Is this hard to read? Is it a good starting point into Faulkner?
>>8130724
As I Lay Dying is a more accessible starting point. This is usually considered to be his magnum opus, and has some notoriously confusing sections that become more clear as the book goes along.
Start with his short stories, then AILD, then TSaTF. Somewhere along the line check out his more accessible novels, such as Light in August.
absalom absalom is goat though, but do that after the already suggested order
Faulkner (like Joyce but less so) is only hard if you're going to get too hung up on not knowing exactly what's going on or where you are in time
>>8130724
Faulkner is incredibly difficult, which I think people dont understand when they get into the folksy nature of his prose.
>>8130758
basically both Joyce and Faulkner are only difficult if you're expecting to be able to visualize scenes rather than engage with prose.
>>8130758
OP this the best/only advice you need. Just keep reading and trust it coheres.
If you really feel like you're shitting the bed theres a site called litcharts that does decent mini summaries by sections. One quick glance n you'll be caught up. Ignore the analysis
>>8130803
I might be misunderstanding but you don't visualize when reading Faulkner and Joyce? Seems like it be pure torture
the first couple chapters are confusing but the later ones clear them up
>>8130817
“A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?”
>>8130817
> Seems like it be pure torture
that's only because the rise of visual media in the past century has taught you to think narrative art needs to be visual.
it might feel like 'more' work at first, but that's just because our 21st century brains aren't used to working that way.
>>8130830
Man this book starts off fine and gets weird senpai
>>8130724
I made my own list for Faulkner.
>>8130729
is right, start with his short stories, then ease into As I Lay Dying.
>>8131758
Why read Faulkner (other than him being part of the canon)?
>>8130817
He means that Faulkner and Joyce knew prose and knew what made it and the novel unique.
Like the first line of The Dead in Dubliners, which is condensed brilliance: 'Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally swept off her feet'. Here, the 'the caretaker's daughter' is appositional and is an (~)external description (the precise word escapes me) of Lily, like this is what someone else than Lily and probably above her social class would say of her. This then shifts completely to something very colloquial, an educated person would never say because nothing is 'literally' anything, and the perspective is shifted, sort of.
You find something similar in Austen's Pride and Prejudice in terms of shift in register: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'. Here, the register starts out with something you'd expect from a philosophical or legal treaty and shifts to an increasingly gossipy and/or colloquial one. This might be chauvinism, but Austen probably wrote out of intuition for prose and novelistic discourse whereas Joyce obviously studied it extensively, which is also why Joyce can feel a bit laborious.
>>8131762
The guy you're responding to is a Filipino who really got into Faulkner. In general, Faulkner has a fair number of devotees who consider him one of the best authors of all time and will read all of his shit. I don't like him as much as those guys do, but he does some interesting things with stream of consciousness and his prose isn't too shabby.
The major downside to Faulkner is that he was too fixated on the American south and that can make his books repetitive. I'd say at least As I Lay Dying, The Sound and The Fury, and Absalom, Absalom are worth reading. Everything else he wrote is skippable unless you really like his writing.
>>8133418
Well, is there really anything to learn from him other than his style? Messages and such?
>>8133446
In terms of themes he seems to deal with pride and poverty a lot.
>>8133484
Thanks pal
I need to read this again
I read it junior year of highschool and I could not tell you a single thing that happened in the first quarter outside of "Caddy smelled like trees"
>>8133446
he is the definitive southern gothic author
I started with Light in August and think that's a perfect point of entry
