After reading for several years, looking back at the long road of reading, which is the most difficult book you have ever read? Kafka's "The Castle" or Borges's "The Garden where the Trail Bifurcates"?
Today is Faulkner's 123rd birthday. So, today I would like to introduce readers to this great writer who is more difficult to read than Kafka and Borgesga together— William Faulkner, one of the most influential writers in the history of American literature, and one of the most modern writers.
Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, to a family of plantation owners in northern Mississippi, in the south. This had an indelible impact on his life's work. It can almost be said that all of Faulkner's work throughout his life revolved around the evil and decay of the Southern plantation system.
Faulkner was born into a decaying celebrity and also experienced ups and downs. He grew up reading a wide range of books, and by the age of 10 he had been reading the works of great writers such as Balzac, Shakespeare, Dickens and Conrad. However, due to his short stature, Faulkner was not very compatible with his classmates, and his grades continued to decline, but it also provided him with opportunities to create. His great-grandfather, William Clarke Faulkner, known as the "Old Colonel," was a remarkable figure and an example of infinite admiration in Faulkner's heart. Therefore, he made a commitment from an early age to "become a writer like his great-grandfather."
Faulkner wrote 19 novels and more than 120 short stories throughout his life. Among them, the most widely circulated is "Noise and Commotion", even if you have not read it, it must be like thunder.
Faulkner's novel is interesting. If you read it carefully, you will be surprised to find that most of Faulkner's works, especially the best, take place in Yorknapatafa County, and the characters are intricate and interrelated in Yorknapatafa County, called the "York Napatafa Lineage". And this "York Napatafa," according to Faulkner, is an ancient Indian name that means "water flows slowly through the flat ground." The main thread is the story of generations of families belonging to different social classes in the town of Jefferson in Joknaptafa County and its suburbs, from 1800 until after world war II. There are more than 600 famous and surnamed characters in the Joknapatafa lineage, interspersed and alternated in various long and short stories. As a result, the Joknapatafa has also become the most prominent symbol of Faulkner's work, constituting one of the most famous fictional sites in the history of literature.
Therefore, to understand "Noise and Commotion", we must first understand the historical background of the birth of Faulkner's "Joknapatafa Lineage". The American Civil War ended in the defeat of the South, after which the traditional values of the South collapsed. The economic base of slavery in the southern plantation economy was shaken and collapsed, and its remaining superstructure was crumbling. Most of Faulkner's work is through depictions of the disintegration of some old family, cutting into the cross-section of the historic changes in the American South. In his creations, he constantly reflected that behind the decline of the "Southern Spirit", Faulkner saw the evils of Southern slavery, the corrupt, cruel and inhuman side of plantation owners.
"Noise and Commotion" is Faulkner's first mature work, and it is also Faulkner's most painstaking and his own favorite work. The title comes from The famous line of Macbeth in the fifth scene of the fifth act of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth: "Life is like a fool's dream, full of noise and turmoil, but it has no meaning." ”
The novel is about the family tragedy of the family of the Compson family, the owner of the fallen plantation in the south. Old Compson is idle, Mrs. Compson is cold and selfish, the family is full of diaphragms, and she can't feel love and warmth. Things must be reversed, and in the old worldly home, which is arrogant and arrogant, and there are many rules, there will be wandering children. The only daughter in the family, Katie, grew into a flirtatious and debauched woman. She had a secret encounter with a man and had to marry another man because she was pregnant. After marriage, her husband discovered the hidden affair and abandoned her. Katie fostered her illegitimate daughter at her mother's house and went to the big city herself. The story revolves around Katie.
As a proud, sensitive fallen nobleman, his brother Quentin placed too much importance on the virginity of his sister Katie, associating it with mendi's honor and even his own life and death. Katie's loss of virginity caused Quentin so much pain that just over a month after his sister's marriage, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the river. Katie's eldest brother, Jason, is selfish, cold-hearted, and hates everyone. The second brother, Banji, is also an idiot with an IQ of only three years old. In Hustle and Turmoil, Faulkner, through the inner monologues of the three brothers, Bangui, Quentin, and Jason, asks them to tell their own stories, recounting the downfall of the Compson family around Katie's downfall, which is then supplemented by Dilsey, a black maid. So Faulkner often told people that he had written the story five times.
The modernity writing skills of the masters such as multi-angle narrative, mythological patterns, and streams of consciousness are vividly displayed in the book "Noise and Turmoil", which casts a mysterious veil on the work.
Faulkner's novel is like a small fulcrum that leverages people's exposure and reflection on the plantation system in the American South. In 1949, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and artistically unparalleled contributions to contemporary American fiction." To understand Faulkner and the decline of the plantation economy in the American South, Hustle and Bustle is undoubtedly the best cut.
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I give you the watch, not so that you can remember time, but so that you can forget time once in a while, and not spend all your energy on conquering time. Because time can't conquer anyway, he said. No one has even competed with time at all. This battlefield only shows man his own stupidity and disappointment, and victory is only a fantasy of philosophers and fools.
Father said that the human being is nothing more than the sum of his misfortunes. You think that one day misfortune will be tired, but then time will become your misfortune again, which is what my father said. A seagull tied to an invisible thread dragged it through the air. You, you drag the symbol of your disillusionment into eternity. Then the wings grew a little bigger and my father said that only such a person could play a harp.
They have also learned the temperament of adults, and as long as you put on a silent and reserved posture, you will believe everything to be true. I think that those who rely heavily on words to deceive themselves and those who deceive others agree on one thing: that a silent tongue is the supreme wisdom.
Women are never virgins. Purity is a state of negation and is therefore contrary to nature.
Poor health is certainly a decisive factor in the lives of all people. Born in pain, grown up in disease, died in decay.
I went out, took the door, and shut the tick in the house. I looked back into the window, and he was looking over the railing to observe me. There were more than a dozen watches in the window, none of which had the same time, each of which was the same as my watch without a pointer, thinking that only I was accurate, and nothing else was reliable. Every watch is different from the others. I could hear my watch ticking in my pocket, and though no one could see it, though it could no longer tell the time, who could say the time?
Because father said that clocks kill time. He said that as long as the little gears clicked and turned, time was dead; time would only come alive when the clock stopped.
However, he loves death the most, he only loves death, while loving, while expecting death. It was a calm, almost morbid anticipation, like a man in love who was expecting while deliberately inhibiting himself from accepting the waiting, welcoming, friendly, gentle, and incredible flesh of his lover. Until one day he could no longer bear it, not because he could not bear the delay, but because of the inhibition, so he simply jumped, gave up everything, and sank into the bottomless abyss.
(Translated by Li Wenjun)
(Written by: Feng Ya)
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