JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #30
December 10, 2020
William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, and on December 10, 1950, seventy years ago today, he gave a speech accepting the award at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm. You can read the revised text of the speech on the Nobel Prize’s website. Audio of the speech (with a slightly different text) was once available at the same site, but it’s now easy enough to find elsewhere on the web.
I revisit this speech every so often in ruminative moods, and I can usually recite from memory a line that reverberates for me as guidance for thinking about fiction: "[T]he human heart in conflict with itself [...] alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." Good fiction must reach for the heart of what it means to be human, how we can continue to exist in the world, what drives us forward. This, as Faulkner reminds us, is the only thing worth the agony of artistic creation.
Faulkner concludes, "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."
There’s not much I can add to this. Maybe it’s self-serving to believe that fiction should seek to be move beyond being merely entertaining in order to be capital-I Important, but Faulkner seems to have it right that little else would make the "anguish and travail" worthwhile.