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The Sound and the Fury
Three brothers and their servant experience a day each, which collectively tell a story of decay and misery.
This book ultimately fails because it doesn’t tell an interesting story. It doesn’t generate meaningful experiences for the reader.
Maybe it did once. Maybe it still means something to some southerners.
But no matter how much you bend over backwards with crafty modernist literary technique, if you’re going to ask for a reader’s attention, you’re on the hook for telling a story that means something. This is not that.
I remember an old tweet from Aella where she told about how her and her polyamorous friends would watch movies together and whenever the conflict was driven by monogamy they’d shout at the screen, “monoplot!”
The whole time reading this a voice in my head was shouting “southern honor plot!” The first three parts are just dumb, sad, and miserable reactions, respectively, to a non-event.
I can imagine that there are some people still living who have the perfect slumdog millionaire mix of values, experiences, and intelligence to crack this as an intellectual nut and still have bandwidth to spare for an emotional reaction to it. They are certainly few.
I believe that this book survives today primarily on momentum of people who report admiring it to the next generation, because they heard someone admirable report liking it.
At the height of its power, this was a critics’ book. 98% critic score, 51% audience score kind of thing.
Today, it’s just one of those pieces of cruft that clutters up greatest of all time lists because too many people are afraid to out themselves as philistines by openly declaring “I thought it was confusing, boring, overwrought trash.”
Well, I thought it was confusing, boring, overwrought trash.
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I don't think art has to be beautiful, but I do think it has to be impactful. I don't think this book accomplished either.
And spinning your response to my own ends:
The fact that your main memory is of trying to make sense of it intellectually is evidence of it being overwrought and confusing.
And for geeks like us, especially at impressionable young ages, it can be a fun experience in itself to get nerd sniped into figuring out how to decode something weird and novel.
But for me anyway, once I cracked the stream-of-consciousness-modernist-extremely-unreliable-narrator code, the fun of it basically evaporated.
And I also think it's rare for it to convey a feeling or experience more effectively than classical narration, even when done well
AND I think many writers, including Faulkner, actually do a poor job of conveying the way thoughts flow. Partly because people think radically differently, partly because a lot of thought is non-linear, partly because a lot of thought is non-verbal, etc.
It's kind of like how people praise the cinematography of the fight scenes in Raging Bull as being "naturalistic" when there's hardly anything natural about it at all
I'm gonna miss this while I'm away, thanks again for playing :D 0 reply
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