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SPEECH TO ACCEPT THE 1949 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

William Faulkner

Speeches to accept awards often demand of their speakers a mix of gratitude and humility, rejoicing and respect. Award winners in our culture should also be modest, though not falsely apologetic, and they should show wit and good nature where possible. There are few prizes better globally recognized than the Nobel Prize, and in this speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, delivered in Stockholm in 1950, the great author William Faulkner speaks from the heart in words that show the audience why he is a good speaker—and a great wordsmith.

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. •

• Faulkner acknowledges the importance of the award but notes that it is less for him and more for his literary output.

• Although Faulkner addresses a crowd of dignitaries, he makes it clear that he speaks to a younger generation of artists. The words that follow will be for them.

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. •

• By asking, “When will I be blown up?” Faulkner emphasizes that public fears of nuclear holocaust in the 1940s had replaced meditations on the essential internal conflicts we all feel as humans.

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.

• Faulkner urges future writers and poets not to ignore the essential human conflicts.

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.

• A bold, life-affirming statement made in the face of fears about nuclear Armageddon.

• Effective repetition: “I refuse to accept this.”

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. •

• Careful word choice: Faulkner labels the necessity to write about the human condition a “duty” and a “privilege.” These words elevate the calling of future artists to a responsibility and an obligation.