The Best Of... discussion
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Reasons to write, or read, for that matter
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Must read some of that Faulkner-dude.
I adore this speech- thank you! My goodness, what a profound thing to write about- the human heart in conflict with itself. All his books are just that. I am reading TSATF for the second time now, nobody writes like this. Paul I suggest As I Lay Dying.
For some bizarre reason I listened to the audio link expecting Faulkner to have a Kennedy-ish high class Massachusetts/Boston accent. Took me a few seconds to realize it was the man himself speaking and not someone introducing him.
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One of those sneaky southern gothics, lol.
I think I might have figured out why there seems to be a disproportionate number o southern [gothic] writers. (It's a loosely defined school of writing.)
When you live in the South, and you think, observe, question, you sure as hell don't talk to people much — writing becomes your default mode of communication.
Paul Martin wrote: "For some bizarre reason I listened to the audio link expecting Faulkner to have a Kennedy-ish high class Massachusetts/Boston accent. Took me a few seconds to realize it was the man himself speakin..."Well thank goodness he didn't, the Kennedy's are not representative of a Boston accent-theirs is an exaggerated snooty one.
Faulkner has a wonderful Southern drawl, I love it.
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Renee wrote: "I think I might print that speech out, or at least parts of it, frame it and hang it up in my workroom . . . if I ever get it together."Very cool. It's a beautiful speech.
Renee wrote: "A Kennedy-ish accent would have been interesting . . . since he grew up in Mississippi :DOne of those sneaky southern gothics, lol.
I think I might have figured out why there seems to be a dispr..."
Faulkner has said that he did not talk about writing with towns people- instead they would talk about horses and hunting. I don't remember where I saw that, as I did not save the link.
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Renee wrote: "In the south, the talk is about people and things — not ideas."That's what he said in interviews- he writes about people, not ideas. More than a few academics who review his work need to be reminded of that. And once a reader of him knows that, the concentration can be more focused on the characters instead of looking for some big idea.
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It is all character driven.
That may be the key to the modern gothic school, for that matter.
Very much in the manner a drama would be presented on stage.
Renee wrote: "I think that's the heart of southern [gothic] literature — the characters SHOW what the writer feels and thinks, what he wants to communicate, rather than the writer narrating/telling us directly...."
Flannery O'Connor definitely contributed to that. It's been a long time since I read 'Wise Blood' or saw Huston's movie, but both are on my list. I'm not so sure about Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Though I liked what I read at the time they didn't make the impression on me that O'Connor made.
William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
Ladies and gentlemen,
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam,
*There is an audio link on the original page: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prize...