The major themes energizing the work of poets and novelists are: (1) the
emptiness of traditional spiritual aims and values; (2) the ascendancy of
"Mass Man" (the archetypal man with no center or identity); (3) the
existentialist themes of isolation, separation, the hostility of an absurd
universe, of "man's littleness"; (4) Sigmund Freud's theories: the
unconscious and the forces which drive man; the person as the sum of his whole
development; (5) the writer's responsibility as one who gives meaning to life
through his art: the only permanence to life is art itself.
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all--not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Another work illustrating the theme of spiritual emptiness is Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness
(1899). Conrad based his short novel on his own experience as the captain of a
Congo river-steamer sent up river to rescue an ailing company agent. That
experience plus Conrad's own creative insights led him in the novel to describe
a journey to the center of Africa which was also a journey into the pit of
man's soul: the "heart of darkness".
The theme of spiritual darkness begins at the beginning of Conrad's story.
The narrator, Marlow, told his story at night, on board a ship waiting on the
Thames for a favorable tide. His first words set the stage: "And this also
. . . has been one of the dark places on the earth." (He spoke of ancient London).
Manning the outer office of the company in Brussels from which he set forth to
find Kurtz were two women in black, knitting, "guarding the door of
Darkness". His trip down the African coast and then up the Congo was a
journey into the "heart of darkness". Images of savagery, suffering
and death met him at every stage: a group of broken, dying natives worked in
chain gangs to the point of death in collecting ivory for the Company; dying
bearers left on the trail to the river; the forest opening before them and closing
behind them on the slow river boat trip up river; the frenzied yells and
swaying motions of villagers along the river bank; the death of Marlow's
helmsman in a sudden native attack on the boat; finally, when they reached
Kurtz's station, the chilling sight of native human heads on poles.
Kurtz, Marlow learned, had been so fantastically successful at ivory
gathering because he had descended into savagery. "He came to them with
thunder and lightening, you know--and they had never seen anything like it--and
very terrible. He could be very terrible." Kurtz, become a god-king, had
used his power over the native people (". . . the chiefs came every day to
see him. They would crawl. . . .") to scour the
countryside for ivory. The heads of any who opposed him wound up atop the poles
around the station. The heads, Marlow said, showed that "Mr. Kurtz lacked
restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something
wanting in him-some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not
be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency
himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last-only at the very
last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a
terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him
things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no
conception till he took counsel with this great solitude-and the whisper had
proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was
hollow at the core."
Kurtz was Conrad's version of the hollow man. He was every man, but
especially European man. "His mother was half-English, his father was
half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz." He was civilized
man, Enlightenment man. But empty at the core. When
set in the jungle, without restraints, he became pure Id to use Freud's term.
Or to use Nietzsche's term, he descended into savagery and brutality when the
will to power seized him. To be sure Kurtz recognized what he had become as
Marlow took him and his ivory back down river. At the end, ill with fever,
staring fiercely, he cried out "The horror! The
horror!" Marlow continued, "He had something to say. He said
it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of
his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but
was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to
penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had
judged. 'The horror!'"
As Marlow finished his narrative, darkness intruded again: "The
tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart
of an immense darkness."
The third and final example of the theme of spiritual emptiness is Ernest
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). The work springs from World War I
and its aftermath of cynicism about ideals and values. Hemingway took the title
from chapter 1, verses 3-5 in Ecclesiastes, an Old Testament study in
the futility of life:
"What
profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another
generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his
place where he arose."
All
is vanity (emptiness and foolishness); life is endless repetition; there is
nothing new under the sun: these were Hemingway's themes borrowed from the
cyclical myth-making outlook of the ancient world.
Hemingway's characters--Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, Mike Campbell, Bill
Gorton, Robert Cohn--are expatriates cut off not only
from their homelands but also from any stable ethical and spiritual moorings.
Like Heart of Darkness, The Sun Also Rises centers on a journey,
from Paris to Pamplona to the bull fights. In the latter novel, however, the
journey is not to a center of darkness but to what for Hemingway was the only
site where life had any order or meaning: the bull ring. More
of that in the next paragraph. By the time the party reaches Pamplona,
the reader knows Hemingway's characters are all damaged in some way. Jake's
malady is physical: a war wound which prevents his loving physically. And that
crippled his emotions as well. (The reader is not surprised when Brett says at
the end "Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time
together." And he replies, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?").
Brett's wound is emotional. She goes from bed to bed, but cannot love
emotionally. Robert Cohn's injury is that he is born out of time. He is the
last true knight. When others cannot believe in ideals, he obstinately does,
making himself ridiculous by his passion for Brett. Mike Campbell's injury is
alcoholism. Bill Gorton's is the inability to believe in anything.
If all are crippled, is there anything redeeming in any of Hemingway's
characters? Perhaps only in Pedro Romero, the matador who knows what he is
doing and why he is doing it. While everyone else is indifferent, casual,
cynical, Pedro Romero lives by the Code. Only the bull-fight, in a "clean
well-lighted place," has any rules which matter. The rules are not
spiritual values, but courage, nobility, bravery, discipline, grace under pressure: the ancient aristocratic virtues of
soldiers and sportsmen. Nada--nothingness, death, violence--pervades
life. But one can live (as the existentialist said) in defiance of nada.
The bull-fights symbolize the good life lived according to the rules in the
face of nada. The matador knows that death is the end of the fight, his
own or the bull's, maybe both. What makes the difference is whether the matador
risks himself in the face of danger. Killing the bull is not the end. The
ritual itself is the end, that and the courage and skill of the matador.
Hemingway describes one of Pedro's kills:
It
was a good bull, a big bull, and with horns, and it turned and recharged easily
and surely. He was what Romero wanted in bulls.
When he had finished his work with the muleta and was ready to kill, the crowd made him go on. They did not want the bull killed yet, they did not want it to be over. Romero went on. It was
like a course in bull-fighting. All the passes he linked up, all completed, all
slow, templed and smooth. There were no tricks and no mystifications. There was
no brusqueness. And each pass as it reached the summit gave you a sudden ache
inside. The crowd did not want it ever to be finished.
The bull was squared on all four feet to be killed, and Romero killed
directly below us. He killed not as he had been forced to by the last bull, but
as he wanted to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out
of the folds of the muleta and sighted along the blade. The bull watched him.
Romero spoke to the bull and tapped one of his feet. The bull charged and
Romero waited for the charge, the muleta held low, sighting along the blade,
his feet firm. Then without taking a step forward, he became one with the bull,
the sword was in high between the shoulders, the bull had followed the
low-swung flannel, that disappeared as Romero lurched clear to the left, and it
was over.
In a world where the end is death, nothingness, and extinction the only
thing that matters is "playing the game according to rules." Pedro
Romero lives by the Code. So do Brett Ashley, Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, and
Mike Campbell, less heroically. Robert Cohn does not. Traditional religion
plays no role at all in the lives of any of Hemingway's characters. Perhaps
Jake comes the closest to feeling religious, but he
fails in the end. Trying to pray and failing he says, "I was a little
ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there
was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while...I only wished I felt
religious and maybe I would the next time." Brett reveals her own idea of
spirituality when she says after having given up Pedro Romero:
You
know I feel rather damned good, Jake.
You should.
You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.
Yes.
It's sort of what we have instead of God.
Some people have God, I said. Quite a lot.
He never worked very well with me.
What
does matter, besides playing the game according to the rules? Physical sensation. Food. Drink. Sex, as an end in itself. Violence, the
violence of the bull ring. Purely sensual pleasure.
Perhaps one of the few scenes of peace and beauty is Jake and Bill's fishing
trip to Burguete on the way to Pamplona. On the theme
of "but the earth abideth forever," Jake
and Bill find solace in the sensations of nature: "We stayed five days at Burguete and had good fishing. The nights were cold and the
days were hot, and there was always a breeze even in the heat of the day. It
was hot enough so that it felt good to wade in a cold stream, and the sun dried
you when you came out and sat on the bank. We found a stream with a pool deep
enough to swim in."
Hemingway once wrote (revealingly?):
To
me heaven would be a big bullring with me holding two barrera
seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and
two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and
would be truly monogamous and love them truly and well, and the other where I
would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.
?
1.What do you make of the last quote above?
2.Do you have any interest in reading one of the
examples of literature so far cited? Why? Why not?
(2) the ascendancy of "Mass
Man" (the archetypal man with no center or identity).
Some representative examples of this theme are W. H. Auden, "The
Unknown Citizen", T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
Auden's Unknown Citizen is Mass Man, faceless in his sameness to everyone
else:
He
was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every
day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name proved that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but
left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a
parent
of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
And then there is a more famous poem by Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Prufrock is
the archetypal anti-hero who populates fiction of the last century. For him
there are no great questions. There are only trivia, and the nagging worry of his own presumption as a nobody. Some selected lines:
There
will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I
Dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin.")
My morning coat my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple
pin--
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin."')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will
reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all- -
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair.')
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all:
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
floor- -
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at time, the Fool.
I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
In the novel, perhaps no one more aptly depicted Mass Man than Sinclair
Lewis in Babbitt (1922). His
character, George F. Babbitt, had no ideas that he had not gotten from his
political party, his church, his civic club, or advertising. He was
commonplace, and proud of it. In the following selections, we see George
Babbitt "thinking" as Mass Man:
He
searched for an attitude, but neither as a Republican, a Presbyterian, an Elk,
nor a real-estate broker did he have any doctrine about preacher-mayors laid
down for him, so he grunted and went on.
But Babbitt was virtuous. He advocated, though he did not practice, the
prohibition of alcohol; he praised, though he did not obey, the laws against
motor-speeding; he paid his debts; he contributed to the church, the Red Cross,
and the Y. M. C. A.; he followed the custom of his clan and cheated only as it
was sanctified by precedent; and he never descended to trickery--though, as he
explained to Paul Riesling: "Course I don't mean to say that every ad I
write is literally true or that I always believe everything I say when I give
some buyer a good strong selling-spiel. You see--you see it's like this: In the
first place, maybe the owner of the property exaggerated when he put it into my
hands, and it certainly isn't my place to go proving my principal a liar! And
then most folks are so darn crooked themselves that they expect a fellow to do
a little lying, so if I was fool enough to never whoop the ante I'd get the
credit for lying anyway! In self-defense I got to toot my own horn, like a
lawyer defending a client--his bounden duty, ain't
it, to bring out the poor dub's good points? Why, the Judge himself would bawl
out a lawyer that didn't, even if they both knew the guy was guilty! But even
so, I don't pad out the truth like Cecil Rountree or
Thayer or the rest of these realtors. Fact, I think a fellow that's willing to
deliberately up and profit by lying ought to be shot!"
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce,
just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious
belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little
smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and
Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix
what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised
wares--toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water
heaters--were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then
the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.
If you had asked Babbitt what his religion was, he would have answered in
sonorous Boosters'-Club rhetoric, "My religion is to serve my fellow men,
to honor my brother as myself, and to do my bit to make life happier for one
and all." If you had pressed him for more detail, he would have announced,
"I'm a member of the Presbyterian Church, and naturally, I accept its
doctrines." If you had been so brutal as to go on, he would have
protested, "There's no use discussing and arguing about religion; it just
stirs up bad feeling."
Actually, the content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who
had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good
Man he would go to a place called Heaven (Babbitt unconsciously pictured it as
rather like an excellent hotel with a private garden), but if one was a Bad
Man, that is, if he murdered or committed burglary or used cocaine or had
mistresses or sold non-existent real estate, he would be punished. Babbitt was
uncertain, however, about what he called "this business of Hell." He
explained to Ted, "Of course I'm pretty liberal; I don't exactly believe
in a fire-and-brimstone Hell. Stands to reason, though, that a fellow can't get
away with all sorts of Vice and not get nicked for it, see how I mean?"
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion
was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going
to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse;
and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of
taking, yet had a voodooistic power which "did a
fellow good--kept him in touch with Higher Things."
He was thinking. It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it
and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven
as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew
was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn't much pleasure out of
making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they
might rear children who would rear children. What was it all about? What did he
want?
He blundered into the living-room, lay on the
davenport, hands behind his head.
What did he want? Wealth? Social
position? Travel? Servants?
Yes, but only incidentally.
"I give it up," he sighed.
?
Your reaction to George F. Babbitt?
(3) the existentialist themes of isolation,
separation, the hostility of an absurd universe, of "man's
littleness";
Two poets come to mind: Robert Frost and e. e. cummings (the way he wrote it).
Frost's "Desert Places" evokes "man's littleness":
Snow
falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All the animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less-
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" also calls up images of alienation and
separation:
Some
say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
And, finally, Frost's view of the hostile universe in "Bereft":
Where
had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
And from e. e. cummings,
another image of man's littleness in "Pity This Busy Monster Manunkind":
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not, Progress is a comfortable disease:
your Victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange;
lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen
till unwish returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but
never this fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if--listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's
go.
?
The imagery in the name "manunkind"?
(4) Sigmund Freud's theories: the unconscious and the forces which
drive man; the person as the sum of his whole development.
Rather than turn to a new work and writer, let us return to Conrad and the Heart
of Darkness. We have already said that Conrad in Kurtz drew a character
right out of Freud. The journey by Marlow into Kurtz's mind was like a journey
into the unconscious, the realm of the Id. The journey was conveyed in dream
imagery: the beginning of the narrative in the darkness of a ship's deck on the
Thames; the river enfolding the boat on the way upstream; the discovery of
Kurtz surrounded by heads on stakes; Kurtz's death; the finish of the tale,
still in darkness. Kurtz's Id had taken over from his Ego. With Marlow's help
he regained Ego control, and Superego judgment so that
he could say, "The horror!"
Marlow's journey also stands for another Freudian image, the growth of the
personality under the stress of internal forces and external circumstances.
Marlow identifies with Kurtz. Why? Because Kurtz represents
the Id, that reservoir of instinctual forces. These instincts threaten
to overwhelm Marlow as they had Kurtz, but he manages to understand, name and
control them. And the means by which he heals himself is by the dream-like
telling of Kurtz's story. And so his experiences become the basis for his
personality as one morally aware, one who had journeyed into the recesses of
his unconscious and had returned a new person. Marlow's character is the sum
total of his whole emotional experience.
?
Is the connection between Freud's ideas and Conrad's fiction valid? Why? Why
not?
(5) the writer's responsibility as one who
gives meaning to life through his art: the only permanence to life is art
itself.
William
Faulkner (1897-1962) said this more eloquently than any one else. Speaking in Stockholm
in 1950 after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, Faulkner
said:
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
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 soul 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.
?
Faulkner's line about writing "not of the heart but the
glands"?
You know by now that I like to show you grave sites. Faulkner's, taken in the Spring of 2004: headstone;
slab.
20th
Century Literature and the Revolt Against Europe
Until the last writer and the last theme there has not been much we could
recognize of the traditional values and beliefs of the Enlightenment. 20th
century writers depict man as hollow, spiritually empty, unable to love or
commit himself to any ideals. The world is hostile.
God "does not work very well" with him. We are back to the cyclical
view of life: the earth abides forever and the sun also rises. Life is nada,
ending in nada. In Faulkner we do see a reaffirmation of the basic worth
and dignity of man. And perhaps some optimism about the future too in his final
words about man's not merely enduring but prevailing. Some comfort perhaps, but
not much on a landscape of nada.
?
Is that last sentence too gloomy?
Return
to Main Page
