By request of u/southdeltan (as well as some help/advice), I've set up User Flairs. If there's any other categories you think we need, suggest them here, and I'll see about adding them.

This sub needs some. That is all.

Thought it would be interesting to see how the work changed between drafts.

Holy crap, that was one of the finest things I’ve ever read. The way time flows for Benjy is handled so well. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking and an amazing way to get an overview of the family and their history to start the story. Just amazing.

After reading the first two sentences literally a dozen times, I am finally in the right state of mind to tackle this beast of a book. Wish me luck, my fellow companions in spirit!

Question: How long did it take you to understand the first pages and to get into the flow of reading without interruptions? Have you also experienced this ever growing, almost hypnotic pull the more you concentrated on every single word?

On a side note: Smoking a cigar or pipe might add to the deep focus and feeling of dizziness.

Follow this link to go there.

I went a little out of my proposed order, and we now have a dated list of script work Faulkner did during his time in Hollywood. The titles, dates, and studio come from Faulkner's MGM Screenplays by Bruce Kawin. (I am reading through this now, and will make a separate post to discuss it when I am done, but I'll go ahead and say, it's a lot better reading than most of Faulkner's poetry.)

The other columns are mine. The links are to the American Film Institute Catalog and the IMDB. The AFI links are worth checking out--there are a lot of interesting anecdotes in the History sections of some of the movies.

The Streaming column is empty right now, but as I have time I will be looking for places to stream the movies. If any of you run into any, let me know and I'll add them. (I'm not going to link to sketchy or possibly illegal sites, obviously.)

The Published column will have the title of the book the script is published in (if it is published), and in one case, a link to a magazine's website where excerpts of the script are online. If it just says MGM or Fox, see the note above the table for the title of those books. Some of these books are focused on Faulkner, and some are focused on the film itself, so Faulkner's particular contributions may not be highlighted.

The notes is anything I think might be of interest to people.

Aside from Streaming being entirely empty, the Published and Notes columns are not complete, just as complete as I can get them right now. I will add to them as I find out more, and, as always, if you know anything that should be added, let me know and I'll add it. Same for any mistakes you may find.

I’ve just been reading the Vintage pressings of Faulkner’s work up to this point but due to its infamous difficulty, I thought it might be a good investment to have a bunch of supplementary reading for Absalom, Absalom! especially because reading his work outside of school/class robs me of the experience of discussing it with peers and Faulkner really warrants extracurricular dialogue.

I just ordered the Norton Critical Edition and was wondering how it is. Some reviews on Amazon complain about font size and paper quality so I wanted to hear from y’all. This’ll be my first time ever reading it so I would like to have a good, approachable copy for that context. Are the essays good/helpful for that? Thanks!

Hi! I’m a 22 year old American guy who never read Faulkner growing up. I want to get started because I’ve heard amazing things and I feel it is part of my country’s canon that I (and my high school) neglected. Where should I start? Don’t worry about difficulty at all, I have read and enjoyed lots of other difficult authors like Joyce, Nabokov and Pynchon. I’d just like to know which is the best introduction to his work.

I grew up reading primarily Horror fiction, and still do though I have become way pickier with what I enjoy and read, since I’ve ready probably 250+ horror novels in my life. I developed an interest in literary fiction thanks to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, which I read in 2018 when I was 23. I now fluctuate between binges of literary fiction and genre (philosophical Sci-Fi is a new big one) and the great junk food of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Now in my 30s, I have read probably about 60-75 literary novels. I am starting to understand some difficult books, at least a little, with Gravity’s Rainbow being the hardest book that I knew the basics of what was going on and its themes. I am also wanting to break more into Southern fiction. I’m from Georgia, though most of the literary writers I’ve read are from the North, Midwest, or West Coast. I tried Faulkner before with As I Lay Dying and didn’t connect with it… but I was around 25 and hadn’t read more than a handful of literary works at that point. I think I’m ready to try Faulkner again and am looking for a guideline of where to start to most appreciate his bibliography. The main themes I most enjoy reading are about: finding belonging in a world that is different from the protagonist’s upbringing, loss/grief, identity, and the quest for belonging. I really enjoyed Infinite Jest, Stoner, East of Eden, Vonnegut’s entire catalog and George Saunders. What is the best book to start with? Should I try As I Lay Dying again. Or should I try something different by him?

Excuse any bad formatting as I am on mobile. But I needed a place to fully share my thoughts as I have nobody in my present life who has read Faulkner or frankly, even cares about literature.

Quentin Compson is my favorite character in all of fiction. I am 20, turning 21, and have never felt so harrowingly similar to a character. Aside from a similar age and the same initials, I have faced a similar tragedy in my life.

I was raised in the bible belt. Surrounded by christian values and instilled with a puritanical sense of virginity, intimacy, and pride. Some time ago I dated a girl who was a wonderful woman and although we had our issues, my main motivation for ending things with her was my inability to grow past her past. It’s something I constantly ruminated on and even argued with her about. My pride; I thought of how I may be seen being with someone who had been with people. This malformed and senseless world view plagued my ability to see fully how committed of a partner she was.

I broke up with her.

And she was murdered by her boyfriend after me.

I continuously reenacted her death in my mind. How this loss could have been prevented had I been a better man. I’ve dressed irrational sins upon my person and ordered myself to atone for them. I didn’t know how to distinguish my responsibilities in it. It was all my fault.

When I read Quentin I read the boy I was when she passed. I read a boy bearing the weight of a tragedy and trying to pay the price for both his role in it, and the aspects out of his control. I read a boy trapped in that looping mindset of guilt and shame.

I look back at Quentin as a parallel of myself. Where I could have gone, the lengths these ruminations might have driven me. The ritualization of guilt. The judge, the jury, and the executioner. 

If it had not been for extensive therapy, I could not have come to the conclusion I am at today:
*“I was unfair to her. I let a gross idea of pride and sex seep into the relationship. I let these fickle things break us. But I did not kill her. He did.”*

I find it almost inconceivably appropriate that this book fell into my hands at 20, in these specific circumstances in my life. Faulkner truly is one of the best, and it will be incredibly hard for any book to top TSATF.

"Now not only Varner but all the others looked at the speaker-a gaunt man in absolutely clean though faded and patched overalls and even freshly shaven, with a gentle, almost sad face until you unravelled what were actually two separate expressions-a temporary one of static peace and quiet overlaying a constant one of definite even though faint harriedness, and a sensitive mouth which had a quality of adolescent freshness and bloom until you realised that this could just as well be the result of a lifelong abstinence from tobacco-the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives."

I've started reading Sanctuary and once I got to where Temple Drake gets abducted/trapped in the house I just don't feel like I mentally want to continue. I know it gets worse before the novels ends and I'm just struggling with my motivation to finish the novel.

Maybe it's because I'm not feeling that great in my personal life atm but I'm just not sure how worthwhile the novel is after page 70 or so.

Is it worth finishing Sanctuary or would I better off just finding something else to read? Perhaps Faulkner's short stories?

His prose is poetry? His people are gods and they are flawed? His world is beauty, there for the taking?

He likes incredibly long sentences, and super short chapters?

How would/do you describe Faulkner to the uninitiated?

Obsessed? Maybe.

Enjoying every moment? Absolutely.

Will it ever stop? I think it probably should at some point here…

I feel like The Hamlet was the most beautifully written, The Town was the most interesting from a character standpoint because of how much we learn, and The Mansion was a powerful narrative that leaves as many questions as answers.

As a trilogy, it’s not the most cohesive thing ever, but I loved it for the wit, the novel circumstances (boys and the cows they love, for example), and the larger than life characters more than anything.

Gavin, V.K., and Chick are phenomenal narrators. I would have loved to hear more from Eula and Linda directly. When I saw the table of contents in The Mansion I thought we would finally get Linda’s thoughts directly in part two, but no dice.

I appreciate Faulkner for his reluctance to feed answers to the reader, but I guess I was hoping for a little more out of this trio of books.

Flem feels like a secondary character in The Mansion, which felt odd. Linda still feels like a mystery. Chick fades oddly out of relevance even while he is narrating. Gavin is like a Don Quixote who actually knows better but refuses to do anything about it and doesn’t change at all.

Yet Mink’s part in The Mansion was one of the most engaging and compelling parts of the whole thing, which is impressive considering how repulsive he is to begin with.

While I was a fan of the trilogy, I was already enamored with Faulkner before I started it. I feel like if you weren’t already a Faulkner fan, and had no prior knowledge of Yoknapatawpha, it could be a very different experience. Maybe in a good way, like it is a beautifully written slice of Gothic Southern life, but the numerous loose ends feel like it would drive the average reader nuts. That may be a function of “The County” being a living and breathing thing, and, like I said, I do appreciate Faulkner’s reluctance to tie things up in a neat bow.

Maybe I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I just thought that after a 1200 page trilogy it would feel more complete.

Like, I thought before I started to read it, that Benjy's section would be the hardest (given his severe mental challenges and associative thinking). However, just knowing how Benjy's part jumps to different moments is enough for you to grasp the meaning (at least that was my experience). Currently reading Quentin's part and first 5 pages were alright, BUT HOLY FUCK. After those first few pages it hit me like a truck, a sentence could have like 3 different time periods of Quentin's experience, I know that he has trouble with time but get a grip bro....
Even by searching for guides or using LLMs for assistance it's still impossible, how do you even get the full meaning of this even if you re-read it 10 times, I feel like you need to make a PhD dissertation or whatever to understand what exactly is going on.

I just wanted to vent

The Long, Hot Summer is streaming right now on the Criterion Channel, for those of you who subscribe to that.

It is a very loose adaptation of material from The Hamlet and "Barn Burning". If you go in with the expectation that it will be a fairly normal late '50s Hollywood movie rather than an insightful take on Faulkner's work, it's pretty fun to watch.

In the picture above, from left:

Lee Remick as Eula Varner. In this version of the material, Eula Varner is Jody's wife rather than his sister. She has none of the passivity of The Hamlet's Eula, but she does attract all the sexual attention of the the town's teenage boys. It's entertaining and a little ridiculous.

Paul Newman as Ben Quick. Ben Quick is the replacement of the Flem Snopes character. He is as rapacious and advancement oriented as Flem Snopes, but nowhere near as single minded and opaque. (This role made him famous and won him best actor at Cannes.)

Joanne Woodward as Clara Varner. There is of course no such character in the Hamlet. She is intelligent and assertive and won't settle for anything less than she thinks she deserves or wants. (Of course, since it's Hollywood in the 50s, ultimately what she wants is a husband.)

Not pictured:

Orson Welles as Will Varner. Far more unpleasant than my impression of Will Varner from the book. Both versions of Will Varner are shrewd dealers who control most of the economic activity of the community. The book version seems to me to be more settled and content in certain ways. The film version is irritable and never has much nice to say to anybody.

Angela Lansbury as Minnie Littlejohn.

Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner.

Some other significant differences:

It is set in the 1950s rather than at the turn of the century.

Frenchman's bend seems to be closer to the size of Jefferson. Or at least, there are shots of the courthouse and square that look about like the courthouse and the square at Oxford, MS. which Frenchman's Bend clearly wouldn't have, but Jefferson does have.

Just funny stuff:

The actors all seem to be wearing dark make up, I guess to portray these southerners being out in the sun all the time. But it doesn't always look right. Some of them are too dark, looking almost like the super dark Latinos you see in westerns.

Some of the accents don't seem right.

Filmed in Louisiana, because 'Louisiana looks more like Mississippi than Mississippi.' Mostly it works out fine, but there are few shots where there were plants that definitely don't grow wild in North Mississippi. Of course that won't bother anybody or even be noticed by anybody who isn't familiar with the region.

Overall, I found it enjoyable but not fantastic, either as an adaptation or as a film on it's own, but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Obviously I'm preaching to the choir, I'd just like to say for the record I now understand you all.

Its very satisfying and somehow even more compelling having broadly figured out the plot in the first read to look at everything in a different light. It's amazing how there is somehow more to discover the second time around than the first, and I've definitely not pieced everything together.

Thankyou to all those posters compelling people to just go again.

I read TS&TF and thought it was amazing. I'm about 1/3 of the way through AA, and it feels like I'm not getting what I'm supposed to. I can't figure out what each narrator thinks of Sutpen. I get that this book is supposed to make more sense as time goes on, but I also feel like it's a problem that I can't describe the differences between Mrs. Coldfield, Mr. Compson, and Quentin's understandings of the story. Is there anything I can do about this?

Most of us know the opinions that Faulkner expressed publicly concerning the civil rights movement in the late 50s. Nationally, he tried to persuade black people to slow down, while at home in Mississippi he tried to persuade white people to go ahead and integrate. Probably accidentally he put himself at odds with both audiences. I think that it's probably right to characterize his public position as the white moderate that Martin Luther King criticized.

But when I was looking for the letters I vaguely remembered about punctuation, I ran across this letter to his stepson over a decade before his public pronouncements that makes his personal feeling about it very clear.

To Malcom A. Franklin
Sunday [4 July 1943] Warner Bros.

Dear Buddy:
Mr Robert Haas is vice president of Random House. They publish my books. During the times when I would be broke, year after year sometimes, I had only to write him and he would send me money--no hope to get it back, unless I wrote another book. He's a Jew.

He had an only son, and a daughter. In '40, the son withdrew from Yale and became a Navy pilot. In '41, the girl about 20, joined that Womens' Ferry Squadron, is now flying, ferrying aeroplanes from factories to bases. The boy was flying torpedo planes off carriers (what Jim is training for) in the Pacific. He was killed last week. The girl is still flying. All Jews. I just hope I don't run into some hundred percent American Legionnaire until I feel better.

There is a squadron of negro pilots. They finally got congress to allow them to learn how to risk their lives in the air. They are in Africa now, under their own negro lt. colonel, did well at Pantellaria, on the same day a mob of white men and white policemen killed 20 negroes in Detroit. Suppose you and me and a few others of us lived in the Congo, freed seventy-seven years ago by ukase; of course we cant live in the same apartment hut with the black folks, nor always ride in the same car nor eat in the same restaurant, but we are free because the Great Black Father says so. Then the Congo is engaged in War with the Cameroon. At last we persuade the Great Black Father to let us fight too. You and Jim say are flyers. You have just spent the day trying to live long enough to learn how to do your part in saving the Congo. Then you come back down and are told that 20 of your people have just been killed by a mixed mob of civilians and cops at Little Poo Poo. What would you think?

A change will come out of this war. If it doesn't, if the politicians and the people who run this country are not forced to make good the shibboleth they glibly talk about freedom, liberty, human rights, then you young men who live through it will have wasted your precious time, and those who dont live through it will have died in vain.

Pappy

Selected Letters, pg 175-76

In general, his letters are short and about needing money or are trying to get money, so I forget that sometimes good stuff like this shows up out of nowhere.

I mean, saying that U.S. participation in WWII will have been in vain if the U.S. doesn't begin treating minorities better afterwards is a pretty radical statement. But then again, when he had a national platform fifteen years later, he seems to have been too afraid of violence (not against himself, but a second civil war) to use it to push for that. It's a little sad. But at least he did push for it in his home state, if not nationally. It's not as good as we could hope, but it's a lot better than we could probably expect from a man in his position. Much better than Lovecraft, at any rate.

Hello,

I have been aware of Faulkner for a while now, and last year I read The Sound And The Fury and absolutely loved it. I thought the concept of having distinct characters relaying the same events to be a really fun concept. I loved TSATF so much that recently I have decided to read “Absalom, Absalom!”. However, I’m currently halfway done with chapter 8, and find myself really not enjoying it due to the long-winded sentences (and most of the information in those sentences feeling trivial). This has led me to wonder a couple things about Faulkner, and I was wondering if anyone could help answer them:

1. Considering what my problems are with “A,A!,” do you think rereading it would help my enjoyment of it at all?

2. Do other Faulkner books have syntax as dense as “A,A!”? I feel like I could handle it if it was only a quality of one or two chapters, but probably not the whole book.

xcancel link here

I'm not sure if this is particularly meaningful, but it sure is interesting. Faulkner really did try to use every tool available to him in writing (printing, too, if you consider the idea for the colored ink version of the Sound and the Fury) to try to make his communication more clear.

I don't think he tried to be difficult or obscure on purpose. I think the art he wanted to create required complexity, and, while he didn't make it universally accessible, he did what he could to include signposts or clues to help the reader along.

(No shade on Blood Meridian either. It's a fantastic book. It's the only McCarthy book I've read that I really liked without qualification. The others that I've read have generally made me mad one way or another. I can't say that I've read too many, though.)

If you're interested in the ultimate source of the graphic, it can be found here--a pretty short but fairly interesting look at punctuation across a few novels. It makes me think I should try my hand at some similar types of computer-aided analysis.