After reading Absolom, Absolom! for over a year, I think I can read anything. I'm now moving to some simpler reading with The Sound and the Fury.

I don't know what it is, part of me loathes Faulkner, but like a really bitter IPA or a stanky French cheese, there's something that keeps me coming back. I'm not sure what it is.

I'll paraphrase an interaction I read about Faulkner. Someone told Faulkner that they've read his stuff three times and didn't understand it. Faulkner replied with "then read it four times."

So many characters and he doesn't tell you who they are until later, you find yourself making notes. It's like a Russian novel but with flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks and flashforwards.

Who else enjoys the masochistic Faulkner experience?

I taught the long version of The Bear (in Go Down, Moses) for many years to juniors in AP English.

I created a study guide the kids had to do that, they joked, was longer than the story.

Faulkner is certainly worth reading, but I suspect he is someone to read when you are young and have patience.

I am not young and no longer have the patience to re-read Absalom, Absalom or S and F.

However, I continue to re-read two works of his, Intruder in the Dust (short and intelligible) and The Reivers (about as close to a conventional novel as he wrote, and quite funny).

Similarly, Henry James was a great favorite of mine--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove--but I don't have the patience to read him any more.




Just a couple of comments on reading him: He wanted the publisher of The Sound and the Fury to use different colors of ink to represent the various times in Benjy's section. That was a no go.

I don't remember what novel it was, but he was driving along with a relative who was reading the typed manuscript (prior to publication), and the relative was so horrified by the "filth" that she tossed the pages out the window. Faulkner had to stop the car and retrieve his novel.

There is a book called Faulkner in the University (1959) worth glancing through. It is a transcript of the discussions with students he had at the University of Virginia when he was Writer in Residence.

He is alternately coy, discerning, and forgetful in his comments on his works and writing process.



I wonder how much he is taught in college these days? He is deeply sympathetic to black people in his books (the only sane character in S and F is black), but was skeptical of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and early 60s, which I am sure does not endear him to English professors these days.

The only experience I ever had with Faulkner was a short story in English 1302 at a junior college while still in high school about one of the Snopes, IO or Flem I think, and a bull that was supposed to be super symbolic. Of what, I don't remember. Probably sex as, is the case with what all English profs are into. I was like, this old professor is really all about this bull.

It doesn't look like I'm missing out on much. My takeaway was everyone knows families of which the Snopes are an amalgamation.

Yeah, tossed around the n word pretty liberally, but like with Twain, i think it was more of a commentary on the society back then than calling them that.

Yes, it's the characters, not the author, who use that language, as is also true in Huck Finn and in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Add Flannery O'Connor to that list.

I had to do a research paper on Faulkner in high school. What a beating that was.