My opinion coming into class today was that I did not like Faulkner’s stream of consciousness writing because it was hard to follow, and the English language has rules about run-on sentences for a reason. However, the discussion we had in class about the reasons behind this writing style helped me to understand and appreciate it a little more. If you compare Faulkner’s style with poetry, you can see the unformed, uncontained beauty of his ideas. Poetry has some form whereas this style has none, capturing an essence of the wilderness of nature and the human brain on paper. Our brain works this way, but rarely do we write this way because it is so hard to follow. I believe that was Faulkner’s point. We aren’t supposed to know exactly what Ike thinks about all this. Faulkner doesn’t come out and tell us, he gives us the thought process behind it. We can’t follow his thought process but it definitely sparks a personal train of thought. I don’t know if you have ever written in stream of consciousness- I thought about doing it for the blog, but I knew it would be really random and incomprehensible- but it is fun. It captures an essence of humanity that otherwise goes unexplored: how the human brain doesn’t just think along one line of here and now but is constantly pulling from past experiences, senses, hearsay, knowledge, emotions, plans, dreams, to-do lists, worries, relationships, passions… all “talking” at once at any given moment about whatever topic is paramount. Some people organize their thoughts more easily than others, so they don’t notice the semi-chaos taking place in their brain. I, however, have trouble organizing my thoughts into orderly categories unless I write them down. So, the stream of consciousness method gave Faulkner a freedom to go places with his writing that would have been out of place or disjointed otherwise.
P.S. commented on Callie’s “So Much Allegory”
I feel the same way, as I read it, i found that a lot of it really annoyed me until I started to see the purpose behind the madness.
ReplyDeleteThis also reminds me of personality theory, as everything does these days (:
P's think out of order a lot of time as opposed to straight lines, probably Faulkner was a P so its easier for him to write that way! ;)
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI like what you said. Stream of conscious is very different from our traditional way of writing things. I like the idea of trying to write that way because it does allow us to see just how busy our brains truly are... lol... Writing in such a way does in fact bring more to the story.
ReplyDelete