Editing William Faulkner (section)

===Style and technique===
{{quote box | width = 25em |align = right
| quote = The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words. ''Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.'' Somewhere I heard bells once. Mississippi or Massachusetts. I was. I am not. Massachusetts or Mississippi. Shreve has a bottle in his trunk. ''Aren't you even going to open it'' Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the ''Three times. Days. Aren't you even going to open it'' marriage of their daughter Candace ''that liquor teaches you to confuse the means with the end'' I am. Drink. I was not. Let us sell Benjy's pasture so that Quentin may go to Harvard and I may knock my bones together and together. I will be dead in. Was it one year Caddy said.
| source = — An example of Faulkner's prose in ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]'' (1929)
| style = padding:1.5em
| fontsize=85%
}}

Carl Rollyson has argued that, "as an artist," Faulkner believed "he should be above worldly concerns and even morality."<ref>{{cite book |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |author-link= |date=2020 |title=The Life of William Faulkner |url= |location= |publisher=University of Virginia |page= |isbn=978-0813944401}}</ref> Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to [[diction]] and [[Cadence (poetry)|cadence]]. In contrast to the [[Minimalism|minimalist]] understatement of his contemporary [[Ernest Hemingway]], Faulkner made frequent use of [[Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)|stream of consciousness]] in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes [[Southern Gothic|Gothic]] or [[Grotesque#In literature|grotesque]] stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.

Faulkner's contemporary critical reception was mixed, with ''[[The New York Times]]'' noting that many critics regarded his work as "raw slabs of pseudorealism that had relatively little merit as serious writing".<ref name="obit" /> His style has been described as "impenetrably convoluted".<ref name="Pikoulis 1982" />

In an interview with ''[[The Paris Review]]'' in 1956, Faulkner remarked: <blockquote>Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.</blockquote> In that same interview, [[Jean Stein]] says "Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?" Faulkner replies: "Read it four times."

When asked about his influences, Faulkner says "the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the [[Old Testament]], [[Charles Dickens|Dickens]], [[Joseph Conrad|Conrad]], [[Miguel de Cervantes|Cervantes]], ''[[Don Quixote]]—''I read that every year, as some do the Bible. [[Gustave Flaubert|Flaubert]], [[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]]—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books—[[Fyodor Dostoevsky|Dostoyevsky]], [[Leo Tolstoy|Tolstoy]], [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]]. I read [[Herman Melville|Melville]] occasionally and, of the poets, [[Christopher Marlowe|Marlowe]], [[Thomas Campion|Campion]], [[Ben Jonson|Jonson]], [[Robert Herrick (poet)|Herrick]], [[John Donne|Donne]], [[John Keats|Keats]], and [[Percy Bysshe Shelley|Shelley]]."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Stein |first=Jean |date=1956 |title=The Art of Fiction No. 12 |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner |journal=[[Paris Review]] |volume=Spring 1956 |issue=12}}</ref>

Like his contemporaries [[James Joyce]] and [[T. S. Eliot]], Faulkner uses stories and themes from classic literature in a modern context. Joyce, in ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]'', modeled the journey of his hero [[Leopold Bloom]] on the adventures of [[Odysseus]]. Eliot, in his essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth",  wrote that "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an [[Einstein]] in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."<ref>{{Cite web |title=T. S. Eliot, 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth"' in The Dial (Nov 1923). |url=http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/major/Joyce_JA/Eliot_TS.htm |access-date=2023-03-27 |website=www.ricorso.net}}</ref> Faulkner's allusions to earlier authors are evidenced by his titles; the title of ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]'' comes from [[Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow|Macbeth's soliloquy]]: "it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing." The opening of the novel is told from the perspective of the intellectually disabled Benjy Compson. The title of ''[[As I Lay Dying]]'' comes from [[Homer]]'s ''[[Odyssey]]'', where it is spoken by [[Agamemnon]] in the past tense: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." Faulkner's novel, in contrast, is narrated in the present tense.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Brooks |first=Cleanth |title=William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country}}</ref> The title of ''[[Go Down, Moses (book)|Go Down, Moses]]'' is from an [[Go Down Moses|African American spiritual]], and the book is dedicated "To Mammy / Caroline Barr / Mississippi / [1840–1940] Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Simon |first=Julia |date=2017 |title=Repudiation and Redemption in Go Down, Moses: Accounting, Settling, Gaming the System, and Justice |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/277/article/672751 |journal=The Southern Quarterly |volume=55 |issue=1 |pages=30–54 |issn=2377-2050}}</ref>