the style, the diction, those phrases

I am in raptures about that amazing style. I will in future posts give some examples. But surely I am not alone. Perhaps we can share them. Perhaps we can attempt to analyze them beyond "I like this".

I love it too. Were I WF I could say why :D

This may be one of the loveliest, most poignant paragraph in American fiction:

"It is just dawn, daylight: that gay and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with the loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. 'That was all I wanted' he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. 'That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.' "
Chapter 14
Page 289
Modern Library #88 1950

That is a truly lovely quote Linda. And do you not find yourself breathing a little more deeply when you read it? I did when I read it in the book and here again I did the same thing. Strange? IDK>
belva

I`m late joining in. WHICH BOOK???? has this paragraph???

Sorry to be so obtuse---I get it! The real discussion is Light in August. Will look it up---

Shame, Andrew...the topic should have the title in it. Tsk..tsk...

That passage you quote, Linda, is also very sad. One of the saddest.

I believe this thread is about the musical beauty of his language, the lyrical phrasing and the word-creation, which are brilliant. But I think part of that power is in the way Faulkner is able to cut to the heart of so many truths. In other words: it's not just how he says it but that he has so much to say. Here is one that struck me very powerfully (Hightower, near the end):

"It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: what is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples."

The long sentences often add power, too, I think, along with the kind of repetition that's so effective in African-American sermons and speeches.

BTW: This could be an ongoing thread, used with all the writing of Faulkner we read. The language is always powerful, always mind-bending.

I fondly remember the novel Wild Palms, where Faulkner describes the wife of a landlord resembling a manatee. Lovely little bit of weirdness.

something I like, from A Rose for Emily - and not the whole sentence in a bid to avoid spoilers:

" and the very old men -some in their brushed Confederate uniforms-on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily . . . believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."

So what are the two works that won't be named? You've incited my curiosity.

11 - "So what are the two works that won't be named? You've incited my curiosity."

What do you mean? I see no mention of two unnamed works on this thread?

Not on this thread, Tony, but on the main group page. The two novels are Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, two of his earliest novels which are not generally held in high regard. See this thread, too.

Novels that aren't held in high regard sometimes merit critical reappraisal. Akin to film critics reappraising B-movies and genre films in light of the French New Wave cinema. Since they are early, it might be worth perusing to see Faulkner in his creative embryo.

I read Soldier's Pay a couple of months ago and except for the irritating tics gleaned from some novel writing 101 Faulkner must have read, I found it a very workmanlike novel of post WW I America. It doesn't rate with his more mature stuff, but not bad for a first novel.

#13 - thanks.

One-sentence books:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/books/review/Park-t.html?_r=2&ref=books

Interesting how many influenced or were influenced by Faulkner, especially the notoriously long sentences in Absalom, Absalom

Raymond Federman also wrote a novel, in his later years, The Voice in the Closet, comprised of a single sentence. It's pricey, so I've yet obtained it.

I was thinking of the one-sentence story/book, I saw referred to somewhere--Hemingway? Carver?:

"For sale: One pair of baby shoes. Never worn."

NYRB has also issued Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines, which looks like it might make for interesting browsing.

#19

Hemingway.

Best thing he ever wrote.

I'm reading The Lime-works by Thomas Bernhard. There are some parallels with Faulkner, especially the long sentences. It is a novel built around hearsay and paranoia, not unlike "A Rose for Emily." It's all about an insurance investigator asking townspeople about a mysterious murder. An eccentric writer allegedly killed his wife, a crippled woman stuck in a wheelchair, and his wife might be his stepsister. While Bernhard was Austrian, there is a mixture of the Gothic and the dark shadows of history that come across as very Faulknerian.

I've just finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. In it, he writes about how Faulkner was the greatest literary influence on his writing. I like the way he points out the Faulkner book (as well as other books) that he was reading at this or that point in his life, as if the books were as real as the events that occurred. I get that. I also see the influence on his writing.