Better than Joyce

I find it interesting to note the sheer quantity of authors who directly cite Faulkner as inspiration for their work. But I cannot think of a single one who was directly inspired by Joyce.

t. a pleb

Am I the only one who read Light in August as a retelling of Frankenstein? Between the "Chinese Box" frame narrative, the fire at the center of the novel and creation of a "monster" who kills the woman he loves. I'm 90% sure all the similarities are intentional, yet I've never come across a paper that discusses this.

What do you consider good prose if you dislike the prose of one of the best writers to ever live?

Find some primary sources to support you thesis and write the paper. It's like you don't even want to succeed.

Um...wut?

Swift, Addison, Fielding, Sterne, Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Newman, Conrad, Cather, Woolf, Waugh, Lowry, Graves, Borges, Nabokov, Updike, Cheever.

Joyce never produced a single turd - Faulkner produced them in droves though he was just as capable a writer.

funny you say that, considering Faulkner was heavily inspired by Joyce's writing style

I don't think he loved Joanna Burden, but I see what you're saying

Maybe, but I don't think Joyce ever had the chance to become bad like Faulkner did.

ahh so it is bait

literally just finished the sound & the fury a few minutes ago and it's the best book i've ever read desu

what about jimmy j's garbage poetry?
also, the man only wrote four books.

These are all great, but they are very fundamentally different styles than Faulkner. The authors you listed seem to have careful, lucid prose, whereas Faulkner's writing tends to be more fiery and quick. It's really just a matter of taste, and unlike most people, you seem to have a clear idea of what you like and what you don't, which I respect. May I ask which Faulkner works you have read, just out of curiosity?

This. I love Faulkner, but after 1943, his work went pretty downhill. I hated the Snopes trilogy.

A Fable might be the most WTF book I ever read. I had no idea what the hell I was reading.

I've wondered about this for years. It's easy to say that the alcoholism destroyed Faulkner but Joyce was just as inveterate a drinker.

he hasn't read any of them.

didn't he start writing more genre-tier works after Light in August?

You could say that, though with the obvious exceptions of The Wild Palms, Absalom, Absalom!, and maybe Go Down Moses.

I couldn't get through the Hamlet to save my life. Memes aside, it was actually corncobby

Ahh I'm a fool, I meant after Go Down, Moses. Absalom, Absalom! is one of my favorite books. I've got both Light in August and Go Down, Moses waiting for me for summer reading, not sure which I'll read first. Only read The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! by the man. All three of which are some of the best books I've ever read, with As I Lay Dying being the weakest of the three though still exceptional.

I agree with everything you said. I would recommend Light in August, but I just have a soft spot for Joe Christmas. They're both great and many of the Go Down Moses stories read well on their own even, most notably The Bear.

Sup cunts
I read a Faulkner short story once (The Bear) and thought it was fucking dope, 10/10 etc, so I jumped straight into As I Lay Dying, and while it's nowhere near as mind-screwy as everyone says it is, I just don't get why everyone says it's so great. I mean the stream-of-consciousness narration flows well and it's fun to grasp aspects of the story by only picking up on a few details from character's thoughts (like Dewey dell's pregnancy ), but it's just not blowing me away. Should I reread it, or read some more of his short fiction before jumping back in?

Fuck I meant to spoiler the stuff in brackets oh well

'Sound & Fury' and 'Light in August'. And yes, it's a matter of taste, which is why I couched the statement subjectively.

Yeah, I actually read Was by itself and loved it. Very difficult, I hadn't read Faulkner for around six months before I read that one. Really enjoyed the voice of the piece. The way Faulkner tells a story... It is fantastic. From what I've read by him, he's big on the oral tradition of a narrative. That is to say, someone telling a story to an audience, and the reader being a part of that audience. I love that, and try to emulate it in my own writing (though not nearly as complexly). For instance, the Mr. Compson sections in Absalom, Absalom! are fucking unbelievable. They sound very epic, and I don't mean that in the bastardized internet definition of epic. Really all of Absalom, Absalom! is indebted to the oral tradition, I just like Mr. Compson's best... Each voice in that novel is so distinct. Fuck, I could talk about it forever.

faulkner's prose is aesthetically impressive but often feels sort of unwieldy and unsuited to the stories he's telling. you can still admire it, but it's hard to really take it seriously. though his works still contain some fantastic passages.

joyce is very significantly better.

Booze fucked up Faulkner. Syphilis took down Joyce.

Its literally better to write a few good works than have an entire archive of shit and a few gems

i'm gonna say no

no

->wanting to write more shit than good

he has more than a few gems. he has certainly written more than four excellent books, as jimmy j did. additionally, i'd argue both the sound and the fury and absalom, absalom! are ulysses-tier works. as i lay dying is probably better than portrait of the artist, and around equal with dubliners.
i'm not sure how to compare any of faulkner's works to finnegans wake. faulkner didn't write anything that wildly experimental or incomprehensible. i haven't read it either, so i'd rather not judge the quality.
i'm still saying they're equally as good.

Proust crushes both easily.

This is a great idea. Just do yourself a favor. You need to break yourself out of the mindset of "intent", there's going to be a lot of people to jump at this post for supporting the New Critics but this is a fundamental hurdle for something like this: comparative work. There's no need to ever have to find documentation that Faulkner read Frankenstein or wrote a letter about it or anything, what you have is a genuinely good idea that only needs supportive evidence from the text established in essay form to back it up. You have intertextuality (think of it as all of literature as fish swimming in the same pond and sometimes you'll get some that are the same species, different markings and catch them a very significant time away from each other, you don't need to prove their lineage to make a comparison), Intertextuality allows us to make any sort of claim, but forces up to make up for the heuristic of artistic intent by making us decode certain texts for patterns and similarities. I don't mean for this to sound undergrad professorial, but you have a good idea you should be confident in and work to not get caught up in intentional fallacy.

Now New Criticism isn't the end all of criticism, engaging with texts as the mirror of genius creators' biographies is also interesting in its own right, but never once will anyone ask you to prove that an author intended to do something. For one thing it's impossible to ever know what the author intended, and also that's a really restrictive way of viewing art. It's a two-way street, there's no art if it's not being perceived so it's the beholder's job to make sense of it, not one person to try to tell you the one thing it means, because what we should take from literature is the fact that it meshes all periods, styles, content, archetypes whatever unconsciously.

read The Unvanquished
it's not as good as any of those but it's pretty great

Honestly, Faulkner was an amazing character writer in general. Thomas Sutpen should be as much a part of our cultural mythology as Captain Ahab.

I wouldn't say Proust crushes Joyce. They are both outstanding writers (possibly among the top 5 ever). It's a matter of preference. I prefer Proust, but they are very different.

Good point. Sutpen is mostly representative of the rise and fall of the South, but his story also matches that of the whole country: come in, take land from Indians, build big ass empire. Very culturally relevant.

not who you responded to, but i agree completely. i wonder why it is Thomas Sutpen is underrepresented. Absalom, Absalom! doesn't garner as much love as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, or even Light in August. Most people I know that are light readers or don't read but are somewhat familiar with American cultural figures know of the aforementioned three but not Absalom, Absalom!

I agree with all of this. Sutpen is one of the greatest American characters ever (along with Joe Christmas).

Faulkner was great for his form, not his content. That's where retards keep getting confused. He was a genius at making metaphor out of syntax, and that's not pretentious because there are clear, valid reasons in why he made certain syntactical choices, and they're clever as fuck.

Faulkner flunked out of the University of Mississippi, of all places. He was a dullard, and his writing was a mess.

Let me preface this by saying that Absalom, Absalom! Is my favorite book. Despite it being my favorite book, I have a problem with Faulkner's characterization insofar the he tends to render characters with such intensity that they cease to be people and become monoliths - especially so in Absalom.

can you explain some clever syntactical choices and the reasons behind them please

Most Faulkner scholars will put Absalom, Absalom! first among his works. It's just very inaccessible in comparison to the other works you mention.

I'm wont to agree.

Jesus Christ...it's been a while since I've seen an actual retard able to type...

Mosquitoes, Pylon, and A Fable are shit-tier Faulkner. I disagree with the Snopes trilogy, though. While Hamlet was a bit meh, I loved The Town and The Mansion.

All of the negations ( Sutpen being Rosa's "nothusband") in Absalom, Absalom! are sort of reflective of a fallen Antebellum South. It's fallen, hence the "not," but not really gone, insofar as people can't seem to stop thinking about the Southern U.S. in any other terms. Sutpen will always be the man who didn't marry Rosa, representative of the troth that never plighted, even though there should be plenty of other ways to conceive of him.

The only truly major Faulkner work I haven't read yet is Light in August, because I've still to find a copy. I prefer Absalom, Absalom most, followed by The Sound and the Fury and then The Unvanquished. I didn't really like As I Lay Dying all that much. I think The Wild Palms was even better than it. I loved The Town and The Mansion, as it put more focus on Gavin Stevens and actually developed the story more than the fragmented Hamlet, although Spotted Horses was an OK vignette.

Again, Pylon, Mosquitoes, and Fable are shit-tier Faulkner. Fable was probably the worst of the lot, though.

I disagree, Faulkner had a few diamonds, but he also had rubies, amethysts, and emeralds. It's unarguable that Absalom, Absalom! and Fury are his greatest works, but Unvanquished, As I Lay Dying, Snopes trilogy, perhaps even the Reivers, his short stories are definitely gems as well.

All of the negations also really fuck up your ability to read smoothly through any of the sentences. Even complex prose like Henry James' reads smoothly because he's using typical syntactical constructions - every time Faulkner throws a "not" in there it sort of makes your brain stutter, many negations strung together basically grinds your reading pace to a halt because you have to spend time decipher what he's saying in syntactically positive terms. Again, kind of reminds me the South trying to move forward immediately post-civil war and how Quentin is having a really damn hard time understanding exactly what the hell actually happened in Rosa, and Mr. Compson's story about the Sutpen family.

Not a Faulkner scholar, but it's my favorite novel of his.

EVERYTHING was perfect about that book. I couldn't read anything else for a week afterward because it was so fucking good.

I didn't know Faulkner was good typist. Maybe he should have become a secretary.

The very opposite of good writing.

>Not understanding how intentional obstruction works

Well, you'll always have Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn, won't you?

>Finnegans Wake
>not humongous shit
lol

>intentional obstruction
Y-you you don't understand! I was writing badly on purpose!!

Nice argument!

>intentional obstruction
The intentional fallacy rears its ugly head yet again!

Bad writing is bad writing, son.

Have you read the book?
>No
You don't get a seat the table.
>Yes
If you've read his other stuff, I don't know how you couldn't think the negations are intentional - he's using the negations to create new nouns and verbs. Confused retrospection is also a prominent idea in the book - the fact the he's recreating that psychological process in the reader seems intentional and artful.

gotta get on that man. great fucking book. Lena, joe, Rev hightower. i read that book years ago and those characters are still stuck in my head.

>EVERYTHING was perfect about that book.
I totally agree user. Absalom, Absalom! is incomparable. The chapter in which Wash kills Sutpen is the greatest thing I have ever read.

Go faulk yourself

My mind was seizing in an orgiastic throe because of its aptness. I was like FFFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCKKKKKKK and all that remained was an African-American retard in Sutpen's Hundred

Christ, just listen to yourself.

If I'm sitting down to a plate of foie gras, I'm not hoping the chef has ventured to "recreate" or re-enact the torturous life of a goose in my mouth. Make it taste good - the rest is horse twaddle.

...

Do i must read him in english, and is his prose difficult?

Its not the prose that's difficult, its inferring the actual plot from the prose, which is often based on a single characters stream of consciousness which gives a skewed view of what's actually happening.

> Reading Sanctuary now
Jesus christ what a dark story.

Were Faulkner and Steinbeck the forefathers of American gothic?

Didn't Faulkner disown sanctuary?

Southern Gothic? That's Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Both are great writers.

He did it to make money, but I liked it anyway.

what translation of the Odyssey is that from?

Eh I'm liking it so far, artistic integrity and talent aren't concepts with great correlation anyway

It does make for difficult reading, but honestly that's just the Modernist way. They wanted to destroy language, to communicate a world which is more basic and raw than abstract words can communicate. Hence all the language fuckery in Faulkner, Joyce, et al.

>7971220
Samuel Butler I reckon

The Sound and the Fury is the best example. In Benjy's chapter the dialogue is punctuated with periods rather than commas. Ex ' "No." He said. ' The reason behind this is because Benjy is a retard and can't keep anything in place (I.e. memory, sense of time), so punctuating dialogue with periods is the only way he as a narrator knows how to nails things down. Another example in Benjy's is Dilsey's diction. Notice how in other chapters Dilsey and Luster talk like dumb niggers, but Benjy can't tell the difference, he's basically colorblind in this regard; in Benjy's perspective, blacks talk the exact same as whites.

Another thing I always thought was clever in this book was how during Jason's narration, Caddy's name was never mention (if so tho, rarely). It gets confusing a lot and you have to keep going back and rereading just to make sure you didn't miss something, like Jason will be narrating some encounter with a woman, let's call her Jill, and say "her" or "she" not long after but he's talking about Caddy. This gets confusing but it's still clever, and its clever because after Caddy was disowned in the family, her name wasn't allowed to be mentioned in the household. In this case, why should her name be mentioned in the narration?

The point is make you think about it. If you can't work it out, you probably should just keep reading YA, where everything is overloaded with exposition.

And yes, he was writing that way on purpose because each syntactical choice he makes is never consistent with his whole body of work. Even each chapter in TSATF had their own unique form.

My old professor in college said Mosquitos was shit, and she practically worshipped Faulkner.

So basically you're just really thoughtless and superficial and you read solely for entertainment.

Jason's section is great. Pretty much everything Jason says about women, even if he's referring to a "Jill", is about Caddy.

lmao alright dude, cooking is an art as writing is an art but they are INCOMPARABLE

Faulkner was arguably better but he never had the ambition to make a 'big book' like Joyce's Ulysses

If only he'd made a big maximalist ""American Novel""

Kinda, he couldn't do what dos passos tried to do, whereas dos passo couldn't write like faulkner did

Better than Joyce also, but then lots of writers are.

You get props for including Updike, but you're still a pseud.

That's because they're allegory ya dip