Attempting to venture into realism but unable to cope with its abject lack of universal truth, American literature is suspended between the real and romantic, warping into a grotesque caricature of itself. However, these modernist attempts to cope with an absurd reality remain haunted by the idea of universal truth, and thus plagued by a desire to return to an earlier romantic tradition. Faced with the absurdity of a post-war world, American literature – its writers and its characters – pushes forward into the realist tradition that became a hallmark of literary modernism. This conflict between hope and despair, endurance and decay, forms one of the most fundamental tensions in American modernism.
The champion of a literary tradition unapologetically characterized by decay and disintegration seems, in his fiction, fairly willing to accept the end of man. This, from the author who – perhaps more than any other – epitomized the southern Gothic genre, is surprising. Elaborating, Faulkner goes on to promise that “man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” This faith, he insists, has its roots in the human soul, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance,” and Faulkner’s speech rings to a triumphant close in a lilting paean of polysyndentous optimism, affirming man by calling upon “the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” In a certain Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm in 1950, William Faulkner famously declines to accept the end of man.
0 kommentar(er)
