TS Heavy Hitters: Powerhouses of Prose #1: Conrad vs. Faulkner

Conrad induces as many headaches as Faulkner; he's obscurantic in his own frustrating way. Long stretches of Nostromo are given to polysyllabic meditations on an amorphous evil. He's actually closer to Henry James.

at his beste James isn't obscurantic at all by the way.

Conrad by a mile. I've yet to finish an entire Faulkner novel.

Conrad IS close to James

What have you read of Conrad, Alfred?

Voted Faulkner btw. I'm p much the opposite of James: I love the Narcissus novel, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim, but I struggled through every page of Nostromo, and didn't finish Secret Agent. Whereas I love every one of Faulkner's major novels and a few of the minor ones.

Let's see. Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory. I've twice started Lord Jim. Heart of Darkness, of course (don't like it). This thread has made me consider trying LJ again.

What attracted me as a writer when I read most of those in the mid nineties was his use of multiplicity. It wasn't merely a matter of unreliable narrators; we never knew the truth. If you haven't Nostromo you should: Edward Said is very good on its power. When I want to reread him I return to the quasi-pulp fiction: The Secret Agent and a marvelous short story called "Youth," as good as prime Stevenson.

Completely agree with you about "Youth"; "An Outpost of Progress" is another great short story by him. I tend to think Conrad was at his best with the short story and the nouvelle. I liked the overall structure of Nostromo but it was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had with a novel; I couldn't for the life of me engage with any of the characters, not because they were unsympathetic, but because they were so externally imagined. Probably part of the point, but that is a big reasonwhy I always head back to the Marlow stuff.

that Edward Said essay sounds interesting though; I'll have to check it out...

It's in Beginnings, I think.

Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and Lord Jim vs The Sound And The Fury and I think that's it. It's Conrad easily for me, I can enjoy him with less effort. In fact I can just enjoy him for the stories, which I certainly couldn't for The Sound And The Fury.

Also, not being a native speaker is so damn impressive.

i always want to read more conrad and then never do. what do you guys recommend?

i guess i am voting faulkner by default.

predictably voted Faulkner

The Secret Agent and "Youth" are great starts.

Yeah, if you don't enjoy The Secret Agent' then I will buy a hat and eat it

ive read 'heart of darkness' and 'as i lay dying'. i didnt make it through 'secret agent' or 'the bear'. like ismael pointed out, its amazing to think that english isnt even conrads 1st language. he packs so much into a sentence. then theres those long, unwieldy faulkner sentences that go on for a paragraph. holy fuck. i preferred 'heart of darkness' and i think i would pick up a conrad book before a faulkner book.

Often Faulkner doesn't write in English.

Sb

Conrad by miles for me. Not read a huge amount of Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury, Go Down Moses, some other bits and pieces. I could see why people think TSATF is great, but with Faulkner I tend to feel I'm putting in more than I'm getting out. Not much tempted to read any more.

I have my blind spots with Conrad - I don't like Heart of Darkness much, Lord Jim is a slight idea portentously dressed up, Nostromo is finally great but an effort to get through in places. The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes are the ones I like best.

i like that Faulkner goes for it but Conrad goes for it in a 3rd hand language and the further the hand the better u go

Conrad by a mile. I've yet to finish an entire Faulkner novel.

Same here. I did my second year English Lit dissertation on Conrad's colonial fiction. Have read almost everything but have a special fondness for that 1895-99 run: Almayer's Folly, An Outpost of Progress, Youth, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness. It helps that a lot of his concerns chime with my political interests - colonialism there and then pre-WWI revolutionary politics in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Victory's very moving.

I just can't get a handle on Faulkner - tried when I was 17, then at university, and again a few months ago. It's like wrestling soup.

bookmarking thread, this is a good one but I'm stupid busy, will get back to it in a couple days

I hope you're coming back to say FAULKNER, YOU FOOLS

I read one Faulkner and loved it, read another and found it incomprehensible. Actually I think I've only ever read one Faulkner.

Faulkner for me. Like Conrad, but never loved him. Loved a whole bunch of Faulkner at one time, though now I find myself returning to the short stories more often than the novels, the exception being As I Lay Dying which I've read a handful of times.

I must read more Faulkner, it's not that incomprehensible, with a fair wind and a modicum of effort. I think I mostly got confused with the family structure (in The Sound and The Fury), having two Jasons and two Quentins really muddies things up, even though one Quentin is a girl. But Benjy's voice, though the hardest to follow, is incredible.

Taking in The Sound and the Fury via audiobook on a long road trip really, really brought home its power for me. There's nothing else to do but focus on the text and the story as it unrolls in front of you like the road. (People who do audiobook readings of Faulkner should get hazard pay.)

faulkner is gr8 <3 light in august

i'm surprised to see ppl so down on faulkner.he's not someone i can read casually or just pick up and enjoy but someone who totally absorbs my attention whenever i read one of his novels. he's very uneven and a lot of his stuff ranks far, far below his masterpieces, but he wrote more great works than anyone else in american lit. greatest american writer along with melville, i think. the moment when i figured out what was actually happening in the sound and the fury ranks as my most 'whoa...' moment as a reader.

my rating of each chapter:

benjy: this one really can't be parsed on a first reading. it was either audacious or obnoxious of faulkner to put it first, depending on your perspective. it is pretty lucid if you reread it immediately after finishing the book, though.
quentin: my favorite chapter. incredibly beautiful writing, if just as opaque as the first chapter in its way.
jason: very funny. i don't think anyone has trouble with the last half of the book. faulkner's decision to only portray caddy through the eyes of others was brilliant; you can sense him trying to get at emotions that a more straightforward treatment wouldn't accomplish.
last chapter: i recall this one sort of standing on its own and reading like a mini-novella.
appendix: faulkner went back years later and wrote a mini-biography of each character and appended it to the end of the book, written in a sort of 'absalom! absalom!' style. caddy's ultimate fate is pretty heartbreaking.

i've never read any faulkner except 'as i lay dying' in college. i think i kind of generally give credence to his american-modernist-giant reputation but am waiting until a time in my life when i'm willing to read down-southy stuff.

Speaking of Conrad, just read the rather good 'Today' by David Miller, a short (160p) novel about Conrad's death and funeral, and his family and friends, especially his secretary and two sons. Really enjoyed it.

Voted Conrad because I re-read him more often and find the stereotypical Faulkner sentence too overwrought to support its own weight, but Faulkner's range is even wider and deeper than Conrad's. As I Lay Dying is probably the best entry point, but my favorite is Absalom, Absalom!. I also like his occasional hardboiled pulp moves, like Sanctuary and iirc Light in August. Passages from his short stories about Hollywood have lingered in my mind for decades.

OK, Faulkner shorts about Hollywood have intrigued me--any titles?

The thing about Conrad is he's kind of the ultimate grown-ups' author. His concerns are adult concerns; he views his characters with a cold, detached eye - he's beyond loving them or scorning them, though he comes closer to the latter. He's not a humanist - he doesn't celebrate his characters' big messy lives or any of that rot. He has an almost mechanistic view of human behavior; his theme, to my mind, is the movement of history, and how it plays out in human lives. He sees the big picture. He writes very well, and his plots are elegant.

Faulkner understands people in their day to day lives better. When people bleed in a Faulkner book, they hurt. They scream. They get mad. Faulkner is interested in the human heart. The human heart is a fucking mess. Conrad is interested in the heart of the world. The heart of the world is fascinating. Both authors are great. Faulkner is to my mind greater, even though my favorite living writer, Joan Didion, would call this for Conrad in a New York minute.

always read this thread title as Heavy Hitlers

aerosmith is completely otm.

i always read these thread titles in the voice of the drop-in on this record -

http://westcoastnation.blogspot.com/2009/09/wc-westside-heavy-hitter-2005.html

For all Conrad's heavy breathing in Nostromo and "Heart of Darkness," he has a mystery writer's understanding of evil: it's a nebulous force that poisons human relations. In books like Light in August Faulkner makes us understand how the evil we do has consequences; that the evil inflicted is often done with the best intentions.

I hope this doesn't sound banal...? Basically: Conrad believes in EEEE-vil while Faulkner believes in evil.

wouldn't a mystery-writer's understanding of evil be, like, quotidian greed, resentment, anger, selfishness, and so on? if there's something nebulous in that it would lie in the thing you get detectives on cop shows saying—'i believe anyone is capable of anything'. (as in, how could anyone being capable of anything arise out of plain old everyday greed, resentment, anger, etc?)

i think the nebulous force of evil in those books is a very material set of circumstances that Conrad is mapping out - this isn't supernatural or innate

Not in HOD. It's one of his worst books because the book doesn't recover from the level of abstraction at which it's written.

*pitched

only if you think the book is "about" colonialism or atavism, but i don't think it exactly is. the "Darkness" isn't outside of social organisation

I'm not quite sure what the book is doing, honestly.

I like Nostromo best because Martin Decoud is like this Dickensian archetype infused with this late nineteenth century guilt; there's a clear line between his ambitions/motives and results.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

EEE-vil sets Conrad in line with Poe, who invented the mystery store

i dont like either of these writers although i think faulkner is both easier to dislike and to admire

Alfred right on about HOD; the evil in the story seems to be personified by the 'darkness' of the Africans and the continent they call home, but philosophically he seems to side with them against the Europeans' attempt to colonize them. It's a pretty big muddle...

I really think The Nigger of the Narcissus is the best thing Conrad's written, but I'm struggling to come up with a Faulkner novel I like less than that

as far as reading Faulkner's experimental radical style, it's daunting. I'd read Sound and the Fury the first time when I was in high school, but I'd checked out the Ole Miss website and the Cliff Notes beforehand, so I knew what I was getting into. There's definitely a lot of obliquness there, but I feel like he accounts for the jarring ellipses, the fractured monologues, his willingness to go down any blind alley in order to milk as much meaningfulness and drama out of his situations as he can, by maintaining the addictive and compulsive cadences of his language. Like you dont have to know what he's talking about when he writes "Memory knows before thinking remembers" in Light in August because soon enough the rolling rhythms in his prose will be carrying you away from that through different parts of the story...

sound and the fury is the only one that's really hard to decipher i think. i also think that book is not his best.

the darkness in HoD first envelops the story on a boat in the middle of the Thames. it's pretty clear that it emanates from colonial Europe, maybe even from western literature too since the book is obsessed with story-telling and perspective. the darkness in Africa is in the eyes and minds of Europeans who want to penetrate it, and the heart of the darkness is the prod civilizers' reductive urge to exterminate "brutes", a history of missionary work in 3 words.

sure Conrad struggles a bit not exoticize his uncorrupted noble savages but he is a 19th/20th century north european dude and it wd be quite possible to argue that the portrayal of the Africans in the book is just another distortion of rapey corrupt European eyes. the joke that "darkness" is what the white people bring with them is right up there on the surface tbh

right on Noodle; that's v well-put

I'm trying to think of a writer with a more recognizable prose style than Faulkner's. . . drawing a blank. A style that's equal parts transcendent and frustrating. Who else could come up with this:

"She had never been giving to talking, living a life of serene vegetation like perpetual corn or wheat in a sheltered garden instead of a field, and during those two days she came and went about the house with an air of tranquil and faintly ludicrous tragic approval."

which is totally over the top and ridiculous (for me at least)

and this, in the same book

"Motionless, her head bent and her hands still in her lap, she had that spent immobility of a chimney rising above the ruin of a house in the aftermath of a cyclone."

^^ a description that totally works for me, on a number of levels. No contest, Faulkner alone, just for Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and Old Man.

yeah the idea of faulkner sometimes irritates me (he's attracted some of the dumbest literary criticism ever written, which is really saying something) but light in august is unfuckwithable

he's attracted some of the dumbest literary criticism ever written,

oooh really? i haven't read any in awhile, like what sorta stuff are you talking about?

i don't even have any names ready to hand! it's just that i wrote papers about faulkner in grad school and had to comb through lots of useless "mystical South" stuff. people love him but they don't do him justice. a good article about faulkner is w4lter b3nn michaels "the difference between white men and white men" about absalom, absalom, but i don't know if you would like it! michaels doesn't care about literary style qua style.

OK, Faulkner shorts about Hollywood have intrigued me--any titles?

Checking Collected Stories, I see the one I was thinking of is "Golden Land," about an aging screenwriter who's not from around there. First sentence: "If he had been thirty, he would not have needed the two aspirin tablets and the half glass of raw gin before he could bear the shower's needling on his body and steady his hands to shave." Second sentence: 267 words. It's not really a great story, but talk about writing what you know.

Re Conrad's view of evil, the nihilist bombers in The Secret Agent might be more recognizable to 21st century readers than the colonialists and Africans in HoD.

It's a college lit warhorse but "Barn Burning" is vivid as hell.

a good article about faulkner is w4lter b3nn michaels "the difference between white men and white men" about absalom, absalom, but i don't know if you would like it! michaels doesn't care about literary style qua style.

cool, will check it out, but yeah i'm a style guy, what can i say. his plots are pretty terrible!

Living in Oxford (on Lamar Blvd, the city's main north-south artery) and reading the section in "The Courthouse" about the architect laying out the town and the courthouse square — looking down at the page, up the street toward the Square, back down at the page — made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

I'd forgotten that The Secret Agent was founded in an actual event.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

am happy with results; glad I did this poll

This thread has inspired me to read The Sound and the Fury for the first time in 20 years and I think I would've changed my vote at least until i go back to Nostromo next.

hey Alfred have you read Albert Guerard's essay on NoTN? it was probably my big 'in' to Conrad. here's the JStor preview:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4333752?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101205089281