Faulkner in His 1950 Acceptance

FAULKNER

In his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, William Faulkner speaks at length about being a writer which in his opinion is founded upon the idea to "create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before," meaning that a writer creates material by drawing upon the most basic elements of the human spirit in the form of age-old archetypes which symbolize a wide variety of emotions, such as love, hate, fear and wonder. Also, Faulkner points out that good writers must be "dedicated to the same anguish and travail," with anguish being some type of agonizing mental pain or suffering coupled with long and hard labor in the shape of words and images.

In addition, Faulkner maintains that any writer in today's troubled world must always remember and draw upon "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." Some of these conflicts include "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" which clearly shows that Faulkner as one of America's greatest authors relied quite heavily upon the ancient tales of the Greeks and the many so-called Western classics of the last three hundred years, such as Oedipus Rex, Homer's Odyssey and American classics like Moby Dick and Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter. Thus, for a "writer wannabe," he/she must study the classics and come to understand how tragedy defines all human emotion. Faulkner also points out that he believes man will endure and prevail because "he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance," traits which will outlive the destruction of the physical world.

PART TWO:

Within the society of man, the artist, whether a novelist, painter, sculptor or musician, helps humankind by "lifting his heart" and by "reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice" which man has experienced since the beginning of recorded history and undoubtedly long before anything was ever written down in the form of a poem or some other type of narrative. Generally speaking, the importance of the artist in human society has much to do with helping us to see beyond what we consider as reality and to understand how every human being is connected not only through human emotions but also through culture in the shape of iconography, being an image that relates a story, and the historical context of any given work. In some respects, art does provide much entertainment by allowing the viewer/reader to forget his/her problems for a short length of time, such as by attending a stage play or by going to see a movie on the big screen.