William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech (1949) • Hacker News Board

Re: William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech (1949)

#11

Post by Barrin92 » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 7:40 AM UTC

pie42000 wrote: post #7

Is it just me, or does Faulkner come off as extremely overwrought and self-indulgent. Especially when you consider some of his contemporaries (Hemingway, Steinbeck) who opted for simplicity, Faulkner comes off as flexing his thesaurus and creating artificially flowery paragraphs that convey very little. There is novelty in complex language/code, but truly beautiful code/language is as simple as possible.

>but truly beautiful code/language is as simple as possible

code and literary prose aren't interchangeable, not everything in the world ought to be approached through the lens of programming.

Code is, unless someone decides to make a language purely for aesthetic purposes, designed to solve technical problems, prose is not.

Maximalist art has a long history. It engulfs the reader, it's deliberately not utilitarian. It's often also a reaction to the sort of plain, monks cave style writing of a lot of American authors. Faulkner certainly falls into that category, but also Pynchon, Wallace, and so on.

Re: William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech (1949)

#12

Post by greenie_beans » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

pie42000 wrote: post #7

Is it just me, or does Faulkner come off as extremely overwrought and self-indulgent. Especially when you consider some of his contemporaries (Hemingway, Steinbeck) who opted for simplicity, Faulkner comes off as flexing his thesaurus and creating artificially flowery paragraphs that convey very little. There is novelty in complex language/code, but truly beautiful code/language is as simple as possible.

what you're criticizing is what a lot of people love about faulkner. he had beef with hemingway because of how simple his sentences were, and hemingway made the same critiques about faulkner as you have. an argument could be made that faulkner's prose was the antithesis of hemingway. or hemingway was the antithesis of faulkner. either way, they're both poets in a sense, and your preference is up to your own subjective taste.

you get a glimpse of it in this speech: "It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking."

so beautiful! especially, "the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening" -- to me, that's very lyrical. only a poet can do that. and in that paragraph, he repeats "last" three times, which adds a nice cadence and rhythm.

i personally like faulkner's prose. it's especially refreshing to read in 2021 when everything is written in plain, simple english. not everything is some code or a README.

Re: William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech (1949)

#13

Post by leobg » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 8:05 PM UTC

ASK HN: What book (by any author, and from any era) stands out to you that does what Faulkner describes here?

“[Man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”