William Faulkner on Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature
2:51 Min.
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- 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 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 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 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 simply 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.
William Faulkner - December 10, 1950
