William Faulkner

William Faulkner appears as both a literary authority and a figure from the narrator’s friend’s past. His call for writers to look beyond fear and affirm enduring human values gives shape to the friend’s resistance to fiction centered on bleakness; an obituary detail then places Faulkner unexpectedly in her own history.

Literary Ideal

The friend invokes Faulkner while objecting to books that dwell on narcissism, alienation, failed relationships between the sexes, and human ugliness. She acknowledges that many such works are brilliant, but asks what happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s task was to lift people up. His standard serves as a counterpoint to what she sees as two prevailing modes: fascinated horror of life and unconvincing, platitudinous sentiment. The appeal is not simply for pleasant subject matter; it is a demand that literature do more than register despair.

Fear and the Writer’s Duty

Recalling Faulkner’s rebuke to a young writer, the friend describes a writer who writes as though he stood among and watched the end of man. Faulkner’s distinction between the heart and the glands sharpens the criticism: a literature governed by fear reduces human beings rather than understanding them. The fear at issue is the fear of being blown up, shared, he says, by every person on earth. Yet the writer has a duty to rise above it. Faulkner calls for valor and a return to universal truths: love, honor, pity, pride, compassion, and sacrifice. Without those values, he warns, a story will last but a day. The friend calls the words fine, while doubting that the image of the writer as a knight in shining armor can persuasively describe writers in her own time; her reservation keeps the ideal alive as an aspiration, not an easy verdict on contemporary literature.

A Biographical Disclosure

Faulkner also enters the account through the obituaries and memorial pieces published after the friend’s death. The narrator learns that, while still in school, the friend had had an affair with him. The revelation joins a celebrated literary name to the private history of the woman whose preferences and judgments have already brought his ideas into the conversation. The account supplies no further circumstances of the affair, leaving its significance in the contrast between Faulkner as a public touchstone for literary courage and his unexpectedly intimate place in the friend’s past.