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.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Stream of consciousness works should be limited by law (as in 'of the cosmos', not as in 'federal law') to minor pieces such as poetry or short stories. It's an effecive device if you are H P Lovecraft and you need your author to go gibberingly insane at the end of a ten page story, when he has seen the Eldritch Horror, but otherwise all it does is alienate the reader. The whole point of writing is to translate what is in your head into a format that other people can view and theoretically understand. Stream-of-consciousness novels are like trying to give your English-speaking audience an 'authentic' view of your character's thoughts by writing in un-translated Swahili for the entire book.

Even Timothy Leary could write in full sentences, for fuck's sake.

[ubergreenkat.livejournal.com]

I've never managed to read Faulkner, but I did laugh aloud reading this.

When Oprah decided to read Faulkner with her book club last summer ("because no American can claim to be well-read without reading Faulkner" cause that makes a fuck-load of sense, Oprah), several of his books became instant best-sellers when they had been slated to be out of print. My rational side says this is good - people reading and all that. My overwhelmingly superior academic side still hates Oprah.

[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.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

John Ralston Saul, complaining about deliberately disjointed styles, noted that Ford Maddox Ford used it to marvellous effect to show the incipient chaos of the post-WWI world. And you're right about Lovecraft using it for horror.

I agree that the novelist has a task of translation. But it does raise a curious point. Faulkner's characters' streams of consciousness don't resemble my own thought processes, so is it an accurate portrayal of Faulkner's though processes, or a contrivance that isn't even interesting?

Probably more of interest to Oliver Sachs, though, than a study of literature.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

My feelings about Oprah are a little like my feelings about JK Rowling singlehandedly winning one of Amnesty International's battles in the Czech Republic: no unelected official should be allowed to command that level of power, but I'm glad she's using for good rather than evil.

What's funny about my edition of The Sound and the Fury is that it not only has the big O-for-Oprah logo on the front, but the back-cover blurb begins with a giant O in exactly the same font ("One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century...").

Matt thought it was hilarious that one of the classic texts I read for my comprehensive exam was labelled "The book that re-launched Oprah's book club!"

Sadly, the book by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland that ended the previous incarnation of Oprah's book club -- because she recommended it before realizing it satirized the kind of talk-show wisdom she's famous for, then temporarily ended the book club -- is not similarly labelled.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I think what it boils down to is that it's a representation of how Faulkner thinks his characters think. There's no way to judge the accuracy of that, as his characters aren't 'real people' in the sense that they exist outside of his story. All the same, if it's actively painful to read, he's not doing a good job of translating that to the page, either.

On the other hand, since it's pretty much always a case of 'how the author thinks his characters think', you can glean some interesting things about the really deranged writers from reading their stuff. You can't always get it from a single piece, but you'll see running themes through their body of work which, even if the author doesn't think that precisely, are very telling when you realize the author thinks other people think that.

Sorry for the incoherence -- I've caught the plague. ^^;;;; Decongestant is my friend, but only if I don't have to be linear or have an attention span.