>>25217097Many are.
I love Conrad and I think people who speak ill of him have something fundamentally wrong with their character. That being said, it's not a contest. Conrad and Faulkner are both good writers.
>>25217107Faulkner was a shameless Conrad imitator
>>25217097Toni Morrison mogs Faulkner too. Many authors to choose from in that respect.
>>25217097aside from heart of darkness and nostromo, does he have anything i should go out of my way to read?
>>25217128The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim.
>>25217128The Nigger of the Narcissus
>>25217097>Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus.Rare case where Nabokov was right about a writer.
>>25217153What did he say about Faulkner?Personally I gave him a shot and his short stories were tolerable. But as soon as the length stretched out even a little bit everything immediately became bogged down with endless asides and pages of characterization that didn't create a character I understood and so on. I imagine reading something like the Sound and the Fury would be an immense chore.
>>25217151The AYY YO WHAT?:
>>25217153He was right about Melville, Joyce, Shakespeare, Bely and Milton.He was wrong about Conrad though>>25217158>Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.
>>25217097To me, Conrad is like if Henry James had to become a sailor instead of sipping tea in a parlour.Just endless equivocations and asides and narratives within narratives that grope for word after word to vainly make some kind of philosophic notion into a tangible feeling.Not to say I dislike him completely but my patience wears thin. I want to tell him that I get the point every 20 pages or so.
>One source of difficulty and disagreement is, of course, to be found where men have at all times found it, in his beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when Figaro is played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a constant quality of Conrad's prose.-Virginia Woolf
I love Faulkner but I got almost nothing out of HoD, and everyone seems to agree Conrad's others aren't quite as good. What do you guys see in him?
>>25217314TL;DR:>REEEEEEEEEEEEE why doesn't he write in a way that is agreeable to meeeeeeI hate women 'writers' so much it's unreal
>>25217786TL;DR:>Conrad good and his critics are retardedI hate Woolf, but don't misrepresent her argument. If you want to get mad, here's what she had to say about Joyce:>I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Tom, great Tom, thinks this is on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200.
>>25217798>I should be reading UlyssesStopped reading there
>Rajeesh is still seething Say it ain’t so!
>>25217181>A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.Who talks like that about other writers? what a cunt
>>25217097so is the dump I just took
>>25217798woolf was gigamogged by joyce and she knew it
>>25217798that's nice, now go make me a sammich, bitch
>>25217802As if you can even read Faulkner, beaner.
>>25217309>Just endless equivocations and asides and narratives within narratives that grope for word after word to vainly make some kind of philosophic notion into a tangible feeling.>Not to say I dislike him completely but my patience wears thin.This, more or less. A whole range of sensible people think Conrad is good, so I suppose he probably must be. But he's no fun to read. Not for me, anyway.Lichtenberg said that a great book should conceal the effort that went into its creation; it should give the impression that the author had wealth in reserve. Usually, that's true. Even with a maximalist work like Moby-Dick, clearly the result of huge effort, there's an even greater sense of abundance of power. You feel Melville had so much to draw upon that the writing was never painful for him; the eloquence just came pouring out. But with Conrad, every line is soaked with sweat. You imagine him struggling on inch by inch, desperately coralling the words and forcing them into place and then tying them down so they can't get away. There's no exuberance, no sense that he's in partnership with his material. He uses the language like a man pulling a pig through a hedge backwards.
>>25217314What a dimwit she was
>>25217912>every line is soaked with sweatI don't mind that. In a way, I find it more admirable than the feeling of effortlessness that writers like Melville, Homer and Tolstoy give off. You can tell when a writer gave it his all, when he left nothing in his tank, when the book is the result of blood, sweat and tears. One writer is a virtuoso showing off, the other is a sportsman on the frontier of what's possible. It's why I like Virgil and Dante, Faulkner and Pynchon.https://youtu.be/YNqq-K0HK18?si=UkXpOq0i4gVXyiG1&t=3081
>>25217961>tolstoyLol>pynchonLMAO
>>25217802>>25217805>>25217808>>25217812>>25217881>>25218014These are awful posts and you are cancer on this website
>>25218338Obsessed
>>25218340What’s wrong with you?
>>25217132>>25217151i'll look into these, thanks
whats /lit/‘s problem with Faulkner lately?
>>25218583The Nabokov pasta permanently ruined this board
>>25218583Rajeesh, the lover and spammer of the lowbrow writer McCuckathy, is eternally seething. He keeps skipping his court-ordered anger management course to make and monitor threads.
>>25218608>beaner still can't writeLol. Tough being a retarded brownoid
>>25217121That dumb nigger doesn't mog anyone posted ITT
>>25218583His fans think that he was good and new when he was just a plagiarizer of better writers.
>>25219104Still better than anyone writing after the end of WW2 when the fate of the artistic world was sealed.
>>25219104Name a single writer who wasn't plagiarizing.>inb4 HomerHe comes from a long lineage of aoidoi.
>>25219106No. Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Bernhard, Gaddis, McCarthy etc. are/were all better>>25219107There is a difference between plagiarism and influence. All writers have influence; not all writers were copying Joyce and Conrad as shamelessly as Faulkner was.
>>25219112Joyce is perhaps the biggest plagiarist out there second only to Shakespeare.
>>25219114Where would that place faulkner considering his modernism is downstream entirely from Joyce's?
>>25217128short story called "youth". the complete futility of the exercise reminds me a lot of posting here.
>>25219114Goes to show that great artists steal after all and Cawkner’s plagiarism says nothing of his quality.I think this current Faulkner vs McCarthy thing is really dumb, it’s not a boxing match you homos.
>>25219114Who did Joyce plagiarize? Who did Shakespeare?
>>25219825The better question is who Joyce didn't plagiarise. Did you read Oxen of the Sun?Shakespeare plagiarised Plutarch, Ovid, historical chronicles, other playwrights (King Lear was originally King Leir), including his contemporaries.
Should i read Absalom, Absalom! ? As i lay dying was enjoyable only after putting the prose aside
>>25221254Yes, its his best work. Though I do think you'll get more out of it if you read the sound and the fury either right before or right after it.
