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WILLIAM FAULKNER RECEIVING GOOD
MONEY - THE NOBEL PRIZE 1950
When Will I Be Blown Up?
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William Faulkner.
Go here for more about
William Faulkner's Nobel Prize
Acceptance speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance
Speech, delivered at Stockholm, Sweden - December 10, 1950.
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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.
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