How did an alcohol dropout hick have such a clear understanding of the tragedy inherent in life and mankind when self-deception and denial about it is so universal?
Faulkner
How did an alcohol dropout hick have such a clear understanding of the tragedy inherent in life and mankind when self-deception and denial about it is so universal?
1. Alcohol
2. Being well-read
3. Gift from God
fpbp if it weren't for (1)
You know it's true.
He was a goddamn star. Wish I had half his talent
>dropout
there it is. when you bear through university you almost always get funneled into working or becoming an academic. Oh, let me just finish my diploma, let me just finish my thesis and before you know it you're teaching a bunch of kids in school or a bunch of kids who've just graduated high school, and maybe the odd MA who knows what they're doing.
Dropping out or performing so badly that you'll never find a job, effectively getting your degree out of virtue for bearing through and finding absolutely no differentiated merit in that degree, is the only way you'd get the opportunity to dedicate time and have the time to dedicate to writing.
And then you'd probably need the observational talent and being well read you'd expect to find in someone who could become a writer but not in anyone else who drops out. That's simple academic tex analysis, we're not talking about hermeneutics or literary science but that deeper "tragedy inherent in life" you mention, when you look at someone and although they have everything you've ever wanted you can only pity them, not out of spite but out of honest, "godly" identification, seeing objectively what they had to sacrifice instead for them to get where they are.
You remove yourself from society, and being removed from society in the first place might've been what left you so unable to perform, to find success otherwise.
It's as in the philosophy of hegel and heidegger respectively where wanting to do something necessitates doing that to begin with. I eat, thus I need to eat, I further being a alive by eating and being alive necessitates eating. Sollen und Wollen als "Aspekte" des Tuns, that. It's a bit deeper but I don't feel so confident as to unravel it here.
shan't be reading any of that
Was actually pretty interesting.
For me it was the debt. I’m still wasting all my time doing work I hate 8 years later because I have to pay the debt.
Sorry dude, life is a college placement - employment meatgrinder from 18-24 and you fricking end up where you end up. And if anything goes wrong during those years you get sorted out. GL getting anything decent published without a good network from a good college. GL getting anything decent published regardless lmao. Faulker's situation was unique to his time and has nothing to do with how things work in the current year
There's more than one way to it, but it's true publishers try to close off fast-tracks once they notice one. Publishers try to discourage submissions to keep up with all of them, it's the main reason for lots of things like no email submissions, agents required, that's just their own interest. Plenty of people get published without MFAs or with careers that have nothing to do with writing. People can learn the business aspect as they go along, anyone competent enough to write a book can network. You don't need 10,000 friends either. A couple good partnerships or mentorships and you're on your way. And Faulkner got rejections just as much as anyone else these days, he kept records of them.
Schizo, plenty of 20 century French philosopher/writers were well educated teachers.
>how does a human being understand human beings?
Shame and self-blame at having his brother tragically die in a stunt plane accident--a plane which Faulkner bought Dean "Swift" Faulkner. Several teenagers also perished. But of course one takes the risk of being overly pessimistic about 'the tragedy of life' or over-invested in the inherent nobility of suffering, such that these types live in a sort of squalid mental apartment, in their own pessimism ghetto, a veritable Black who grows up impoverished of optimism, only to find themselves incarcerated in the psychiatric prison complex of self-pity, unable to vote ever again in the happiness elections, unable to find work in Hollywood... That's the real tragedy.
>alcohol dropout hick
>a clear understanding of the tragedy inherent in life and mankind when self-deception and denial about it is so universal?
>alcohol dropout hick
Answered your own question, you moronic city slicker. Go to eastern KY and call them hicks, you'll get a bullet between your eyes before you can unlock your prius.
No, they'll ask you if you want fries with your big mac. Driving through rural Kentucky is always an adventure. The highways seem pretty normal, but as soon as you turn off to get gas and take a piss you're surrounded by shirtless red necks, fat women, and barefoot kids. Frick... I'm not even making that up. Stop sucking, you're making the rest of us feel bad for you.
>No, they'll ask you if you want fries with your big mac. Driving through rural Kentucky is always an adventure. The highways seem pretty normal, but as soon as you turn off to get gas and take a piss you're surrounded by shirtless red necks, fat women, and barefoot kids. Frick... I'm not even making that up. Stop sucking, you're making the rest of us feel bad for you.
>pic
Bolaño?
No, you, city slicker
You
t. vibrant city dweller
One of the true greats. Absalom, Absalom! is the greatest novel I've ever read.
My favorite Faulker story is the fact the Nazis didnt intially ban his works because they pegged him as a conservative, agrarian racial purist.
The entire Nazi high command and propaganda and cultural bureaucracies got filtered reading fricking Faulkner.
Didn't he say he'd take up arms against blacks and the federal government in the name of Mississippi if he had to, like Lee?
>got filtered reading fricking Faulkner.
You say that as if he's not a hugely misinterpreted author. The YouTube Yale lectures on him are a perfect example.
I agree that he's not a conservative agrarian racial purist but he's certainly not the opposite either, despite what literature departments and people desparate to reconcile his work with the contemporary zeitgeist often try to push. Read through his lectures; his actual views aren't very straightforward or obvious.
>desparate
Desperate*
More on how often he is misunderstood are the essays on TSATF in the Norton edition. Even Sartre pretty much fails completely to understand the book.
Sartre was a hack who had no business in literature.
Probably tried reading Nausea, got filtered and then ignored all other works of fiction he wrote
The plays or the trilogy?
>t.has only read 30 books in life
>went through a pseud existentialism phase
Sounds about since you can keep Sartre’s shriveled wiener out of your mouth
Did Sartre rape you or something? Why do you hate that little man so much?
sartre and debeauvoir raped their female students. if you dont see anything wrong with that, kys trannoid
What's your source for these rape claims?
>im too moronic to google the sentence for attested mainstream news sources despite it being common knowledge on lit
Dumb response. The more probable cause would be laziness rather than the inability to use Google. That wasn't even the question. Now I know that you're basing your beliefs on newspaper articles (mainstream, lol).
>I agree that he's not a conservative agrarian racial purist but he's certainly not the opposite either,
Judging from interviews from Shelby Foote's interviews and Walker Percy's recollections, Faulkner seemed to be very enigmatic and standoffish to most people, especially the media.
Yeah I agree. His lectures are anything but direct and it seems very likely his views changed significantly through his life.
I don't know about that quote and the only thing I've read from him is Go Down, Moses, but that at least seemed like its purpose was "anti racist" through and through, I would be shocked if anyone could make a textually supported argument to the contrary. Not saying his views couldn't be ambiguous, but the message he ultimately wanted to get across was firmly on the side of criticizing slavery and colonialism.
I'd be careful about the nature of his criticism of "colonialism". Often it's not discernible from his criticism of modernization and industrialization in general, most obvious at the end of Go Down Moses and basically peppered everywhere throughout his works (it's probably his most obvious reoccurring theme). It's important that in general his perspective on all this is entirely fatalistic.
It's the same for his critique of racism. I wouldn't call it anti racism for fear of being mistaken for that horseshit today. Racism and miscegenation are much more nuanced for him (how could they not be as a post-Civil War Southern white), and again he always approaches things through the lens of fatalism; this is most obvious in Absalom, Absalom! but apparent even in Go Down Moses and Light in August (to say nothing of his short stories apart from Go Down Moses).
The passage the guy also quoting you showed is telling. Things are rarely so one dimensional in Faulkner.
I made both of those posts, the one you're replying to and the one with the passage, and you are right that his critiques of America ultimately stem from a desire for roots and a connection with one's land/ancestors, which also leads to a distaste for excessive mixing of races to the point of diluting one's particular inheritance. However this focus on natural simplicity also manifests in a strong belief in the equality, or at least the equal claim to human dignity, of all the races, and it manifests in a belief that whites are the race that have erred most grievously. I agree that he doesn't seem to be saying "white people are evil" in any way, but he clearly deeply regrets the path they have taken, even if it was fated.
You hit the nail on the head regarding his belief in the claim to dignity, for me that's a perfect distillation of his treatment of blacks and natives (and mixed race characters).
But I think you overstate the heed he pays to whites as a group, especially in terms of the magnitude or quality of their errors. Where do you read this? He thought slavery was untenable and segregation unfair, but nowhere that I'm familiar with does he seem to write from or explore a belief that "whites are the race that have erred most grievously," I hope you understand my suspicion considering how in-vogue and popular that view is today and how alien it would be, especially to a sympathetic Southerner, it was during Faulkner's life.
I didn't mean that he's saying they did wrong in the sort of slave-morality sense that you see in contemporary discourse; their error, at least the way he talks about it in "The Bear", is in being the modernizers, the ones who undid both themselves and their "victims" by uprooting themselves, the slaves and the natives in one fell swoop. This is the sense in which he's anti-colonialist, the impetus of his thought is basically the same as that of all the characteristic representatives of anti-modern ideas, it's just that he sees the original colonization as the most significant turning point in the process and so he seizes on that as the subject of his laments (or Ike's laments, at least, however much that does or doesn't correspond with Faulkner's own beliefs).
So the accusation is about hubris and greed, and the displacement those flaws wrought upon the beauty of nature itself and of the various peoples in their particular relations with nature; there's many microcosms of this in GDM and the way it all hangs together is very beautiful and unified and it's the furthest thing from the facile and sanctimonious nonsense that you're justifiably wary of. And of course there's a bittersweetness to it because he has a great love for the land and its people, even if those people have torn themselves or been torn out of paradise; he paradoxically resents them for their diluted, chaotic, fallen state but loves them for it with the love of a fellow-sufferer. Whatever he says about the colonization, I don't think he feels a desire to go back and undo it, the scars of that uprooting are the foundation of the identity which he was born with and to which he is intensely loyal.
The Nazis were against American racism towards Blacks and they opposed slavery and colonialism (subjugating third worlders). They were for the national liberation of colonized peoples. So Faulkner was not ideologically awkward for the Nazis.
On a cursory look over it again, I'd have to agree with you that he was with them on certain points, though obviously not the most distinctive ones:
>And cold too: he lay shaking faintly and steadily in it, rigid save for the shaking. This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like Black folk and Black folk crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and israelite, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares.… No wonder the ruined woods I used to know dont cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.
In the same story the characters directly discuss Hitler, and the gist is that his rise was also due to the aforementioned rootlessness. The overall perspective of Go Down, Moses is one that cuts across significant divides in the modern discourse, it would probably be a very healthy thing for many people to read, in addition to just being incredibly beautiful in its scope and its tragedy.
You don’t have to be intelligent to be make observations, be perceptive, be creative, and tell a good story
Who is more likely to survive the test of time, Faulkner or Hemingway?
One hundred years from now, much less five hundred, when all the cultural impedimenta upon which their writings rest has been washed away, whose art will survive?
Faulkner, without a doubt.
The Old Man and the Sea is almost on Faulkner’s level but nothing else of Hemingway’s is even close.
Faulkner's themes, at least in TSATF and AILD, are the same as Shakespeare's best. He'll survive.
He was quite literally the American Dostoevsky.
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes” — Maimonides
Credentialism and “trusting the experts” had been a bane on society,
where do i start with him
As I Lay Dying or the Sound and The Fury. Just pick one and then read the next. If you like him, I whole heartedly recommend getting his Collected short stories, then read one of them a day. It's amazing breadth of voices and feelings, and only a number of his short stories capture the brutality that his best novels had. Some are mundane, some profound.
>the Sound and The Fury
I heard the claim that first chapter is the most difficult thing he wrote.
The first chapter isn't difficult, the book isn't really that difficult either. If you just read it, the dread will build up. You're not supposed to fully understand what's going on so much as feel it. The term "the Sound" mean incomprehension, and thus why the beginning of it is written in the childish format that jerks you back and forth. It is really good but it's Act II that really kills it.
Probably because it was the first time he was giving it all while writing a non-conventional narration.
Yeah sort of but it’s intentionally difficult to understand, you get context on the order of events as you go through the other chapters. It’s the sort of thing where the first time is a little bewildering but another go after reading the rest you’ll know how the puzzle is meant to turn out.
>where do i start with him
At the beginning of one of his books.
>the Sound and The Fury
>I heard the claim that first chapter is the most difficult thing he wrote.
As I Lay Dying has dozens of short chapters (a page or two on average), all narrated by different people. Faulker originally wanted to have these chapters with no titles and no indication which character was speaking, which would have been absolutely insane. The publisher persuaded him to have the narrator's names as chapter titles, to give the reader some slight clue as to what's going on.
I suspect he did this because The Sound And The Fury, which was truly a labour of love, sold very poorly. I think his first instinct was "Screw you. If you think this first-person perspective is too difficult, I'll give you something to whine about."
>At the beginning of one of his books.
Rural people are actually not as hard to relate to as you ignorant arrogant c**ts all think.
>hick
>clear understanding of the tragedy inherent in life
People often say things like this. "How could Emily Bronte possibly have known what makes people tick as well as she did? She just lived in the middle of nowhere."
I feel exactly the opposite. To write novels you need lots of peace and quiet so you can hear yourself think, and a few people around you can observe over long periods.
How anyone gets anything useful done in a city I have no idea.
City slickers unironically think being lost in a sea of people, places and things makes them more sophisticated and human.
It’s no surprise their writings center around either decadent lifestyles, cheap spirituality or narcissistic self-obsession.
My English teacher said it was because he read ALOT
More like he read AILD.
>Faulkner
Who?
Can non americans understand him?
I would imagine only a Southerner could truly *feel* what he's trying to get across, or even more specifically, only a relatively upper-class Southerner (i.e. from a slave-owning family). However, if you're interested in understanding America, and particularly some of the aspects of America that have ended up recently permeating the rest of the developed world, then I think reading him would be incredibly valuable. He was also popular in France according to Sartre, although perhaps they misread him as the other anon claims Sartre did. But wiki also states he was a formative influence on the LatAm boom/magical realism.
So yeah with any author you might miss something if your experiences are disparate from theirs, but don't fall into the lazy black-and-white online mentalities that lead to over-categorizing and thus dismissing important authors. People's "takes" are shorthand and therefore often end up being overly extreme in one direction or another.
no