[HN Gopher] William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Accepta...
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       William Faulkner's Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech
       (1949)
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2021-08-31 13:00 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nobelprize.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nobelprize.org)
        
       | enquon wrote:
       | So good! Thanks for the share.
        
       | greenie_beans wrote:
       | Faulker lore: he didn't want to attend this ceremony. He wrote
       | the speech in the plane while he was drunk. And quickly delivered
       | the speech drunk and mumbling.
        
         | gwerbret wrote:
         | ...in a heavy, almost incomprehensible (to his audience)
         | southern accent.
        
       | rdevsrex wrote:
       | History doesn't repeat but boy does it rhyme.
        
       | skmurphy wrote:
       | Faulkner's final paragraph includes this optimistic assertion: "I
       | believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail."
        
       | mrblampo wrote:
       | That was very stirring. Thank you.
        
       | pie42000 wrote:
       | Is it just me, or does Faulkner come off as extremely overwrought
       | and self-indulgent. Especially when you consider some of his
       | contemporaries (Hemingway, Steinbeck) who opted for simplicity,
       | Faulkner comes off as flexing his thesaurus and creating
       | artificially flowery paragraphs that convey very little.
       | 
       | There is novelty in complex language/code, but truly beautiful
       | code/language is as simple as possible.
        
         | jauhar wrote:
         | are you talking about the language in this speech or in his
         | novels?
        
         | usgroup wrote:
         | overwrought is not a word i knew. a "wrought" thing is made in
         | a particular way, or made by effort and artistry, and an
         | "overwrought" thing is overly complex or elaborate.
         | 
         | You can say, "a novel she wrought" or the novel was "well
         | wrought". Presumably "she wrought a novel" is also fine. Its
         | like a generalised "made something using skills".
         | 
         | "Beautifully wrought code". Although I reckon most reading it
         | would just think you can't spell.
        
         | Barrin92 wrote:
         | >but truly beautiful code/language is as simple as possible
         | 
         | code and literary prose aren't interchangeable, not everything
         | in the world ought to be approached through the lens of
         | programming.
         | 
         | Code is, unless someone decides to make a language purely for
         | aesthetic purposes, designed to solve technical problems, prose
         | is not.
         | 
         | Maximalist art has a long history. It engulfs the reader, it's
         | deliberately not utilitarian. It's often also a reaction to the
         | sort of plain, monks cave style writing of a lot of American
         | authors. Faulkner certainly falls into that category, but also
         | Pynchon, Wallace, and so on.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-01 10:02 UTC)