Stockholm, December 10, 1950
William Faulkner officially earned the Nobel Prize in Literature for the
year 1949, but he did not receive it until the following year, because the
Nobel Prize committee could not reach a consensus in 1949. Hence, two Nobel
prizes were awarded in 1950, for the prior year and for the present one.
The speech Faulkner delivered was not immediately intelligible to his listeners,
both because of Faulkner’s southern dialect and because the microphone
was too distant from his mouth, but when it was printed in newspapers the
following day, it was immediately hailed as one of the most significant addresses
ever delivered at a Nobel ceremony.
The text below is reprinted from Essays,
Speeches, and Public Letters, which differs from the speech he actually delivered at the cermony. To hear a studio
recording of Faulkner reading the (revised) speech, please visit this
page. Also worth visiting is this page on the 1949 literature award from the Nobel Foundation, which features an audio recording of his live presentation of the speech, which unfortunately ends before the conclusion of the speech..
(This is apparently the same audio used for the first video featured below.)
I feel that this award
was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a lifes
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 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.
For more information about Faulkner’s
Nobel Prize in Literature, check out Trivia.
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