In the writing of Rebellious Bird thus far I’ve tried to avoid pervasive influences–authors whom I greatly respect and admire–if for no other reason than even the simplest cluster of sentences can warp one’s writing style or get into one’s head. Alas, temptation was never my strong suit. Last night I stumbled across William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
William Faulkner
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 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 one 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 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, and 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 learns 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 because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong 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.
As usual, after reading something like this, I begin asking myself if my own work is meeting all these expectations. Then I start trembling in fear and doubt. Then I have to talk myself off that suicidal ledge of insecurity and remind myself of how little control I really have. I have to tell myself that this is the first draft, that I can’t worry about the reaction of my imagined audience because in truth there is no audience: this is only the first draft. Then I can breathe again and keep writing.
I notice the same thing when I read. Before I started writing this novel I was reading all the time. I managed to plow through Anna Karenina in three weeks and some days. Now that I’m writing, reading seems a lot less appealing, probably because I find it disturbing. I read Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark in the early stages of writing, and I found that while I was reading I kept getting hung up on certain sentences or paragraphs, images or metaphors, even his startling portmanteaus. Every facet of this man’s writing–which I love–was bothering me, and it took me a while to figure out that I was constantly evaluating the sentences and the images and the metaphors against my own, asking myself how my own prose measured up in comparison to his. It’s a wonder I actually kept writing during this time.
This, however, is a hard lesson to learn. After reading the above speech last night I immediately went to my bookshelf and plucked from it Absalom, Absalom! and read the first chapter. Again the close attention to prose style, yet I’m finding that I’m able to practice a mental separation. I notice Faulkner’s sentences without becoming overwhelmed. I should probably stick to reading biographies (currently reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Herman Melville), but in truth I think there’s something to be gained from reading an influence while writing your novel, at least if you’re careful not to shoot yourself in the head. There’s always that danger.
And then there are the expectations that Faulkner directly acknowledges: immortalizing of the human spirit through one’s craft. I would love to ask Faulkner if these were things he thought about as he wrote The Sound and the Fury or Light in August, if he asked himself repeatedly, “Does this chapter help man prevail?” I certainly hope not. I hope that he had the same energy that I find in myself–that which he couldn’t quite articulate, that which drove him to write obsessively. I hope he was as blind as I am now, feeling around in the benthic dark and grasping at innumerable moments or laughter or sighs not yet written in his own language. See that–that was Faulkner’s pervasive influence. Shit.
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Faulkner Discussion on LiteraryMary | William Faulkner on Wikipedia
