BeefSupreme posted:

As for the racial implications, I didn't find either in this or in other Faulkner things I've read that he had anything in particular to say about race, but that his novels were grounded in the reality of the time. Perhaps, as you say, there is a subtle slant one way or another, but I always felt like he was more interested in Southern family dynamics than anything else. Of course, I'm white, so who knows.

quote:

Light in August, published in 1932, is Faulkner’s Great American Novel. It was the seventh of what would be 19 novels, an output that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 and that, to borrow a hackneyed but apt phrase, represents nothing less than an embarrassment of riches. A writer of prodigious powers, Faulkner bequeathed to readers a rich fictional panoply of complex characters, incisive social commentary, formal ingenuity, and metaphorical depth. His oeuvre displays an unsentimental compassion, a tragedian’s unblinking vision, and an almost preternatural insight into human motivation and desire. He left behind two highly influential masterpieces of modernist fiction: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, works that, along with other modernist texts, radically altered conceptions of narrative linearity and the formal depiction of consciousness. Absalom, Absalom!, often mentioned in the same breath, is celebrated by many as his greatest, most fully realized novel, one of tremendous breadth and a radical consistency of aesthetics. But it is the less mannered Light in August, sometimes overlooked in discussions of his more overtly modernist works, that draws all of Faulkner’s familiar preoccupations—determinism vs. free will, the partially Reconstructed South, religiosity, the draw of female sexuality, and the power of the living past—around one overriding, ineradicably American concern: race.

Light in August is the story of Joe Christmas, a man of indeterminate race who believes himself to be black despite appearing white. Because the exact details of his birth are lost to history and retold vaguely through unreliable narrators, we know only slightly more than Christmas does: he might be part black, he might be Mexican, he might be white. This unknowing, this lack of definition, forms the central irony of the book and mirrors perfectly the central irony of the American experience: we are a nation built upon, devoted to, and defined by constructed racial categories that do not—scientifically speaking—exist. These highly mutable categories were designed to establish clear demarcations between populations, but the supposed distinctions are for the most part superficial and illusory. Illusion, rendered into a kind of fact by action, has provided us with centuries of meaning.

So a story prefigures Light in August, just as an ancestor precedes a descendant. It’s a story that begins with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the New World in 15021, a story that continues with the importation into the Americas of between 11 and 15 million captives via the Middle Passage, the enslavement of their descendants, the denial of all essential human rights, then the abandonment of an entire people after sudden emancipation, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other terror groups, the denial of suffrage, and the long struggle through the twentieth century toward a recognizable equality in social, educational, and political spheres. The story is long and violent and composed of so many competing strands that our national history has fairly begged for unifying narratives on race. That so many of our greatest American books have attended to this complicated ethnological history seems right, even necessary, and causes the assertions of new historicism to ring true: our peculiar history not only laid the groundwork for our literature, but demanded it. A book like Light in August is an answer to a call.

Falstaff Infection posted:

What's a pulp lust novel? Not being snarky, I've genuinely never heard of that genre.

Falstaff Infection posted:

Ah, gotcha. Figured it was something like that. What gets me is that they're all quite obviously wank material, but they try to cloak it in language about "a cautionary tale" or "an expose of the seedy underworld" as if people are reading them and tut-tutting primly.

Falstaff Infection posted:

Basically, all this is just to say that race is very much a presence in TSATF. I haven't finished it yet, so I can't say what kind of overall statement it's making, but its absolutely there in a big way.

Rabbit Hill posted:

Here's a great article (contains spoilers) about Light in August and race and sexuality.

Rabbit Hill posted:

DO IT MAN

One neat stylistic feature of the book is Faulkner's way of telling you what a character is not thinking, so specifically that he puts those thoughts into your head while allowing the character to remain, uh, true to character by remaining ignorant of [whatever situation]. You'll know it when you see it.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

V. Illych L. posted:

Yo Hieronymous, whatever happened to that Pride and Prejudice readalong? I loved that thread dude

Mercrom posted:

Can anyone recommend proper novels that explore and critizice utilitarian and nihilist concepts sort of the way Gen Urobuchi does but less anime?

Smoking Crow posted:

Aldous Huxley

Mercrom posted:

Can you recommend any particular book? I'm not interested in satire.

Mercrom posted:

Can anyone recommend proper novels that explore and critizice utilitarian and nihilist concepts sort of the way Gen Urobuchi does but less anime?

Mercrom posted:

Can you recommend any particular book? I'm not interested in satire.

Tree Goat posted:

Just to be clear here, you are looking for a book which criticizes particular concepts but in no way alludes to or heavily references these concepts as they occur in the actual lived world.

Mercrom posted:

Can anyone recommend proper novels that explore and critizice utilitarian and nihilist concepts sort of the way Gen Urobuchi does but less anime?

Mercrom posted:

Can you recommend any particular book? I'm not interested in satire.

Smoking Crow posted:

Game of Thrones is drivel. It's another Tolkien rip-off except that the author tries to justify it by being "dark and edgy." Also, why is there so much underage loving?

blue squares posted:

Are you guys talking about the Jeremy Benthem/John Stuart Mill utilitarianism? Because I don't see how brave new world? It's been a decade since I read the book but I don't see how that applies.

Falstaff Infection posted:

Also, I don't wanna dredge up this old argument, but it's really not. There's so much underage loving because it is, primarily, a series about the horrors of patriarchy. This is also why there's so much castration. Additionally, one thing that GRRM does better than any author I can think of is get you all psyched for righteous war and then pull the rug out from under you by showing how squalid and absurd it all really is. It's a great trick to pull on the reader. When you're reading your typical anti-war novel like, say, Johnny got his Gun, you know the war is terrible and a waste from the get-go because a) you've heard of the book before and b) you've heard of world war one. In ASOIAF, however, the tricks is that you think it's awesome fun fantasy bloodshed where badass vengeance is wreaked, but then the horrors are exposed and you feel ashamed. So, in a way, you're being put through the same process of disillusionment (minus the actual trauma and terror, of course) as, say, an eager young WWI volunteer.

Falstaff Infection posted:

Also, I don't wanna dredge up this old argument, but it's really not. There's so much underage loving because it is, primarily, a series about the horrors of patriarchy. This is also why there's so much castration. Additionally, one thing that GRRM does better than any author I can think of is get you all psyched for righteous war and then pull the rug out from under you by showing how squalid and absurd it all really is. It's a great trick to pull on the reader. When you're reading your typical anti-war novel like, say, Johnny got his Gun, you know the war is terrible and a waste from the get-go because a) you've heard of the book before and b) you've heard of world war one. In ASOIAF, however, the tricks is that you think it's awesome fun fantasy bloodshed where badass vengeance is wreaked, but then the horrors are exposed and you feel ashamed. So, in a way, you're being put through the same process of disillusionment (minus the actual trauma and terror, of course) as, say, an eager young WWI volunteer.

quote:

It is just a fictionalized version of the War of the Roses and a few other medieval wars with dragons and magic thrown in as an afterthought to sell books.

blue squares posted:

Are you guys talking about the Jeremy Benthem/John Stuart Mill utilitarianism? Because I don't see how brave new world? It's been a decade since I read the book but I don't see how that applies.

Earwicker posted:

This is an extraordinarily generous reading verging on the delusional. I would argue that a lot of the sex and violence in the series is simply there because he and his readers find it entertaining, not because it stirs up some feelings of shame or thought about patriarchy or whatever. I don't think the average reader comes away with some kind of "futility of war" message the way someone reading All Quiet on the Western Front or La Debacle might, rather its mostly just an endless series of badass warriors and conniving manipulators out-fighting and out-manipulating each other while making quips and showing off how smart and cool they are. And with a bunch of supernatural horror stuff thrown in because that's GRRM's background.

CestMoi posted:

Maybe if George Ar Ar Martin had wanted to write a good book about the horrors of war he shou;ldn't have written such a lovely book.

Falstaff Infection posted:

I think it's because (and it's been forever since I read it too) the society in Brave New World tries to provide maximum happiness and pleasure (which is *sort of* the Benthamite goal) to all its members by essentially drugging them into a stupor, and the novel criticizes that goal, arguing that happiness is not the be-all and end-all.

"'All right then,' said the Savage. 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'"

blue squares posted:

Are you guys talking about the Jeremy Benthem/John Stuart Mill utilitarianism? Because I don't see how brave new world? It's been a decade since I read the book but I don't see how that applies.

Mercrom posted:

I'm not interested in utilitarianism per se. I'm interested in things that are or seem rational and logical, but are still not right.

Falstaff Infection posted:

Not to get all authorial intent on you but GRRM was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, so it's really not as much of a stretch as you might think to argue that the series is fundamentally anti-war.

quote:

Sure, the average reader may not pick up on that reading, but so what? Since when is that the benchmark for deriving the meaning of a work of art?

Falstaff Infection posted:

Anyway, I'm sorry for starting this derail. We really shouldn't be talkign about GRRM in the "grown-up books" thread. What do people think of Zadie Smith? I really love her essays, but I've always had a hard time getting through her novels.

Earwicker posted:

I don't see how his objection to the Vietnam war several decades before writing this series is necessarily even relevant. Objecting to that war in particular does not mean everything an author writes that involves war, for the rest of their life, has any relation.