I posted this on my old blog in 2005.  Since I’m still busy doing the seminar stuff, I believe now is a good time to use this as filler.  I hope you enjoy it!

I can’t stand literary pretensions.  I’ve been out of college for many years, and continue to feel fortunate that I no longer have to deal with those nose-in-the-air literature snobs who would parade around campus in tight little mincing groups and constantly raise their hands during advanced literature classes because they wanted to impress their plebian classmates (including myself) with their erudition.  These superior students would say things like “…It’s obvious that Fitzgerald was using Gatsby as an exemplar, or doppelganger if you will, for his own self-satisfied persona’s moral disintegration and the verisimilitudes that the upper-classes have to face when dealing with their own bourgeoisie ethos.”  After we all clapped and cheered in the face of such brilliance, the professor and said student(s) would engage in a lengthy discussion about the symbolic meaning of the color of Jay Gatsby’s car.  The rest of us would struggle valiantly to keep from yawning every two seconds.

I got my undergraduate degree in the East, and was acquainted with many lit snobs who adored Fitzgerald and lionized Faulkner.  At least once a year I’d have a class with an English prof, usually female, who would wax lyrical about Faulkner every chance she got.  It didn’t matter that the course was on the Romantic Poets; the love-struck professor would find some way to insinuate Faulkner into her lectures.  Having struggled through The Reivers in high school and after attempting to read The Sound and the Fury a couple of times with no success, I was loathe to admit that I thought Faulkner was a terrible writer.  I was afraid that if I talked dirt about the great WF, I would be chased across campus by the aforementioned mincing lit snobs and beaten to death with their copies of As I Lay Dying.  (Perhaps I’d be screaming absalom, absalom! before I slipped into unconsciousness).

I’m sure I’m not the only person who can’t stomach Faulkner.  I’m even more sure that there are pseudo-intellectual scholars out there in academic la-la-land who say they love Faulkner when they really despise his stream-of-consciousness 100+ word sentences.  They just want their peers to think they’re brainy.  Here’s an example of a Faulkner paragraph (Absalom, Absalom! 1936):

“From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.  There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. “

The second sentence of this two sentence paragraph is around 159 words long, give or take.  Reading something like this is just way too much work.  If I want to work, I’ll mow the lawn.  Reading is for pleasure.  Give me John Irving or Dr. Seuss any day!

By the way, I wonder if Oprah really does read Faulkner.  What do you think?