A lot of authors on Wikipedia have a list of authors they've influenced on their page; this is not the case with Faulkner. This got me wondering, if you were to list some writers that you felt Faulkner had a clear influence on, who would you name? I know we have some knowledgeable people here and I'm curious for your thoughts.
Well, leaving north-america, Faulkner is very relevant to guys like Borges, Rulfo, Marquez, Bioy Casares and Guimarães Rosa (even if some are as old as him).
Cormac McCarthy. Having read The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom, Intruder in the Dust, and The Rievers long before I read McCarthy, I didn't pick up on this at first. While reading Light in August more recently, it seemed perfectly obvious. Makes me see The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, for example, in a new light.Originally Posted by Dark Star
Charly Cormac is a separate suicidal issue.
I can't speak to the other authors listed, but I can definitely see the Faulkner influence in Cormac McCarthy.
Flannery O'Connor should certainly be taken into consideration among the major authors which were influenced by Faulkner, and there are several similarities between their modes of fiction. Faulkner's peculiar use of the grotesque and of the tragicomic, it's important to note, finds a particularly strong resonance on her works, as she transformed it in an uncanny scenery of disconcerting horror and moral phantasmagoria. Moreover, both of them are commonly related to the genre of Southern Gothic, what may count as a further evidence of the proximity between their authorial visions.
Since I have not read her novels yet, I'm unable to provide any evaluation about their quality, although it may be relevant to note that most of the critical commentary I've read on them was predominantly favorable. Her short stories are, however, outstandingly noteworthy, and in my judgment among the best ones composed in American Literature since Hemingway's, in the company of the works of Eudora Welty, which may be just as great. Nevertheless, I don't feel that much attracted to her style, which highly differs from my usual aesthetic preferences on several points.
I believe some admirers of Dostoevsky, certainly not lacking here on Litnet, may feel entranced by the atmosphere characteristic to her art, although I may be wrong, as she scarcely occupied herself with the detailed study of her characters, wich generally lacked the psychological depth of Dostoesvky's literary presentation. She should be considered a substantial reading option notwithstanding, and I would reccomend her to anyone who is searching for something different to read, as I would any writer of merit.
Last edited by namenlose; 04-07-2013 at 12:35 AM.
Cafolini starting to sound like a bot; Enter a keyword and the above pops out . . . again and again.
O'Connor and McCarthy
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This is a really good thread. I find that, in all my years of reading post Faulkner books, I've never thought of any one of them as being influenced specifically by Faulkner. Joyce: sure; Woolf: sure; Kafka, Proust, Mann, et al.: sure. Hemingway: you bet. But never Faulkner. Though now that people point out contemporaries (O'Connor) and more recent writers (McCarthy), I'm thinking about it. Thanks for sharing your thought, OP!
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Jean Paul Sartre had a lot to say about Faulkner and I think there was a clear influence on his fiction, most obviously in The Reprieve.
Thank you.
Faulkner strikes me as the kind of author whose influence is subtle and harder to detect than others. Whenever I take a crack at Kerouac my first thought is to wonder whether he ever got his hands on The Sound and the Fury and whether that helped his mature style develop. (According to a quick Google search he liked to read Pylon while high, but I'm not sure how relevant that is.) I'd also like to think I see some Faulkner in Tom Wolfe--at least in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test--but that could have been Kerouac's influence.
Faulkner was also a major influence on a group of Canadian writers usually termed somewhat ironically as "Southern Ontario Gothic." Their chief representative would be the short story writer Alice Munro, though Margaret Atwood is sometimes attached to the term as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Ontario_Gothic
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
When I read Hemingway I often think of Faulkner. This is particularly so when it comes to Hemingway's frequent use of extremely long run-on sentences. Both the style and the frequency with which these long run-ons are written causes me to believe that Ernest was directly influenced by Faulkner.
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