When will /lit/ realize Faulkner is the GOAT?
>>7817713
no, that would be me
>>7817713
He is pretty good but he is no Joyce
>>7817713
His corncobbish provincialism keeps him far beneath loads of others.
>>7817720
>portfolio consists of several shit posts and a very large folder on his Mac of unfinished first chapters
>>7817734
This is almost me, except I've finished a full length book and a few short stories. Nothing published though.
>>7817713
Just started As I Lay Dying at the moment and it's confusing the fuck out of me. Like I've read Gravity's Rainbow and Moby-Dick and a whole lot of stuff /lit/ considers harder, but this reads like it's describing images seen out of the window of a car or someshit.
Anyway, as far as I can tell so far I think they're just all tending over some sick (dead?) family member, one of the brothers is building a coffin, and we're just getting introduced to the feels of a few different characters. I'm about 50 pages in and I spend like 3 minutes on each page poring over every detail. Am I on the money?
>>7817732
His themes are universal. His best works are amazing. Pigeonholing him as "provincial" just because he's southern is bullshit
>>7817750
addie is dead, yes. Pay close attention to Darl, Jewel, and their respective relationships with Addie
>>7817754
No she isn't. She doesn't die until several chapters in.
>>7817751
It's not because he's southern, it's because he only ever wrote about the south. Also muh themes is a retarded argument.
>>7817763
he said he's read like 50 pages. Addie dies in the 30s
>>7817766
Joyce only ever wrote about Dublin and no one criticizes him for it
>>7817713
The Sound and the Fury is like the manifesto of the cuck lifestyle.
>>7817750
Yeah I find with Faulkner it's easy to miss the gist of his writing for some reason. The way I understood him was to read The Sound and the Fury, just the first part, Benjy's section. Then read the Sparknotes of that section because it will likely make fuck all sense and then finally reread Benjy's section now with the Sparknotes information and you will understand that section completely.
After this Faulkner should make complete sense to you.
>>7817766
He's from the south. He knew the south. He knew how to write about the south.
"writing what you know" isn't the only way to be a good author but it's certainly one of them.
>>7817713
Why is the Snopes trilogy not discussed more? It does come up more often than e.g. Pylon, but I figured /lit/ would be more into it.
>>7817782
That's because Ulysses, his most famous book, is set more in the consciousness than the outside world, and the depictions of it change wildly from chapter to chapter.
With Faulkner, even when he does things like write from the inner perspectives of retards, kids, or the insane, there's no real sense of transformation as far as the setting goes and you can still tell where you are fairly easily.
>>7817732
>provincialism
Of course, nothing that Joyce, Dostoyevsky or Dickens can be blamed for.
>>7818241
I already covered Joyce, and I don't think the other two are all that great despite being considered authors of "classics". Though Dickens at least wrote A Tale of Two Cities which goes outside of his stomping grounds.
>>7818188
The setting is more or less constant, but he is not simply concerned with the South. He is a chronicler of the young, bohemian, "lost generation" consciousness (disillusionment with World War I, break from traditional values), and at his best, he tackles metaphysical reality. The Sound and the Fury, which on the surface depicts the decaying southern aristocracy and traditional values, also presents an ultimate conflict of physical (masculine, rebirthing, fertility gods (Herbert Head, Gerald Bland, and Dalton Ames)) and the nonphysical (Benjy, Dilsey, and the Reverend Shegag, who are all outwardly shabby but with a hidden, ethereal power), as is the conclusion of his debut novel Soldiers' Pay (which is a great read, btw).
He is very interested in the South and its history/development, but in many cases, this is simply the vessel through which Faulkner explores more universal theme, just as Joyce does with his relatively remote group of characters from Dublin.
>>7818188
Faulkner > Joyce
>>7817720
I respect you, but the GOAT is me.
>When will /lit/ realize Faulkner is the GOAT?
Why would one do that in a world where we have Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Chekhov and Melville, for example?
>>7818993
>Shakespeare
Over Dante, Homer, and Virgil...at least pick one of the immensely better poets m8
>>7819221
I don’t want to discuss this now, for I am tired, but I need to say a few words, Shakespeare is superior to all of them. I frankly I can’t see how you can choose one of them to put in front of Shakespeare. How many works by him have you read? Do you know the enormous range of his metaphors and similes (he seems to talk about everything: every single subject finds a great metaphor in his work)? Not trying to be aggressive or offensive, but you probably have read only the major tragedies.
On top of this you find a much greater variety of human beings in his works. To be frank even a topic as diverse as comedy is almost absent from the works of Dante, Homer, and Virgil, while Shakespeare handle both Tragedy and comedy in several different forms. He also is much more natural in his presentation of women than any of those other poets. He can be epic, but he also is at home in the domestic, in the human world of kitchens, living-rooms, servants dormitories, couples beds, and all the domestic environments that we hardly see in the poets you mentioned (although there are some nice bits of it in the Odyssey).
The texture of his writing is also much more complex and inventive than the one we find on the tree poets you have quoted. You can test this by simply comparing the sonnets of Shakespeare with the ones of Dante: Shakespeare does many more things in his 14 lines than Dante; his images are more striking, more unique, more inventive, more out of the common, more out of the cliché and the tradition. Virgil is hardly a poet of imagery, and you have to make great effort to find inventive images in his corpus. As for Homer, he uses great imagery, but he is too ancient: he suffers from the fact that he is too distant in time and much of his images sound now as cliché. Also, he is from a time were you would read about fighting and political discussions and rage and heroism, but nothing about Shakespeare’s “cakes and ale”, nothing about the world of the common folk, the world of everyday life.
I realized it a long time ago anon. Maybe not the GOAT, but...
He's certainly a top 3 American novelist.
I would say, in no particular order:
Melville
Faulkner
Henry James
Although Henry James barely even wrote about America so to the extent that he's not an "American" writer, I might replace him with Pinecone.
>>7820675
I should amend this post to say that James did in fact write extensively about American-ism, it's just that for the most part his books take place in Europe.
