William Faulkner's "address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature" is a classic statement of humanist affirmation. (p. 366)

The text that appears in freshman anthologies is a noble statement, a model of rhetoric transcending platitude. But the text that Faulkner delivered to the Swedish Academy—albeit an identical one—is false and insincere. It lacks eloquence, because Faulkner did not fully believe what he was saying.

The first half—yes. He did believe what he said about other writers: that they had "forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing," and that those who fail to confront the "old verities and truths of the heart" doom themselves to write "not of the heart but of the glands." These sentiments reflect principles he had always held. But the final, longest paragraph of the Speech presents a teleological defense of his foregoing remarks which contradicts not only the pessimism implicit in his early works but opinions he was expressing in current books as well. That paragraph will be familiar to most students of modern literature:

Until [the writer] relearns [the old universal truths], 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.

This stirring assertion of immortality for the human spirit, and of the writer's contribution to that immortality, presents only one side of an internal debate that preoccupied Faulkner throughout the 1940s and into the fifties. It therefore provides a false resolution to a question Faulkner was then still struggling to answer, a question that touched him personally in a way the Speech conceals: not only "Will mankind prevail?" (that is, does human history have meaning?), but also "Is it meaningful for me, William Faulkner, to write?" (is my voice "inexhaustible"?).

This context of internal debate can best be demonstrated by tracing the history of the central image in the last paragraph of the Speech—that of the lone man standing upon the last rocky island in an apocalyptic seascape. From early in his career, Faulkner used this image as a metaphor for his own literary situation; and variations in his use of it reflect important shifts in his attitude toward his vocation. (pp. 366-67)

While, in the Speech, Faulkner admonished writers to contribute their words to the construction of a refuge for mankind, in The Sound and the Fury the words themselves are a force from which the speaker seeks refuge. The Speech denies the possibility that man's voice will exhaust itself, but the novel seems to accept such a possibility as desirable: the ultimate goal of language is to move "beyond the need for words." A major change has occurred between 1928 and 1950; but it has less to do with Faulkner's supposed conversion to humanist affirmation than with the advent of severe doubts about the efficacy of his vocation—doubts he had to appease in order to continue writing. In 1928, Faulkner felt the imperative voice within himself too strongly to resist an attempt to move beyond it; but in 1950 he was too fearful of his own exhaustion, and too disillusioned with the idea that language can transcend itself, to speak favorably of the condition of silence.

The debate within him between faith and doubt began in earnest in the late thirties, when he complained for the first time of an intermittent inability to write. Financial difficulties, family responsibilities, and his failure to reach a comprehending audience contributed to this dilemma, but it also derived from his growing pessimism about the future of mankind….

[In Go Down, Moses the] river is an instrument of oblivion, embodying all of Faulkner's fears for his own vocation and for world history. The admonition in the novel's title to "go down" bespeaks his prevailing awareness of decline.

Yet Go Down, Moses also contains a hopeful vision, and it was within a confrontation between the two opposite attitudes that Faulkner first composed the germ of the last paragraph of the Nobel Prize Speech, using language that became formulaic for him even before he received the prize. As a young man, Ike McCaslin had become disillusioned with his social heritage. He chose to reject the past, to erase his historical memory, and to begin life hopefully anew. Consequently, he was willing to dispense with written records, for they only preserve past injustices without actively accommodating change. An exponent of oblivion, the younger Ike articulates Faulkner's own deep suspicion of the inertia and ineffectuality of words. Against this position stands Ike's cousin Cass Edmonds, who defends inherited evils and cultivates book-knowledge—consulting a volume of Keats's poetry, for example, in order to explain an experience Ike would rather leave to instinct. Thus, Faulkner entrusted his optimism about the human race to a man who belittles the value of writing and his defense of literacy to a man who accepts a bleak vision of history—a confusion he only artificially untangled in the Nobel Speech. (pp. 370-71)

Despite his covert pessimism, Faulkner adopted an affirmative pose before the world, and probably for his own benefit as well, during his laureateship. He frequently repeated the sentiments of the Nobel Address in interviews and in other speeches he delivered, as if he were consciously fulfilling the writer's duty to uplift the human heart which he had asserted in Stockholm; and he used the same language in many of his later books. (p. 373)

The immortality of mankind and, implicitly, the future of Faulkner's artistic legacy remain doubtful in A Fable. The debate between the general and the corporal—which they have no more resolved than Ike and Cass have theirs in Go Down, Moses—articulates the division between faith and despair that afflicted Faulkner throughout the forties and into the fifties. He tried to persuade himself that he, and mankind, had a future; and toward the very end of his life he may have succeeded in doing so. But in the Nobel Prize Speech he voiced only half of what was within him. While advising his listeners to write about "the human heart in conflict with itself," he was wishfully ignoring the conflict within himself, which his books revealed whether he wished them to or not. (pp. 374-75)