Signifying nothing?

[felis_ultharus]

The problem with stream-of-consciousness novels is that they tend to produce unconsciousness in their victims readers. It was a little interesting when Gertrude Stein tried it because it was still so new, but the lesson I took away from Stein is that all writing needs to be at least a little contrived because if you reproduce the way people really talk and think, the result is incredibly boring.

I'm muddling through The Sound and the Fury now, and thinking of all the better ways the story could've been written. There are enough hints about what's really going on under the surface of this wealthy Southern family to be interesting, but I really crave a fucking sentence right about now -- you know, subject, object, verb. Period.

This book needed a good mystery writer to pinch-hit for Faulkner -- one who'd present the family's surface, then peel away the layers like an onion. Right now we're getting bits and pieces of the horror in Tourettes-like spasms and it's just not a worthy style.

It's a shame. I really liked Faulkner's Light in August, one of the best novels ever written about racism. It was much better constructed, better crafted, well-built.

Comments

[rougemacabre.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, The Sound and The Fury.... I vaguely remember reading that novel. Well, that is the sense of pain I felt at being forced to read the work. Really, I think school isn't trying to teach us to like reading, it's trying to cause voluntary illiteracy. :-P

There are novels I've gone back to later in life that I didn't appreciate at the time. So far, TSATF is not one of them. Give me another fifty years, and we'll see.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It's the same everywhere. There's lots of good Canadian novels, but high schools here prefer to teach the ones that are all misery and pain.

Faulkner later on turned into a really good novelist -- once he left behind the modernist bullcrap and had something interesting to say. I think everyone should read Light in August. I can see wanting to teach him as an American novelist in American schools, but why couldn't they have used something more interesting?

Maybe it's because The Sound and the Fury is too incomprehensible to be controversial. I've caught vague references to rape, incest, and male prostitution in it, and that's pretty typical of Faulkner, but if no one knows what the hell's going on, parents can't complain.