Who Influenced Faulkner?

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Who Influenced Faulkner?

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1absurdeist
nov 24, 2009, 4:14 pm

I'm sure an obvious answer is Joyce. But beyond that, I know so very little of whom Faulkner admired and perhaps emulated early on in his career, or how perhaps which writers may have influenced particular periods of Faulkner's development.

There's lots of Faulkner hardcore aficionados hereabouts, so I'm anticipating receiving a good, well rounded, and free education on this topic. Thanks in advance!

2jburlinson
nov 24, 2009, 6:54 pm

One of Faulkner's acknowledged influences was A. E. Housman, of whose A Shropshire Lad, Faulkner wrote: "Here was reason for being born into a fantastic world: discovering the splender of fortitude, the beauty of being of the soil like a tree about which fools might howl and which winds of disillusion and death and despair might strip, leaving bleak, without bitterness: beautiful in sadness."

Never forget that Faulkner started as a poet and the romantics & the symbolists meant a lot to him.

This wasn't any passing fancy of a young romanticisit either -- Faulkner was still quoting Housman, even if a little obscurely, as late as his Nobel Prize speech.

3kokipy
nov 24, 2009, 8:42 pm

what a good question, to which I would love further answers. The roots must lie not just in the post-modern style, ie Joyce, but in what he loved and cared about. The Nobel Prize speech may include clues. who was dealing in that currency in the 20s and 30s? I dont know the literature of that era particularly well.

4tootstorm
nov 24, 2009, 9:32 pm

Well...I know Joyce did for sure. Mosquitoes is partly made up of a bad Joyce impersonation.

Beyond that though...I'm not too sure. He loved mythology. He loved Homer. He was influenced by his great grandpappy William Clarke Falkner who wrote couple books back in the mid-19th c. Also influenced in the early years of his career by his friendship with Sherwood Anderson, part of the southern grotesque style comes from him, but I get the impression he had a major falling out with Anderson after Soldiers' Pay, 'cause Mosquitoes is pretty harsh against him.

5laytonwoman3rd
Redigerat: nov 25, 2009, 7:39 am

Conrad, surely...Balzac, (the Yoknapatawpha novels being his own "Human Comedy") Dickens, Shakespeare, the Bible, the Greek tragedians. He was very impressed with Joyce---took the stream-of-consciousness idea and worked a little miracle with it in The Sound and the Fury. (When his wife complained that she thought Ulysses was incomprehensible, he told her to "read it again.") If you read some of his poetry (if you can bear to), you can see that he was influenced there by Eliot. Just some food for thought before I run off to work...

6Sandydog1
nov 25, 2009, 8:44 am

"When his wife complained that she thought Ulysses was incomprehensible, he told her to read it again."

I just love that.

7absurdeist
nov 25, 2009, 11:14 am

Thanks everybody! Very informative, just what I was hoping for.

5> I just noticed that you have 50 (fifty!!!) books by Faulkner in your library. Question for you: Are there still some out there that you don't own but would like to own?

8A_musing
nov 25, 2009, 12:00 pm

The beginnings of a legacy library are up: http://www.librarything.com/profile/TempWmFExperiment#

9laytonwoman3rd
Redigerat: nov 25, 2009, 12:24 pm

#7 Many of those are duplicates, as I'm sure you realize, including something like 8 different editions of S&F, 6 of Light in August etc. My "want list" is now refined to first editions (yes, I dream BIG) and magazines in which his stories were first published (I have a few of those.) I don't own a copy of The Marble Faun, which would be nice. Aside from a few special limited editions, I think I have everything else. I was lucky enough to hold the Holy Grail in my hand about a year and a half ago. I visited Bauman Rare Books' brand new location in Las Vegas, and got to inspect a first edition copy of The Sound and the Fury under the watchful eye of an earnest young man who surely couldn't have thought I was likely to pull $25,000.00 out of my pocket to buy it. *sigh*

10kokipy
nov 25, 2009, 1:02 pm

Have you been to Oxford to see his study? where he diagrammed the chronology of A Fable? (off topic, sorry!)

11theaelizabet
Redigerat: nov 25, 2009, 1:35 pm

#9 Oh, I am so glad to see that someone else buys multiple editions of the same book. I just bought three different versions of the complete poems of Keats because each editor offers different and interesting things/notes/perspectives, etc. My husband is amused. I'm going to show him your post.

12jburlinson
Redigerat: nov 25, 2009, 1:46 pm

>9 laytonwoman3rd: First editions of The Marble Faun are hard, but not impossible, to come by. Four Seas Press was something of a vanity press and Faulkner had to sink $400 of his own money into it before they printed 500 copies. As it was, I think they sold 100 copies. You can pick a copy up in Boston for a cool 20 grand. Or, you can get a copy in the UK that's inscribed "To my boyhood friend, Hilda Lester / Bill Faulkner" for around $81K (depending on currency rates).

I wonder how much Hilda sold it for. Or maybe she offered it up on Book Mooch.

13laytonwoman3rd
nov 25, 2009, 2:11 pm

#10 I have not yet made it to Oxford. I would like to attend the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference some time. It's on my list of things to do before I die.

14kokipy
nov 25, 2009, 7:58 pm

I've never been to the conference but I had the great pleasure of going to Oxford during my college Faulkner class and it was an amazing awesome experience. We met Jimmy Faulkner, Wm.'s nephew, saw the house, went drinking with his great nephews (Sartorises to the last eyeteeth), saw the town square, the jail, Phil Stone's office, and every little thing. Oxford is well worth the visit. Now this was at least 35 years ago, but at that time you could still see houses that he wrote about, in Oxford and at Frenchman's Bend. Linda, you would love it! I hope it hasn't changed.

15laytonwoman3rd
nov 25, 2009, 8:45 pm

Mmmm...and don't forget that Confederate monument. What a treat!

16SeanLong
Redigerat: jan 4, 2010, 12:57 pm

I was watching an interview with the late Shelby Foote once, and he said that Faulkner inisisted that he never read James Joyce's Ulysses, but yet, Faulkner would always quote different passages from it.

17laytonwoman3rd
jan 7, 2010, 10:04 am

And then there's this:

'I think that the book which I put down with the unqualified thought "I wish I had written that" is Moby Dick'
WILLIAM FAULKNER

18SeanLong
jan 7, 2010, 10:27 am

Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty certain that I read somewhere once that literary influences on Faulkner's style included Sherwood Anderson and Charles Baudelaire.

19kambrogi
Redigerat: feb 8, 2010, 6:32 pm

And who are his direct descendants? Certainly Toni Morrison, who is considered by some to be the carrier of his legacy, and William Styron, whose Lie Down in Darkness was The Sound and the Fury redux. There are Faulknerian passages in Cormac McCarthy (really) and I think surely Robert Penn Warren must have admired/emulated him (although Faulkner dissed Warren). Beyond just the southern writers who breathed the same air and thus the same myths, who really studied him and adopted his approach beyond these?

20wrmjr66
feb 8, 2010, 1:52 pm

I have heard the magical realists are lovers of Faulkner. Garcia Marquez certainly fits the mold, in my opinion.

21theaelizabet
Redigerat: feb 10, 2010, 7:20 pm

In tomorrow's (2/11) New York Times: "Where Faulkner Found His People" about a newly discovered Mississippi Plantation diary that inspired him. Fascinating.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/books/11faulkner.html

22laytonwoman3rd
feb 10, 2010, 8:56 pm

#20 Having just finished reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I have to believe that Murakami is in that admiration society as well.

#21 Wow, thanks for that link.

23kokipy
feb 11, 2010, 10:59 am

I loved that book but had virtually no idea what it was all about :D

24theaelizabet
Redigerat: feb 11, 2010, 10:58 pm

In reading bits of God and the American Writer by Alfred Kazin, found this in chapter titled Faulkner: God over the South: "He was to tell students at the University of Mississippi that the four greatest influences on his work were the Old Testament, Dostoevsky, Melville, and Conrad."

25kambrogi
feb 13, 2010, 10:48 am

Thanks for that, theaelizabet. Since I read Light in August this time back-to-back (actually, somewhat simultaneously) with Crime and Punishment, I definitely see the Dostoevsky-Faulkner connection.