名人轶事:William Faukner, Part Two（在线收听）

Broadcast: December 12, 2004

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VOICE ONE:

I'm Faith Lapidus.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today, we

finish the story of the writer William Faulkner. He created an area and

filled it with people of the American South.

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VOICE ONE:

In nineteen-forty-five, all seventeen books William Faulkner had written by

then were not being published. Some of them could not be found even in stores

that sold used books.

The critic Malcolm Cowley says, Faulkner's "early novels had been praised too

much, usually for the wrong reasons. His later and in many ways better novels

had been criticized or simply not read. "

Even those who liked his books were not always sure what he was trying to

say. Faulkner never explained. And he did not give information about himself.

He did not even correct the mistakes others made when they wrote about him.

He did not care how his name was spelled: with or without a "u. " He said

either way was all right with him.

Once he finished a book he was not concerned about how it was presented to

the public. Sometimes he did not even keep a copy of his book. He said, "I

think I have written a lot and sent it off to be printed before I realized

strangers might read it. "

VOICE TWO:

In nineteen-forty-six, Malcolm Cowley collected some of Faulkner's writings

and wrote a report about him. The collection attempted to show what Faulkner

was trying to do, and how each different book was part of a unified effort.


Cowley agreed that Faulkner was an uneven writer. Yet, he said, the

unevenness shows that Faulkner was willing to take risks, to explore new

material, and new ways to talk about it.


In nineteen-twenty-nine, in his novel “Sartoris,” Faulkner presented almost

all the ideas he developed during the rest of his life. Soon after, he

published the book he liked best, “The Sound and the Fury.” It was finished

before “Sartoris,” but did not appear until six months later.

VOICE ONE

In talking about “The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner said he saw in his mind

a dirty little girl playing in front of her house. From this small beginning,

Faulkner developed a story about the Compson family, told in four different

voices. Three of the voices are brothers: Benjy, who is mentally sick;

Quentin, who kills himself, and Jason, a business failure. Each of them for

different reasons mourns the loss of their sister, Caddie. Each has a

different piece of the story.

It is a story of sadness and loss, of the failure of an old Southern family

to which the brothers belong. It also describes the private ideas of the

brothers. To do this, Faulkner invents a different way of writing for each of

them. Only the last part of the novel is told in the normal way. The other

three parts move forward and back through time and space.

VOICE TWO:

The story also shows how the Compson family seems to cooperate in its

failure. In doing so the family destroys what it wants to save.

Quentin, in “The Sound and the Fury,” tries to pressure his sister to say

that she is pregnant by him. He finds it better to say that a brother and

sister had sex together than to admit that she had sex with one of the common

town boys of Jefferson.

Another brother, Jason, accuses others of stealing his money and causing his

business to fail. At the same time, he is stealing from the daughter of his

sister.

Missus Compson, the mother in the family, says of God's actions: "It can't be

simply to…hurt me. Whoever God is, he would not permit that. I'm a lady."

VOICE ONE:#p#副标题#e#

Some of the people Faulkner creates, like Reverend Hightower in “Light in

August,” live so much in the past that they are unable to face the present.

Others seem to run from one danger to another, like young Bayard Sartoris,

seeking his own destruction. These people exist, Faulkner says, "in that

dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you cannot

believe, toward a safety in which you have no…[belief]."

As Malcolm Cowley shows, all of Faulkner's people, black or white, act in a

similar way. They dig for gold after they have lost hope of finding it --like

Henry Armstid in the novel, “The Hamlet.” They battle and survive a

Mississippi flood for the reward of returning to state prison -- as the tall

man did in the story "Old Man." They turn and face death at the hands of a

mob -- like Joe Christmas does in the novel, “Light in August.” They act as

if they will succeed when they know they will fail.

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VOICE TWO:

Faulkner's next book, “As I Lay Dying,” was published in nineteen-thirty.

It is similar to “The Sound and the Fury” in the way it is written and in

the way it deals with loss. Again Faulkner uses a series of different voices

to tell his story. The loss this time is the death of the family's mother.

The family carries the body through flood and fire in an effort to get her

body to Jefferson to be buried.

Neither “As I Lay Dying” nor “The Sound and the Fury” was a great

success. Faulkner did not earn much money from them. He was adding to his

earnings by selling short stories and by working from time to time on movies

in Hollywood. Then to earn more money, he wrote a book full of sex and

violence. He called it “Sanctuary.”

When the book was ready to be published, Faulkner went to New York and

completely rewrote it. The changes were made after it was printed. So

Faulkner had to pay for them himself.

VOICE ONE:

The main person in “Sanctuary” is a man called Popeye. He is a kind of

mechanical man, a man, Faulkner says, without human eyes. Faulkner says he is

a person with the depth of pressed metal. For Faulkner, Popeye represents

everything that is wrong with modern society and its concern with economic

capitalism.

Popeye is a criminal, a man who "made money and had nothing he could do with

it, spend it for. " He knows that alcohol will kill him like poison. He has

no friends. He has never known a woman.

In later books he appears as a member of the Snopes family. The Snopes are a

group of killers and barn burners. They fear nothing, except nature. They

love no one, except themselves. They cheat everyone, even the devil. They

live in a private land without morals. Yet Flem Snopes ends as the president

of the bank in Jefferson.

Like Popeye, they gain the ownership and use of things, but they never really

have them. Flem Snopes marries into a powerful family but his wife does not

even have a name for him. She calls him "that man. "

Faulkner says that nothing can be had without love. Love is the opposite of

the desire for power. A person in one of Faulkner's stories says, "God

created man, and he created the world for him to live in. And…He created the

kind of world he would have wanted to live in if he had been a man. "

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VOICE TWO:

“Light in August” starts with the search by a woman, Lena Grove, for the

man who promised to marry her. The story is also about two people who do not

fit with other people. They are a black man named Joe Christmas, and a former

minister John Hightower, who has lost his belief in God. Faulkner ties the

three levels of individual psychology, social history, and tragedy into a

whole.

In nineteen-thirty-six, Faulkner followed “Light in August” with “Absalom,

Absalom.” Many consider this his best novel. It is the story of Joseph

Sutpen, who wants to start a famous Southern family after America's Civil

War. It is told by four speakers, each trying to discover what the story

means. The reader sees how the story changes with each telling, and that the

"meanings" are created by individuals. He finds that creating stories is the

way a human being finds meaning. Thus, “Absalom, Absalom” is also about

itself, as a work of the mind of man.

VOICE ONE:

Faulkner's great writing days were over by the end of World War Two. Near the

end of his life, Faulkner received many honors for his writing. The last, and

best honor, was the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen-fifty.

In a speech accepting the award, Faulkner spoke to young writers. It was a

time of great fears about the atomic bomb. Faulkner said that he refused to

accept the end of the human race. He said he believed that man will not only

survive, he will rule. "Man is immortal," he said, "because he has a soul, a

spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance. The writer's duty is

to write about these things. "

William Faulkner died of a heart attack in nineteen-sixty-two. He was sixty-

five years old.

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VOICE TWO:

This Special English program was written by Richard Thorman and produced by

Lawan Davis. I'm Steve Ember.

VOICE ONE:

And I'm Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA

Special English.

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