I don’t mind working toward understanding, and I don’t mind reading things that are challenging. I just get irritated at extremely nonstandard grammar, etc.
Start with his short stories. You’ve probably read A Rose for Emily. Try reading Death Drag, Uncle Willy, Hair, Mule in the Yard. His style is easier to digest here, and I think it prepares you for reading his novels (if you’re still inclined to try after giving his short stories a go).
No. For the love of God no. Faulkner is the epitome, the very apex of the giant mountain of overrated authors (only slightly ahead of James Joyce). If he was not taught to, and later by, pretentious, black turtleneck wearing, thin black cigarette smoking English Grad Students, he’d be the biggest joke in American literature since “a guy walks into the bar”. And it’s not just one small flaw. EVERYTHING about his writings is atrocious. The plot. His style. His word choice. The beginnings, the middles and his endings. He’s tedious, boring, inane, and more overrated than Joe Namath.
Eat broken glass.
Give yourself a vasectomy with a rusty spoon.
Anything except read Faulkner.
You’ll thank me later.
Since this is a website ostensibly about fighting ignorance, I feel compelled to point out that much of what Faulkner writes is written in standard English. When it’s not, it’s deliberate and purposeful. You make it sound like he hasn’t written a coherent sentence in his life. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Anyone who says that reading Faulkner is like eating broken glass doesn’t get it. I know, I hate it when people say that too, but why not try it for yourself and make your own decision?
Well, how long does reading a novel take? Not long if you can sit for a few hours in silence. Just grab one and dig in. I’d also recommend “As I Lay Dying” or “Go Down Moses,” both of which are commented upon above. Pick one up on mp3 and check it out while walking or driving – you’ll know if he’s one of your guys pretty quickly, unlike less plastic authors about whose work you may better know something first.
At the least you’ll be empowered to resist reacting in verbigeration and may do so in idiom and coherence, should you want it, to his fans.
Also, if you were able to read Melville, Faulkner shouldn’t pose much of a challenge, I’d think. It seems to me like they were cut from similar cloth.
FYI, as far as it is possible to be objectively wrong about something that most people would consider subjective, you’re pretty frikkin wrong. It’s cool you’ve chosen to leave a Faulkner-shaped hole in your life, but to suggest that your literary choices are the universal truth is more than just arrogant and solipsistic; it’s pretty nearly delusional. Also you should look up “epitome” before you use it again. Especially if you’re going to use it when lecturing your betters on literature.
Great Ghu, NO!
Run as fast as you can from this Southern Gothic crap. Having been forced to read The Sound and the Fury for lit class, let me totally and unequivocally endorse **Hamlet’s **suggestions above.
He’s a must to avoid.
I love these people who have read one book of his, and probably his most opaque if it’s TSatF, thinking they have enough information and the critical acumen to dismiss the entire oeuvre a Nobel Prize-winner out of hand. OK, you had a bad experience with that one book in college. Get over it. That’s not the sum of the man’s work. It may not be to your taste, but the hyperbole that’s getting thrown out here to discourage the OP from even trying… well, it’s make me want to read it more, actually.
Faulkner and Joyce are extraordinarily difficult. I found Faulkner a bit easier to read. The only Joyce I’ve read is Ulysses, and it is tough, but there are a few moments of such sheer vivid brilliance that you are transported to early 20th century Dublin in a way that no other author has ever been able to move me. But those moments are hard to find in a book that is much, much longer and almost as difficult as the Benji sections of The Sound and The Fury. These authors are very difficult and the rewards are long in coming. If you aren’t up to such hard work, but still want to do Southern Gothic, try Flannery O’Connor, whose writing might even be called Southern Gothic Horror. But her writing is a bit more accessible. If you must do Faulkner, A Light In August is much easier going than The Sound and The Fury. Why anyone would assign TSATF to high school students or lower division undergrads is beyond me.
Oh, and Faulkner in general is much harder than Moby Dick. For Moby Dick, when reading it for the first time as an adult, don’t skip the introduction and you can skip the description/catalog chapters, but do read them the second time through. Moby Dick is my favorite American novel.
One thing that always helped me with Faulkner was reading aloud. So grab a drink and settle into your favorite armchair.
Reading him out loud helps on two levels - first, hearing the words helps you appreciate the beauty of Faulkner’s language, it just flows and rises and falls in a delightful way.
Second, it’s a great aide for parsing out what his crazier characters are saying. This speaks to Opal’s point about Faulkner’s use of non-standard grammar. It’s sometimes confusing on the page, but it is very intentional and when one hears it spoken aloud, it can become much more clear. One of Faulkner’s goals was to better represent what goes on inside people’s heads, and angry people or demented people or people caught up in a flood of emotion or memory don’t necessarily think in fully-formed sentences with strict formal grammar.
Also, I confess sometimes I have fun reading Faulkner using a fake Southern accent for dramatic effect, kind of like Holly Hunter does Masterpiece Theater.
I endorse the suggestions of A Rose for Emily for a short story, and As I Lay Dying for a novel.
In my experience, Faulkner is almost as bad a Joyce-which means you hve to wade through imcomprhensible prose, re-read it, and finall consult an edited edition. Gaaahhh!
Well, if you take “bad” in the Miles Davis sense, and replace “hve to” with “get to,” I agree.
The first one I read was “Absalom, Absalom,” and it kicked my ass completely – I had to make a little map and family tree just to get the characters and the basic conceit straight. Not everything is equally inscrutable or equally saga-ified in his corpus, as has already been said, though.
What edited editions are you talking about? Cliff’s Notes? If so, I agree that for any novel, if you’re the kind of person (like me) who would rather pay attention to other things than reading a novel for the page-turning suspense thrill, it’s helpful to know it advance in some detail what the plot of the novel is, beat by beat. But that goes, in my method of reading, for absolutely anything.
I don’t see how Joyce is really relevant to Faulkner, other than that they both are modernists and (not surprisingly, given their metiers) are they both are good with the words.
Don’t start with *The Bear *is all I can add to this discussion.
This is extremely helpful for reading Faulkner. If you read it fastasisthepacewiththemodernworld, it’ll drive you nuts. Faulkner comes out of the Southern oral storytelling tradition, where words and timing are savored. I’m a transplanted Southerner (born in California, but rooted since teens here), and, to me, the key with Faulkner was pacing the reading as if hearing it with Southern cadence, meaning, slow down a bit.
You could then say, well, wtf, that doesn’t do me much good, gotta read it the way I read it. But, it’s well worth it to slow down and savor his words; he was an incredible craftsman and observer, and his innovation was to try to take that into writing.
Tried to add; but no response abled, so, here:
I’m coming back to add: Sampiro’s threads here are likewise in reading for me. If you try to read fast and cram it all down, it can be overwhelming. But, reading it as talking, in that mode, ya slow down and enjoy the ride of umpteen digressions and elaborations, because that’s the fun of storytelling.
There is no literature so well written, no painting so inspired, no music so well crafted, no cuisine so delicious, as to prevent some dilettante from having the kind of reaction this thread has provoked from the likes of Hamlet and Hometownboy.
In a nutshell: The greater the work of art, the more vehemently some people will hate it.
Faulkner is worth reading.
That doesn’t mean you’ll like it.
What crawled up your Verhoeven and died?
What a witty comeback. Truly you ooze literary credibility.
Did I accidentally wander into the Pit?
So far, lissener, Knorf, and you all have taken pot shots at me because I think Faulkner is a horrible writer, and expressed it in a hyperbolic way. Luckily, I’m a big boy and can suffer the slings and arrows of the likes of you … posters. But your inanities still don’t make Faulkner a good writer.