a God who punishes and mutilates. Universes, galaxies, suns, worlds, peoples, minds: they are all dew drops embracing a thorn; there is no oasis face without an abyss skull, heaven and hell are names for the same path.

[Anonymous No.18970809]

Also, where do I start with Faulkner?

[Anonymous No.18970844]

>>18970809
I read As I Lay Dying first and it was very good.
>>18970801
Goddamn, where's this one from?

[Anonymous No.18970859]

>>18970809
Sanctuary (left field but accessible and good).
Finish on Absalom, Absalom!

[Anonymous No.18971176]

>>18970242
>>Wright [Willard Wright, author of a critical book called “The Creative Will”] had also invoked Walter Pater to indicate the detrimental effects of stylistic homogeneity: "True style-one which attests to mastery—is an ability to change one's manner at random so as to harmonise the expression with the thing expressed. A great stylist can write suavely, simply and delicately, as well as robustly, complexly and brutally. Shakespeare is a stylist. Pater is the negation of style." As late as 1941 Faulkner apparently recalled precisely this formulation when he told one of his first critics, Warren Beck: “I had rather read Shakespeare, bad puns, bad history, taste and all, than Pater, and that I had a damn sight rather fail at trying to write Shakespeare than to write all of Pater over again so he couldn't have told it himself if you fired it point blank at him through an amplifier".

Good quote

[Anonymous No.18971260]

Faulkner was one of the greatest of all time at mastering different styles. Just in the span of three novels (Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying) he perfected straightforward realistic prose, highly complex experimental modernism, and earthy bare minimalism. His later works all focus on different formal structures.

[Anonymous No.18971366]

>>18970242
Faulkner is probably the most overrated writer of the 20th century, but his legacy is still propped up by people who enjoy convincing themselves and others that his writing isn't the dumb drivel that it is. When challenged on this, his disciples generally claim that his work is simply too abstruse for people who dislike it, which of course is a weak argument because you could claim this about literally any low quality art that you're set on defending.

Since we don't have time to go through his ouvre line by line to perform an in-depth exegesis, simply ask yourself this question: have you ever visited Mississippi? If not, consider yourself lucky if not extraordinarily blessed. If you have, however, you have lived through a singular experience that has granted you the clarity to understand how there's no way anyone from Mississippi has ever written a book—never mind multiple books—worth reading. (You will notice a similar phenomenon with regard to that notorious open-air penal colony called Australia, which to date has only ever produced that band where the guitarist wear children's clothes and the blonde dude who liked to poke dangerous animals.) Leave Faulkner for the pseuds and schizos, good sir. You will be better off for it.

[Anonymous No.18971410]

>>18971366
imagine being this butthurt about genuinely profound literature
thanks for the bump faggot

[Anonymous No.18971430]

"My Mother is a Fish"

[Anonymous No.18971605]

>>18971366
>simply ask yourself this question: have you ever visited Mississippi? If not, consider yourself lucky if not extraordinarily blessed. If you have, however, you have lived through a singular experience that has granted you the clarity to understand how there's no way anyone from Mississippi has ever written a book—never mind multiple books—worth reading. (You will notice a similar phenomenon with regard to that notorious open-air penal colony called Australia, which to date has only ever produced that band where the guitarist wear children's clothes and the blonde dude who liked to poke dangerous animals.)

Lol

[Anonymous No.18971685]

>>18970242
"The thing you have to understand about William Faulkner is, he was very short." — Shelby Foote

[Anonymous No.18971692]

>>18971366
Sneed

[Anonymous No.18971868]

>>18970844
It's some anon's gay OC

[Anonymous No.18972055]

>>18971410
Behold the Mississippian, gentlemen. Call him what you will: a brigand, a looby, a lout, and he will laugh at you. But call him what he is, and he will recoil from you, thinking to himself “I’ve been found out!”

[Anonymous No.18972282]

>>18971260

Had he ever wrote in some sort of Shakespearean/metaphorical prose?

[Anonymous No.18972318]

it seemed to him that he saw the twenty-seven irrevocable years diminished and foreshortened beyond them in turn, as if his life were to lie passively on his back as though he floated effortless and without volition upon an unreturning stream. He seemed to see them: the empty years in which his youth had vanished—the years for wild oats and for daring, for the passionate tragic ephemeral loves of adolescence, the girl- and boy-white, the wild importunate fumbling flesh, which had not been for him; lying, so he thought, not exactly with pride and certainly not with the resignation which he believed, but rather with that peace with which a middle-aged eunuch might look back upon the dead time before his alteration, at the fading and (at last) edgeless shapes which now inhabited only the memory and not the flesh: /I have repudiated money and hence love. Not abjured it, repudiated. I do not need it; by next year or two years or five years I will know to be true what I now believe to be true: I will not even need to want it./

[Anonymous No.18972448]

>>18970809
Read the short story/novella 'Old Man'. It's a good story that has a generous helping of peak-tier Faulkner describing the Mississippi flood of 1927 in an incredibly vivid and epic fashion.

Or read the short story The Bear, another absolute classic. (There are two versions of this -- a short story, and a longer version that's found in Go Down Moses. Either version is good.)

[Anonymous No.18972453]

>>18970242
Alright fellas I model my style after Cormac and I figures I might as well read who inspired him. I’ve got The Sound and The Fury and Light in August. Which is a better starting point?
In the same vein, what are some good Melville stories to start with?

[Anonymous No.18972471]

>>18972453
Light in august.

[Anonymous No.18972688]

>>18971260
Is it in that order? I've read only AILD, and for the most part I can say that AILD is minimalist, but I would not say earthy. To me, it was grotesque and vulgar and striking while saying little, so I would like to ask how you saw it as earthy.

[Anonymous No.18973505]

Bump

[Anonymous No.18973665]

>>18971366
Obviously anon is a funny dude here, but I do think Faulkner, in quotes like OPs or in stuff like his Paris Review interview, markets himself as hard as possible as a highbrow, to the point of seeming insecure and false.

Also, Sound and the Fury was supposed to be published with each narrator in a different color of text, right? The cult of difficulty around that book is partly artificial - the version we read is harder than was intended.

As I Lay Dying is the right answer. Sanctuary would be OK, but is probably too conventional for OP.

[Anonymous No.18973690]

>>18970844
>Goddamn, where's this one from?

Probably some of his drafts. They have large archives of Faulkner’s manuscripts and have even published them in the 80s.

[Anonymous No.18973855]

Faulkner is great. I love his prose so much. I'm reading Light in august rn, which is much more accessible than his other works, but even there I'm in awe of his writing. Will post an excerpt from the sound and the fury in the next post
>>18970496
Quentin's part is brutally tragic. I love it.
>>18970801
you could start anywhere if you're patient enough. I started with the sound and the fury, which is probably his hardest book along with absalom, but I loved it to death and it's my favorite book now. But alternatively I think as I lay dying would be a great start because it's short and has the stream of consciousness element that carries his other works while not being as confusing as the sound and the fury.

[Anonymous No.18973891]

>>18973855
>what have I done to have been given children like these Benjamin was punishment enough and now for her to have no more regard for me her own mother I've suffered for her dreamed and planned and sacrificed I went down into the valley yet never since she opened her eyes has she given me one unselfish thought at times I look at her I wonder if she can be my child except Jason he has never given me one moment's sorrow since I first held him in my arms I knew then that he was to be my joy and my salvation I thought that Benjamin was punishment enough for any sins I have committed I thought he was my punishment for putting aside my pride and marrying a man who held himself above me I dont complain I loved him above all of them because of it
because my duty though Jason pulling at my heart all the while but I see now that I have not suffered enough I see now that I must pay for your sins as well as mine what have you done what sins have your high and mighty people visited upon me but you'll take up for them you always have found excuses for your own blood only Jason can do wrong because he is more Bascomb than Compson while your own daughter my little daughter my baby girl she is she is no better than that when I was a girl I was unfortunate I was only a Bascomb I was taught that there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or not but I never dreamed when I held her in my arms that any daughter of mine could let herself dont you know I can look at her eyes and tell you may think she'd tell you but she doesn't tell things she is secretive you dont know her I know things she's done that I'd die before I'd have you know that's it go on criticise Jason accuse me of setting him to watch her as if it were a crime while your own daughter can I know you dont love him that you wish to believe faults against him you never have yes ridicule him as you always have Maury you cannot hurt me any more than your children already have and then I'll be gone and Jason with no one to love him shield him from this I look at him every day dreading to see this Compson blood beginning to show in him at last with his sister slipping out to see what do you call it then have you ever laid eyes on him will you even let me try to find out who he is it's not for myself I couldn't bear to see him it's for your sake to protect you but who can fight against bad blood you wont let me try we are to sit back with our hands folded while she not only drags your name in the dirt but corrupts the very air your children breathe Jason you must let me go away I cannot stand it let me have Jason and you keep the others they're not my flesh and blood like he is strangers nothing of mine and I am afraid of them I can take Jason and go where we are not known I'll go down on my knees and pray for the absolution of my sins that he may escape this curse try to forget that the others ever were

[Anonymous No.18973901]

>>18973891
>If that was the three quarters, not over ten minutes now. One car had just left, and people were already waiting for the next one. I asked, but he didn't know whether another one would leave before noon or not because you'd think that interurbans. So the first one was another trolley. I got on. You can feel noon. I wonder if even miners in the bowels of the earth. That's why whistles: because people that sweat, and if just far enough from sweat you wont hear whistles and in eight minutes you should be that far from sweat in Boston. Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity. Then the wings are bigger Father said only who can play a harp.

[Anonymous No.18973956]

>>18970496
I'm convinced Cormac read this passage an innumerable amount of times

[Anonymous No.18973979]

i like this bit from near the beginning of as i lay dying

>When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake. For an instant before the jerk comes onto his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-umber, until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again. Then they are rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs, with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse's wind with one hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.

>They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.

[Anonymous No.18974117]

>>18970242
What were his political views?
>Inb4 who cares
Shut the fuck up

[Anonymous No.18974148]

"He smelled the bright cold."

Wizardry.

[Anonymous No.18974546]

>>18974117
exactly, nobody cares, stop trying to ruin one of the few lit related threads with your political bullshit. If you care that much go look it up faggot.

[Anonymous No.18974651]

>>18974117
how about you go and view some tiddy incel

[Anonymous No.18974831]

>>18972282
I'm not sure what you mean by that but maybe A Fable comes closest to that description.
>>18972688
"Earthy" as in the the syntax, diction, and tone isn't just simple but is full of very direct, pastoral speech and dialect. It's minimal but it's not abstracted (say like Camus), and it sticks really closely in its structure to writing the world of its rural characters as they conceive it rather than narrating from a more neutral perspective (like maybe Hemingway or Orwell). It's the difference between how he writes about horses and people working in fields between As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, which has some of the same scenes but isn't earthy at all; it's very mannered. As I Lay Dying is definitely grotesque too but you also wouldn't really say the way he writes Vardaman riding a horse is "grotesque" right. Besides, definitions for earthy that I think are included in what we're both getting at is "crude or indecent" and "hearty or uninhibited."

[Anonymous No.18974847]

>>18974831
>Vardaman riding a horse
meant to say Jewel but whatever.

[Anonymous No.18975700]

>>18970242

bump because most of th threads on /lit/ are stupid religious or philosophical or incel crap and not really about literature.

[Anonymous No.18975876]

>>18971366
>>18972055
Kek

[Anonymous No.18975933]

>>18970242
I recently read as I lay dying and i couldn't believe what a piece of shit it was

[Anonymous No.18975934]

>>18974117
He was big on Southern provincialism particularly in his later years. I don't think he had any views about specific political issues but he was adamant that Southern states should work out their own problems with little to no interference from the federal government and Northern states, including segregation.
You can tell he didn't like Italian fascism from his story "Mistral" and his travels in fascist Italy in the 1920s.
Other than that, it's hard to characterize his political beliefs without falling into the brainlet trap of thinking the views of his characters reflect his own.

[Anonymous No.18975968]

>>18975934
Defending some form of political autonomy for Southern states is still pretty based. No reason for an American to particularly care about European right wing movements.

[Anonymous No.18975987]

>>18970809
A Rose for Emily, is an English 100 classic. Prime example of southern gothic.

[Anonymous No.18976016]

honestly, you could never read an american writer and not miss out on too much
goes double for writers from the southern states

[Anonymous No.18976031]

>>18975968
>Defending some form of political autonomy for Southern states is still pretty based.
People still seethe uncontrollably about something he said in a drunken interview in 1956 and later tried to backpedal:
>But I don't like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I have to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I'll choose Mississippi. What I'm trying to do now is not have to make that decision. As long as there's a middle road, all right, I'll be on it. But if it came to fighting I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I'm not going out to shoot Mississippians.

[Anonymous No.18976075]

>>18976031
Very based and also correct

[Anonymous No.18976527]

>>18976016
hahaha sure

[Anonymous No.18976551]

>>18974117
crybaby poltroon needs his feefees validated

[Anonymous No.18976575]

>>18976551
Yikes, my dude.

[Anonymous No.18976594]

>>18976575
I know, it's pretty cringe lol

[Anonymous No.18977023]

>>18974148
Faulkner is such a strange writer because he can get away with sentences like these, in my opinion. For Joyce, stream-of-consciousness is something really labored, detailed, and with a lot of autistic thought put into every little reference, all the wordplay and puns and allusions. For Faulkner, his stream-of-consciousness and even just his own descriptive prose actually reads much of the time like Faulkner’s own stream-of-consciousness, just spit out, first-draft style, even if it doesn’t make full sense, but somehow it simultaneously does. Like a person with an IQ of 170 doing automatic writing that’s simultaneously really flawed and really brilliant.

He smelled the bright cold, shouldn’t make sense, and you make fun of it, but it actually makes a weird sense. Being outside on a bright cold day and smelling the air.

I think this is why that pansy, Nabokov, hated him. I like Nabokov and Faulkner and Nabokov is technically a far more perfect writer, obviously, but something in me is drawn more to the wild Shakespearean passion and crudity of Faulkner, the “fuck it, I wrote this while hungover and really passionate, out of the seat of my pants, and I’m publishing it for money.” You know he wrote the majority of his best books — AiLD, TSaTF, LiA (underrated but still really good) and A&A — in a few short years’ time period, and all with drastically different but still a uniquely recognizable Faulknerian style, writing these novels as quickly as he could for money and just out of his manic passion (it’s suspected he may have had bipolar disorder) it’s said? I think it’s regarded as one of the greatest feats of a Western novelist, for critics and historians who acknowledge this fact — that he wrote three of the books regarded as some of the greatest American novels ever written in just a few years. It’s a Herculean feat. I also regard him as being one of the closest writers to Shakespeare in novelist form, along with Melville and Joyce, not just for the style, but for being able to create so many unique characters with distinct voices both in his individual works and across different works. In The Sound and the Fury, just think about both the brainpower and the heart/empathy needed to have created and gotten into the minds and hearts of characters as radically different as Benjy, Quentin, Caddy, Jason Sr. and Jr., and Dilsey, who are all genuinely unique, radically different, but also extremely memorable characters.

Nabokov lambasts Faulkner but Nabokov wrote having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and, as Martin Amis put it, “You can hear the clatter of surgical instruments in his writing.” John Shade, Charles Kinbote, Humbert Humbert, Pnin, and Lolita, OK, sure, they’re sort of memorable and unique — but honestly none of them strikes me as being as intensely and fully human and interesting as these characters in just ONE of Faulkner’s books alone.

[Anonymous No.18977414]

>>18977023
>He smelled the bright cold, shouldn’t make sense, and you make fun of it, but it actually makes a weird sense. Being outside on a bright cold day and smelling the air.

For me the meaning was quite clear from the very start. I don’t see how people can read a sentence like that and fail to understand what Faulkner is doing. Synesthesia in poetic language is quite a normal and effective technique.

[Anonymous No.18977529]

>>18977414
You’re right. It is clear, just not grammatically. This is another good way of putting it — writers like Nabokov are sticklers for perfect syntax and grammar, Faulkner bends grammar freely to make the unique impacts that he wants.

[Anonymous No.18977573]

>>18977414
Nabokov had actual, literal synesthesia, though, he discussed it in interviews a couple times. He was very explicit about particular letters and sounds having distinct associations with color or texture.
I've seen it brought up before that part of the reason he was so idiosyncratic with his opinions on other writers might've been because their personal voices would clash with his synesthetic impressions, making something almost like dissonance in music. I believe there's actually a copypasta to that effect floating around somewhere.

[Anonymous No.18977581]

>>18977023
I despise Nabakov. Human writers like Steinbeck and Faulkner languish while people can't stop talking about fucking Lolita (pun intended).

[Anonymous No.18978160]

Bump

[Anonymous No.18978481]

Faulkner's descriptions often don't connect at all and his stream-of-consciousness is really shitty, nowhere close to Joyce. And McCarthy does the other stuff better