Clark Gillespie
Exit Essay
Eng 210 Intro to Lit
Heidi Naylor
William Faulkner’s
Nobel Address
William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature. It is safe to say that he earned the right to critique the state of his craft upon receiving this prestigious award, and critique he does. It was 1950 when he gave his acceptance speech for the prize. America, and the world, had just endured the greatest war in the history of man. We then transitioned almost directly into the Cold War, where fear and
paranoia were staples of the every-day consciousness. Faulkner saw a kind of
paralyzing fear settle over society in this protracted time of war and rumors
of wars and challenged his contemporaries and those coming after him to not
focusing on grief and fear and being afraid, the “basest of all things”(53), but
to get back to writing about the “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.” (53)
Are these qualities
found in his own writings? Do those that follow heed his advice? I will look at
his story Barn Burning from our readings. Albeit before the Cold War, it was written while Nazi Germany was
rolling their tanks across Europe, certainly a time for, if not the sustained
numbing fear he spoke of, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”
(53), but certainly a time of a lingering nervousness . I will also look at some
other writers after this time to see how they may have heeded his call.
Barn
Burning is a story set within a family that migrates from town to town, the
father picking up farming jobs in each new place. But really, it’s the story of
the youngest son and the conflicted relationship he has with his father and the
reason they have had to move 12 times in his young life. That reason is that the
father burns down the barns of the property owners he is sharecropping from,
never in a way that can be proven in court because he asks his children to lie
on the witness stand for him, but with enough of a knowing that the locals run
them out of town. Faulkner sets this conflict up beautifully on the one side with
the loyalty of family relations, of blood. “the smell and sense just a little
of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He
could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and
his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn
both! He’s my father!) stood…” (40) Juxtaposing against that desperate pull of
blood on the boy is his own conscience. “His father, stiff in his black Sunday
coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He
aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And
I will have to do hit.” (40) A brilliant move to show “the human heart in
conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…” (53) The boy did
eventually, after his father was finally shot, if not actually prevail,
acquired the hope of prevailing, “and
soon there would be the sun.” and finally, “He did not look back.” (52)
These
themes of blood versus conscience are also explored in John Cheever’s story
Goodbye, My Brother, though the lines between who to root for in the story are
blurred. In it we primarily see the conflict between the narrator and his
younger brother, Lawrence. The narrator claims, “We are a family that has
always been very close in spirit.”(54), yet throughout the book he highlights
the battles of will and opinion between the family members, particularly
Lawrence’s view of the family that show being “close in spirit” is a messy
closeness indeed. “I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and
our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of
the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a
happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and
candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure.” (58) Ultimately in the
end, the brooding younger brother, after the final blow, metaphorically and
literally, to their bond, disowns the family when the narrator bludgeons him in
the head with driftwood. This disowning is shown as a kind of victory, a fresh
start and even a baptism for the family as illustrated in the vivid last lines:
“The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were
swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw them come out and saw that they were naked,
unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of
the sea.” (66) I was left with an empty place, where hope was, for this family
to reconcile with this ending. I myself have had a falling out with a sibling,
the reasons for which were deeply personal and life scarring, yet we have become
close again, the pull of a shared upbringing, a mother’s love, and of blood too
strong for even the harshest transgressions to not fade. Ultimately I feel this
story falls short of Faulkner’s ideal of what the writer and poet should write
about, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” (53) He
feels a burden as a writer to not just document difficult truths, but to “help
man endure by lifting his heart…” (53) While blood loses out in both stories,
Faulkner’s boy sacrifices his blood for truth and we are left with an image of
his following a path of higher calling, where Cheever’s narrator’s family bonds
seem to be broken by nothing more than a difference in worldview, and yet we
are given that powerful baptismal image in the end as if the brooding and
melancholy brother was the weight that held the family under.
Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton were divisive characters in the world of poetry. Their critics say they
used the shock value of tortured minds to achieve acclaim secondary to poetic
artistry, while supporters might point out that they expanded poetry to a new
place of raw emotion and autobiographical self-observation, dubbing it
“confessional poetry.” This kind of
poetry was new for the time and ground-breaking. It seems that all new things do
breed a certain resistance from any establishment, but does their poetry lift
the spirit as Faulkner would ask of our writers? It certainly does not. “I have
gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming
evil” (Sexton 70) “And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats.
They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be
blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” (Sexton 71) The images of blackness and
death are ever present in the poems “Her Kind” and “The Truth the Dead Know” by
Sexton. Many similar images are found in Plath’s poetry, particularly “Daddy”,
and ironically enough, even though it was 1962 and many years after WWII, her
imagery evokes the time that Faulkner was imploring our writers to help society
get past, Nazi oppression and the war. “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”,
(72) “Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.” (72) “I have always been
scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.” (73)
It
seems that Faulkner could see the change happening in his contemporaries and
the new crop of writers as they transitioned from the modern to the post-modern
world. He saw and felt that inspiration was giving way to a raw emotionalism.
An emotionalism that was, for some, also a realism that looked in a mirror,
instead of looking at the horizon, and he did not like it. I do not think, for
the most part, that his call for the poet’s voice to “not merely be the record
of man”, but to “be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and
prevail.” (53) was heeded by the writers that followed. Faulkner held his craft
to a higher call, a call to lift society from the dregs of the fear and
uncertainty in life, to see inspiration and attain higher things. The writers
that came after were more interested in showing a life that, to them, was real,
whether or not there was anything higher to be hoped for.
Faulkner,
William. “Acceptance Speech Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi
Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 53. Print.
Faulkner,
William. “Barn Burner.” Introduction to
Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 40-52.
Print.
Cheever,
John. “Goodbye, My Brother.” Introduction
to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 54-66.
Print.
Sexton,
Anne. “Her Kind.” Introduction to
Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 70. Print.
Sexton,
Anne. “The Truth the Dead Know.” Introduction
to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 71.
Print.
Plath,
Sylvia. “Daddy.” Introduction to
Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 72-74.
Print.
Biography,
Anne Sexton. The Poetry Foundation. Web.
10 May. 2014.
Biography
of Sylvia Plath. Poemhunter.com Web.
10 May. 2014
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