Eh. I'll admit the guy was a revolutionary, but I don't enjoy reading him. Not my style. Too heavy and slow.
The sound and the fury
- Thread starter martand
- Start date
I had the wonderful advantage of taking a Faulkner course as an undergrad English major, from a Faulkner scholar, at the time the only undergrad-level course devoted exclusively to Faulkner's work in the United States. About the first thing the Prof said was that most English courses teach students to detest Faulkner by assigning the most difficult stuff first, stuff out of context with the body of his work. And of all major fiction writers I can think of, the context of Faulkner's work matters most. There's a (slightly flexible) order in which his major works should be read, and this is how we did it in the class:
The Unvanquished
Sartoris
The Wild Palms
Go Down, Moses
Sanctuary
The Hamlet
The Town
The Mansion
Intruder in the Dust
As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
The Reivers
The Prof would have had us read Light in August right after Sanctuary, but at the time it was not available in an inexpensive print edition. so we didn't read it. I read it later. It's a far better major novel to read as a first go than The Sound and the Fury, which is absolutely the most difficult. Getting accustomed to Faulkner's hypnotic prose style is enormously important, and understanding its evolution equally so.
In retrospect, for anyone considering starting to read Faulkner's work, I'd actually begin with The Wild Palms, a wonderful book with his Mississippi setting, but otherwise unconnected with his Yoknapatawpha novels. Go Down, Moses is a volume of longish short stories which makes a good place to start, as well. And, in my view, the acme of Faulkner's work is the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, a magnificent set of novels telling a single story, which he wrote over a couple of decades, interspersed with other works. The culminating novel, The Mansion, in particular, is just plain a masterpiece.
The final novel on the list, The Reivers, was in fact Faulkner's final work. He died within weeks of its publication, and it reads as if it were his designed farewell to writing, much like Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. It is actually quite a good and readable work, one of the best novels ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. Faulkner won another Pulitzer in the 1950s for a truly crappy novel, A Fable. That was after he had already won the Nobel Prize, and was largely a recognition by the Pulitzer folks of his reputation rather than of the quality of the novel itself. In that novel, as in his earliest three or four novels, he strayed from his Mississippi roots, much to his discredit.
My fifty-cent lecture on Willliam Faulkner. Pay me via PayPal.
caw
The Unvanquished
Sartoris
The Wild Palms
Go Down, Moses
Sanctuary
The Hamlet
The Town
The Mansion
Intruder in the Dust
As I Lay Dying
The Sound and the Fury
The Reivers
The Prof would have had us read Light in August right after Sanctuary, but at the time it was not available in an inexpensive print edition. so we didn't read it. I read it later. It's a far better major novel to read as a first go than The Sound and the Fury, which is absolutely the most difficult. Getting accustomed to Faulkner's hypnotic prose style is enormously important, and understanding its evolution equally so.
In retrospect, for anyone considering starting to read Faulkner's work, I'd actually begin with The Wild Palms, a wonderful book with his Mississippi setting, but otherwise unconnected with his Yoknapatawpha novels. Go Down, Moses is a volume of longish short stories which makes a good place to start, as well. And, in my view, the acme of Faulkner's work is the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, a magnificent set of novels telling a single story, which he wrote over a couple of decades, interspersed with other works. The culminating novel, The Mansion, in particular, is just plain a masterpiece.
The final novel on the list, The Reivers, was in fact Faulkner's final work. He died within weeks of its publication, and it reads as if it were his designed farewell to writing, much like Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. It is actually quite a good and readable work, one of the best novels ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. Faulkner won another Pulitzer in the 1950s for a truly crappy novel, A Fable. That was after he had already won the Nobel Prize, and was largely a recognition by the Pulitzer folks of his reputation rather than of the quality of the novel itself. In that novel, as in his earliest three or four novels, he strayed from his Mississippi roots, much to his discredit.
My fifty-cent lecture on Willliam Faulkner. Pay me via PayPal.
caw
Last edited:
I'm having Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust as my slow-reading project at the moment. If this had been my main read, I'd but it down a long time ago for being to slow and meandering in its sentences, but because I've allowed it to be a slow-read project, I have more patience with it. I pick it up now and again, read a few pages or a chapter, and then put it down again for another week or two.
The more you read of Faulkner, the faster the reading tends to become. His prose has a sonorous, hypnotic quality that carries a kind of subliminal sense to the reader.
And I forgot Absalom, Absalom! on my list above, which we read in the class just before Sound y Fury, as I recall. It is definitely one of his finest.
caw
And I forgot Absalom, Absalom! on my list above, which we read in the class just before Sound y Fury, as I recall. It is definitely one of his finest.
caw