Literary Quandry: Is It Okay to Hate Faulkner?

A few days ago I filled out a "get to know you" questionairre at work. One of the questions was, "What is one book you read and hated?" After rifling through the extensive list of books I had read, narrowing it down to the much shorter list of books I didn't enjoy, I arrived at the inevitable answer: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

I expected this to be met with gasps of shock and horror. People clutching their chests and shaking their fingers in my face saying, "You don't deserve to be an editor. You know nothing about classic literature!" Instead, this led to other guilty dislikes. The list was illustrious, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Hardy. I also received a lot of replies saying things like, "I hate Faulkner too!" and "Aw, you took my answer!" (These employee surveys are very competitive--everyone wants to be the wittiest, friendliest, coolest person. Of course, this would be the coolest person in a group of people who could happily spend the afternoon arguing the merit of the Lord of the Rings movies vs. the Lord of the Rings novels--and quote both from memory. We're nerds, is what I'm saying. Big nerds.)

Anyway. I felt a huge sense of relief knowing that I wasn't the only one harboring a shameful secret. Growing up in literary academia instills a feeling of great pressure to read and enjoy certain books. As a champion of literacy and reading, it seems like a crime to dislike books that are determined "classics"--what we in the the pretentious world of academia refer to as the "literary canon". Not liking such a book is tantamount to being a hack, a sellout, someone with no class, no taste, and no future in the literary world.

But is the literary world changing? Is it now acceptable to criticize the great writers that came before us? Is it, after all, okay to hate Faulkner?

I started reading As I Lay Dying my sophomore year of college, during an American Lit class. It was not assigned as part of the class reading, but I was so taken with the theme of the class, so enamored of the professor, and so desperate to be a good English major that I decided to read it for fun.

I made it about halfway through before I gave up. It wasn't that the story wasn't good. It was that  I had no idea what the story was supposed to be about because the stream of consciousness was so convoluted. I learned very quickly that this particular narrative style was not for me. And I have never gone back.

I since decided that people only read Faulkner to be able to say they had read Faulkner, because nobody  could really, genuinely enjoy that stuff, could they?

This begs the question, how did Faulkner become considered such a canonical institution in the first place? How did he become such a recognizable name in American Literature that even Oprah had to endorse him? Perhaps, like other moderately talents, quirky come-alongs (Lady Gaga comes to mind), Faulkner was initially appreciated just for being so completely different than those who came before him. And perhaps the appreciation of that difference ballooned into a required respect of his work--something that would differentiate the charlatans from the truly well-read. That being the case, does this mean that Faulkner should no longer hold a place in the list of canonical works? Or is it still important that readers are educated thoroughly in his particular style of writing?

In a broader sense, we must ask, what makes a book a classic? What books are coming about nowadays that will gain that status? How long does a book have to wait to join the canon? And, finally, how long can a classic remain relevant to its readers?