There's something simultaneously depressing and uplifting about reading amazing books. On the one hand, books this good remind us struggling reader-writers that we will never accomplish something of such staggering genius. But on the other hand, it reminds us that all we can do is write what we want how we want, and maybe, just maybe, it'll score us a Nobel Prize (or at least a Booker, or something made of metal and worth money).
The Sound and The Fury drops a massive F-bomb on anyone prepared to place rules on literature. Be warned: the first 80 pages make absolutely no sense-- narrated by a retarded man with no concept of time (and he's somehow still the most reliable of the narrators!)-- and devolving in the next 100 pages into a block of text so dense as to be impossible to read. It's written almost entirely in dialect, with complete disregard for grammatical conventions, and absolutely no concession made to the fact that a vast majority of readers simply won't have the patience or appreciation to finish the book.
And it's amazing-- definitely deserving of its place on the list of 100 Best Novels. Faulkner's uncanny ability to narrate from anyone's point of view; his use of symbols and precision with language; his evocation of place and person-- by the end of the third section you hate Jason so bad that you hope a truck loaded with cinder blocks will run over his chest-- make this an absolute joy to read. It's also a book that can be, indeed needs to be, read many times to really grasp what is going on.
FYI: My 'Next Up' thingie is ridiculously arbitrary. I finish things when I finish them and write about them when I want to-- Chinua Achebe may take me the rest of the year to read and report on at it's staggering length of 130 pages. In the meantime: courage!
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4 comments:
I have to say, I hate William Faulkner. I've never met one of his books that I've liked.
I can appreciate his 'mastery of the language,' but seriously, why do I have to suffer through an incoherent novel for the sake of someone's 'classic talent'?
I'd like to say it's because I read several Faulkners in high school, but I read them again in college, and still hated them. I hated Steinbeck in high school, but East of Eden is fantastic nowadays, and I can appreciate the Grapes of Wrath, too. Not so with Faulkner, that obscure, nonsensical bane of my existence.
Hahaha... what made me cream over Steinbeck was Sweet Thursday, and The Moon Is Down. Those books are Ba-Na-Nas.
That being said, I never could have tackled Faulkner until this year. I just find that you can't read his novels as 'novels' the way you'd read a John Irving. If you do, he'll make you crazy on purpose and then pee in your bed while you sleep... Faulkner novels are almost a series of somewhat-related vignettes along a theme. He gives you these pieces divorced from real space and time and you create your own story from them-- I finished Sound and Fury with a dozen questions regarding misogyny and incest and race relations and mental retardation, but it doesn't matter! Whatever answers I can justify using the text can work-- like the friggin' Bible-- so every subsequent reading is like reading an entirely different book. THAT, as far as I'm concerned, is the genius of Faulkner...
It's like literary Choose Your Own Adventure, Elizabeth, and I'd think a fantasy nerd like you would be all over that...
If you'd like a crazy, insane chapter, turn to page 83. If you'd like an insane, crazy chapter, turn to page 143.
I can see your point, and I may be too prejudiced against him at this point for proper reflection, but Faulker has always felt like a literary 'fuck you' - Faulkner regards TSATF as his 'greatest failure' although it's also his favorite work. After 3 lesser books, he tries to cracked scheme with crazy narrators and weird chronological constructions - it's a 'fuck you' in the sense that he doesn't seem to feel the need to hold the reader's hand. You're on your own with a Faulkner, and I suppose that has its merits, but I'm just not personally taken with it.
It feels like William S. Burroughs and all the incoherent literature of that era is a rip-off with acid of Faulkner, and if I had to choose, I guess I would choose Faulkner - at least it seems like he made his work incoherent for a reason.
"it's a 'fuck you' in the sense that he doesn't seem to feel the need to hold the reader's hand."
Elizabeth: This is totally correct!
Faulkner had a 'thing' he wanted to do-- a risky thing, for obvious reasons, but he did it anyway. No, he doesn't do much to help the reader out, but for readers willing to help themselves, who are okay with a load of uncertainty in their literature, there is a whole careful, deliberate and meaningful universe in there to explore over and over.
We basically agree: Faulkner is fuck-hard to read, and this will turn many readers off. But this is fine with me-- Faulkner is the Radiohead of literature! Some people dig that inaccessibility, but it's not for everyone, and art would be BORING if all of it was for everyone.
This is why I'm glad most people are so piss-scared of poetry that they shove their fingers in their ears and go 'LaLaLaLa' whenever it is mentioned. That's right, people, keep passing that door-- I'll be inside the keyhole, getting drunk with Milton and Eliot and laughing at everyone too afraid to crawl through.
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