William Faulkner
Banquet Speech*
William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950
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3 min.
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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.
* The speech was apparently revised by the author for publication in The Faulkner Reader. These minor changes, all of which improve the address stylistically have been incorporated here.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1949
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