Faulkner's View...Noble Speech

Since this blog is entitled “Responses to the writing and the world of William Faulkner”, I am going to dedicate my last post to Faulkner’s Noble Prize Speech. Because this speech is as much part of the world of Faulkner, as this week’s reading The Reivers, and I believe it was Ms. Ethridge, who said at the beginning, this course will be used to interpret the different personalities of Faulkner through his work. The speech is given to Faulkner as a life time achievement award for his work so I thought its relevance is undeniable to understanding Faulkner as well as his work.

His Noble Prize speech brought so many things together for me. It seemed as if many others, whom have read his fiction, took Faulkner’s pessimist to heart. Like some of us, they viewed Faulkner only from the surface. They saw him as an author, who viewed life and man in general, as victims of idiocy by our own making due to us ignoring “the problems of the human heart.” However, this was not who Faulkner was at all; in fact, he was a man, who very much believed in the spirit and compassion of man to carry himself through hard times such as the radical transformation of the south after the Civil War or what the south was to its inhabitants before the war. Faulkner was merely documenting a time and place (Yoknapatawpha County) in history that was relative to him, and to us all since the Civil War deeply affected the U.S.

I believed that doom and gloom were simply themes that Faulkner explored on his path to self discovery that as writer he must not forget about the problems that the human heart endure or that the basis of all things is to be afraid; therefore, to leave no room for anything but the old verities and truth of the heart. Faulkner must have gone through these things himself in order to offer such in depth advice about where one should find inspiration to write. I know that the human heart takes on different identities, thus speaking to us in a voice that is not always familiar, yet we go along and discover another part of ourselves or craft. This is what I believe Faulkner went through when he wrote using the writing technique stream of consciousness. Because he was so trusting to undergo this transformation he got really good at it, and people mistakenly believed this was the real William Faulkner, when really he was just playing part in order to tell that character’s story. Faulkner happily did his duty as wanna-be poet/novelist by prompting man, through his work, to endure and prevail. I never viewed Faulkner as pessimistic. I definitly felt at times that I only captured a glance of what he was doing,but after reading this speech it widen my view, more than any criticism, about what was one of his many aims were.