Sunday, October 8, 2017

120th Birthday of William Faulkner - Part II

             Faulkner was totally right about his worry with his right to privacy. A nightmare called dystopia starts with violations of basic human rights, and with the helping hand of a dehumanizing big media talking daily about these violations as it were a normal event, so without we realize our rights are being violated and then suddenly,we are already  living in this nightmare. Therefore we all must fight privacy violations, if you know about any of them, record, being a witness, help fight evil, because otherwise you can be the next victim. Join us in this fight, the democracy, the justice, the people and me really appreciate this humanitarian act. We all have to keep the democratic and humanitarian values, we can not tolerate an inversion of values and hypocrisy.  In this post remains the tribute to the American writer William Faulkner. This post is a summary of his essay with the complete title and subtitle of, "On Privacy." The American dream: what happened to it. The second summary was published at  http://www.vqronline.org/essay/faulkner%E2%80%99s-criticism-modern-america. The third was published at http://mwp.olemiss.edu//dir/faulkner_william/

            This was the American dream: a sanctuary on the earth for individual man: a condition in which he could be free not only of the old established closed-corporation hierarchies of arbitrary power which had oppressed him as a mass, but free of that mass into which the hierarchies of church and state had compressed and held him individually thralled and individually impotent. A dream simultaneous among the separate individuals of men so asunder and scattered as to have no contact to match dreams and hopes among the old nations of the old world which existed as nations not on citizenship but subjectship, which endured only on the premise of size and docility of the subject mass; the individual men and women who said as with one simultaneous voice: "We will establish a newland where man can assume that every individual man has inalienable right to individual dignity and freedom within a fabric of individual courage and honorable work and mutual responsibility." Not just a idea, but a condition: a living human condition designed to be co-eval with the birth of America itself. The dream, the hope, the condition which our forefathers did not bequeath to us, their heirs and assigns, but rather bequeathed us, their successors, to the dream and hope. We ourselves heired in our successive generations to the dream by the idea of the dream. And not only we, their sons born in America, but men born in the old alien repudiated lands, also felt that breath, that air, heard that promise, that proffer that there was such a thing as hope for individual man. And the old nations themselves, so old and so long-fixed in the old concepts of man as to have thought themselves beyond all hope of change, making oblation to that new dream of that new concept of man by gifts of monuments and devices to mark the portals of that inalienable right and hope: "There is room for you here from about the earth, for all you individually homeless, individually oppressed, individually unindividualized."  A free gift left to us by those who had travailed and individually endured to create it, we their successors, did not even to nourish and feed it. We needed only to remember that, living, it was therefore perishable and must be defended in its crisis. Because that dream was man's aspiration in the true meaning of the word aspiration. It was not merely the blind and voiceless hope of his heart: it was the actual inbreathe of his lungs, his lights, his living and unsleeping metabolism, so that we actually lived the dream. The dream audible in the strong uninhibited voices which were not afraid to speak, "that all individual men were created equal in one mutual right to freedom." That was the dream. Then we lost it. It abandoned us, which had supported and protected and defended us whicle our new nation of new concepts of human existence. Something happened to the dream. Many things did. This, I think, is a symptom of one of them. About ten years ago a well known literary critic, a good friend of long standing, told me that a wealthy widely circulated magazine had offered him a good price to write about me, not about my work, but about me as a private citizen. I said no, and explained why: until the writer committed a crime, his private life was his own, and not only had he the right to defend his privacy, but the public had the duty to do so since one man's liberty must stop at exactly the point where the next one's begins, and that I believed that anyone of responsibility would agree with me. Across the board in fact, a parlay, a daily triple: truth, freedom and liberty. The point is that America today any organization can postulante to itself immunity to violate the individualness, the individual privacy which he can not be an individual and lacking it which individuality he is not anything at all worth the having or keeping, of anyone who is not himself a member of some organization or group numerous enough or rich enough to frighten them off. There are occupations which are very valuable,  such as writing novels and short stories, which require, demand privacy in order to endure, live. The American sky which was once the topless empyrean of freedom, the American air which was once the living breath of liberty, are now become one vast down-crowding pressure to abolish them both, by destroying the last vestige of privacy without which man can not be an individual.
              Every great novelist has his wisdom, but he imparts it in his own mode. He doesn't make statement and offer arguments. He dramatizes fictional characters. His judgments are normally implicit, not explicit. But they engage human interest in a way in which the abstract statements of the political scientist never can. They make their appeal to the imagination. The work of the great literary artist, as a matter of fact, has never been more necessary than now. In a world which increasingly resembles the innards of a vast IBM machine, a world in which the human integers are likely to feel themselves dehumanized and left at the mercy of forces which are impersonal, we need the rich particularity and the imaginative reach of the literary artist. What he gives us is not life itself, but perhaps the next best thing to life itself: a simulacrum of life that helps us to come to terms with ourselves, to understand our history, and to get a firmer grasp on reality and truth.
            The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. More than simply a renowned Mississipi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the 20th century' greatest writers. During what is generally considered his period of greatest artistis acievement, from The Sound and the Fury, in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small county in the South, that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written.

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