A Rose For Emily

[mortalterror]

"To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. ... I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought would be the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks..."- William Faulkner in his Introduction to the 1932 edition of Sanctuary

There's such a thing as writing to make a living, but it's quite another to compromise your artistic integrity and produce work you recognize as sub par. For his part, Faulkner owned up to what he tried to do, and I think his remarks are telling. The work isn't bad because it makes money, or because it's popular. It's bad because no effort went into it's crafting, the artist didn't believe in it, and so he deliberately sabotaged himself by not developing things and making the work as good as it possibly could be.

[Chester]

"To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. ... I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought would be the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks..."- William Faulkner in his Introduction to the 1932 edition of Sanctuary

There's such a thing as writing to make a living, but it's quite another to compromise your artistic integrity and produce work you recognize as sub par. For his part, Faulkner owned up to what he tried to do, and I think his remarks are telling. The work isn't bad because it makes money, or because it's popular. It's bad because no effort went into it's crafting, the artist didn't believe in it, and so he deliberately sabotaged himself by not developing things and making the work as good as it possibly could be.

I found the same quote in a New York Times article titled
"FAULKNER WAS WRONG ABOUT 'SANCTUARY'"

You can find it here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...=&pagewanted=1

The article goes on to say:

Faulkner was so discouraged that he didn't even ask Smith to return the manuscript. When the novel was published by Cape & Smith in 1931, and then reprinted in the Modern Library, Faulkner's introduction set the tone for critical evaluations during the next 30 years. Being a ''cheap idea'' hastily executed to make money, ''Sanctuary'' could be brushed aside. Critics and readers didn't suspect that Faulkner mightn't be telling the complete truth about it, given his early passion for astounding the public. As Noel Polk, a Faulkner scholar and an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, reminds us in his afterword to the present edition, even the original text wasn't written in ''about three weeks'' but in four months - from January to May 1929 - with painstaking revisions.

I added the bold. This is the arrogance of which I speak. Critics had their minds made up about it even before they left the introduction. They believed Faulkner when he said he “speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe...” And of course we musn’t go in for the same things that the average person in Mississipi would go in for...

Meanwhile, I think we’re taking Antiquarian’s thread off topic. (But what else are we to talk about until Monday?)

[mortalterror]

Then let it go off topic. They aren't discussing Rose until Monday, and last I checked, we are in a literary forum. I had more remarks I wanted to add to my post anyway:

On it's face, the question is not even about whether the author believed that his own work was good or not. History is replete with artists who were mistaken about the relative value of their work. The main concern seems to be the way in which integrity is tied to quality. Can a good writer compromise his artistic principles and create a work of genius? Furthermore, can a great writer compromise his work without compromising himself?

When he sets himself before a typewriter, a keyboard, or takes pen in hand, it is assumed that the writer has already made certain decisions about his work. With most writers of merit, we assume that he has decided to write a great work of literature, or at least that he has determined to write something to the best of his abilities. The prologue to any work is a series of assumptions the writer makes about himself, his audience, and the work he's preparing to make. The optimal condition, in such cases, is for the writer to believe that he is a good writer, that he's writing for an intelligent, receptive, well educated audience, and that his story will be a masterpiece. Concerns beyond this, have a way of intruding upon the work, often to detrimental effect. When the author begins to doubt first the one, then the other, you have a serious crisis on your hands. The mark is lowered. Your hypothetical writer has stopped trying to write well and started writing well enough. Once a man has lowered his expectations, mayn't he lower them yet again, and still further subsequently? And again, why should he make the assumption that there is more money to be made by lowering his standards, by diminishing his powers, than could be made by raising them?

Let's consider the possibility that Sanctuary is a good piece of writing despite whatever Faulkner himself might have thought about it. I mentioned briefly above, that authors are often mistaken about which of their works will be the most enduring, or will have the most merit. But was he at least trying to make it as good a book as it could be made? This opens up the question of effort and intent. Great writers do write bad books, which they intend to be good. Could they also write great books which they intend to be bad? Is it all a crap shoot? Can bad writers write great literature, and can God create a rock so big even he could not lift it? I want to say that only great writers can write great literature, that they possess some spark, or specialized knowledge which other lesser authors simply do not possess. But I know that's not true. We have the example readily before us of any number of one hit wonders who create a single superlative work and then vanish into mediocrity forever, or even of astonishing virtuosos who never fulfill their potential. The difference between one of these geniuses and the men of a solitary book seems to be professionalism, the ability to reproduce a previous success, to properly interpret the factors that made their initial effort successful, the proper critical judgement of a work of art. Every dog has his day, but a genius has a career.

Be that as it may, whether a good writer can write below his ability or a bad writer can write above it still does not get to the heart of what we are discussing. Whatever their level of ability, or their capacity to reproduce those results on command does not satisfy the initial question relative to effort. Masterpieces have been tossed off, or labored forth in difficult birth of toil, effort, and length of days. But we must beg the question, what kind of writers pour forth streams of effortless majesty, and what type must slavishly grind to uncover a solitary gem? I believe that the reason some efforts are less taxing is because the authors have already spent their time in preparation. They've written dozens of books and covered much of the ground they are seeking to cover before. Or they've already worked out much of what they were going to do in their minds. I do not believe that a person unaccustomed to greatness and success could be so fortuitous as to stumble upon literary gold all at once, through accident, and without much striving beforehand. When an author rapidly develops a treasure, he does so with the weight of experience behind him. A mediocre writer has nothing but mediocre experience behind him, and so if he seeks to attain the heights of Olympus he must first scale it's lofty peeks. But enough metaphors. Can a writer create a work of genius in spite of himself, à la The Producers? Now that I really don't know.

As far as Sanctuary is concerned, Faulkner seems to have realized the danger he was in, bought back the manuscript and rewritten it. Whether he ever tried such a stunt again, or recovered from his lapse is for Faulkner scholars to decide.

P.S. What a bonehead I am. I forgot to address the primary motivating factors of mankind (money, power, fame, and pleasure), how they compete, and the differing results they produce. Well, I guess I'll leave that to some other occasion.

Whether Faulkner's judgement of the American audience was correct is another thing worth wondering about. When the Portable Faulkner came out in 1946, fifteen years later, Sanctuary was the only one of his books still in print. The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August had all been relegated to the bargain bin of your local used bookstore. How much does the reversal of critical opinion owe to his winning the Nobel Prize in 1949? Now, it's like he can do no wrong, or he never wrote a lousy word.

We make false idols of these men, and pretend their works shouldn't be read with the same critical appraisals as we would give to other books by other writers. I suggest that Proust had some problems with plot, pacing, and narrative setting and people jump all over me. They can't accept that their favorite books could be anything less than perfect, or that their favorite artist wrote anything less than a masterpiece. There is the fallacy. They stop looking at the books critically, accepting either the common opinion or their own hasty judgement as a substitute for reason, continued observation, and an open mind.

In regards to an earlier poster who mentioned that Balzac wrote extremely fast, I have to agree that some of Balzacs books are excellent, with the caveat that we only read three or four of them these days. I'm guessing that about seventy of them were probably worthless garbage and another twenty or so ran the gamut from good to alright. He wrote an awful lot of books without much effort in the hope that one or two of them would stick in the public consciousness. Then you have writers like T.S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway who produce extremely few works but of a higher quality. Scientists actually have term for this kind of behavior as it exists in nature. It's called r/K selection theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection

[Chester]

Excellent posts. And I don’t see much I would disagree with, mortalterror. My interest is specifically in “Faulkner’s judgment of the American audience” and I would just emphasize that his second sin, assuming his first was to compromise something of his artistic integrity and lower his expectations of himself, was to make the assumption that doing so was the quick way to gain a popular market for his work. That assumption is what drove the lowering, and I would argue that that mindset is the more egregious offense of the two.

Admittedly I know little about Faulkner and so I’m probably out of line in making my own assumptions about the man’s assumptions. As you say, he caught himself in time and rewrote the manuscript. One wonders, though, if he did so as a result of rethinking his opinion of the typical American reader.

That's about what every living writer today does. Almost no one writes for himself/herself and remains true to his artistic vision.

How do we know this? How do we know what the "artistic visions" are of today's writers? How do we know that their artistic visions are not what they are putting in print? And how do we know that their artistic visions do not match what the typical reader enjoys reading?

Kay Scarpetta might not embody Cornwell’s "unique vision of life" but she may well be Cornwell’s artistic vision. I can’t say for sure that these "formula" writers, as you suggest them to be, have a vision beyond what they are actually writing. Do we know, in other words, that they have some kind of artistic inclinations which they are willingly sacrificing to make money, as is the underlying assumption? Maybe they do, but I don’t know how we’d know that. It seems – and this is where I bristle – that we don’t find their work "artistic" enough to our liking (notwithstanding what the general population feels about it or, worse, because of what the general population feels about it) and so we presume they must be forfeiting their "integrity."

I think in the end the most we can say is that these people don’t share our artistic vision.

[Nossa]

I know I'm probably a bit behind here, cuz I just started reading it today. I'll hopefully join in tomorrow. I just wanna say that so far it's a very good read. I think Faulkner's style is not as difficult as people say, but maybe it's just cuz it's only a short story. I never tried reading a whole novel by him, but this should be a good start for more Faulkner reads

[mortalterror]

The problem is not that they lack originality and base their writing on a form. Some of the best stuff gets written that way: The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, Jerusalem Delivered, The Lusiads. And it's not that they re-use themes or popular characters: Don Quixote, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sherlock Holmes. It's that the models they base their work on are poor models in themselves.

I think that the major problem facing novelists today is that they don't have a proper form. Tradition gives direction and can inform a work in many ways. Anyone who's played a modern video game will understand the difference between sandbox gameplay, free form, and games which are "on rails" carefully regulated, restricted design. There's a lot of latitude in between the two which doesn't often get explored. Personally, I am deeply troubled by the amount of preference creative people show toward sandbox style writing. The novel is often such a formless mass it's hard to tell what it is trying to do.

Dante's Divine Comedy is 100 cantos, 33 cantos a book, with one canto introduction. The story is told in three books in terza (three) rima. The form re-inforces the tri-part nature of God (the father, the son, and the holy spirit) which is a major theme in the poem. I personally love that Jame Joyce structured Ulysses on Homer's Odyssey. I think there's a lot to be said for the well-made novel, and Scribe's well-made play. Plotting is perhaps the single most important element of a story and we neglect it at our peril.

Henry James once lamented that although Tolstoy's writing was good, his novels were like "loose baggy monsters." Nobody could say that about James Patterson. He does economize on his words. His sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are all short, which many people like. It zips the narrative along, keeps readers turning pages, creates a light energetic tone, and doesn't demand too much thought from his audience. There are a lot of things he does well. His problem is that he started life in marketing, and now he sees the novel as another product to be manufactured assembly line style, focus grouped, sensationalized, dumbed down, farmed out to other writers, ghost written, mass produced, and then sold in lavish ad campaigns.

I don't know what form Stephen King could be said to follow and I don't think that he repeats his characters. I would say that as opposed to Patterson King actually shows some traces of betrayed talent and a questioning mind. His cast of artistic misdeeds follow a wholly different arc than those of Patterson and we should be careful about lumping them in together. However, the place where he's distinguished himself and perhaps his true calling is in business. I couldn't say too much about the rest Antiquarian's rogues gallery but I doubt it would be terribly informative if I could; so I'll just shut up.

[Virgil]

I know I'm probably a bit behind here, cuz I just started reading it today. I'll hopefully join in tomorrow. I just wanna say that so far it's a very good read. I think Faulkner's style is not as difficult as people say, but maybe it's just cuz it's only a short story. I never tried reading a whole novel by him, but this should be a good start for more Faulkner reads

Actuaoly Nossa this will be an excellent place for you to start on Faulkner.


As to the other discussion, history is filled with great writing that is popular or unpopular in its day, history is filled with writers who wrote for money or worte for themselves. Actually other than poets, I can't think of a single fiction writer that did not intend to write for money. It makes no difference to the writing's value as art. Don Quixote was sold for lots of money. Cervantes considered himself a playwright first, but was not able to earn a living, so he decided to write something that would be popular and make money. Shakespeare constantly picks up stories that were popular. In fact he was not the first to write a Hamlet type of play or Julius Ceasar or many other. He knew what his audience was interested in and he satisfied them. As to Sanctuary, yes Faulkner wrote it in a popular/sensationalistic way for money. And he was criticized for it and the work was not rated highly at first. However, literature is constantly going under revision and now that critics have gotten distance from the time it was written have upward rated Santuary. Despite its sensational scenes it is considered a fine work today by many Faulkner scholars. As to sensationalism, give me a break. No one was more sensational than Shakespeare. Actually Faulkner's model was Shakespeare.

[HerGuardian]

waiting for tomorrow to see what is special about this short story

i didn't find it that unique to cause all this fuss. too eager for Monday

[tractatus]

waiting for tomorrow to see what is special about this short story

i didn't find it that unique to cause all this fuss. too eager for Monday

Well, I am waiting too, and I think Australian's are ready to start !

[Janine]

Wow, Antiquarian...I didn't know you started this thread. How did I miss it? I read this story recently at your suggestion, so I am sure I can comment some on it, even if briefly, because I am a bit too busy right now with the other threads, to add on more; so sorry. Good for you,
A starting this new thread and short story - great! Will be interesting to me to see what other people say. I may just be a spectator on this thread - is that ok?

[DapperDrake]

...Well its practically Monday, shy a couple of hours.

I really don't know what you see in it Antiquarian, my first impression on finishing it (a few minutes ago) was "so what?", its bland and pointless.
I don't really know what else to say about it because it has so little going on, there is one simple and predictable plot thread that goes out with a whimper, so what if the woman was lonely and a little crazy, what do we care? the story doesn't give us any reason to care.
Perhaps I'm missing a whole other level of meaning here, I'll anticipate other peoples views.

[mtpspur]

A thread now I see. As I PM'd you last week I think I read it because of your high regard for it. I liked it more for the surrounding mystery of it and speculations and WAS NOT expecting thesecret to be what it was. By the by I had picked up the caretaker makig a quiet getaway. I vaguely remember reading a Faulkner short story in junior high English call but all I remmber is a little brother thinking about his older sibling going off to war and feeling how stiff his back was. That impression never wore off because my brother would have clobbered me if I touched him and for THAT silly reson disdained the story--can't remember the title. There was of course The Long Hot Summer (movie) and TV show no one recalls (Roy Thinnes). And that's my entire experience thus far. But curiousity has paid off before. We shall see. A thmbs up to showing me this little gem. But I still like Dave Keller's A Piece of Linoleum better.

[papayahed]

...Well its practically Monday, shy a couple of hours.

I really don't know what you see in it Antiquarian, my first impression on finishing it (a few minutes ago) was "so what?", its bland and pointless.
I don't really know what else to say about it because it has so little going on, there is one simple and predictable plot thread that goes out with a whimper, so what if the woman was lonely and a little crazy, what do we care? the story doesn't give us any reason to care.
Perhaps I'm missing a whole other level of meaning here, I'll anticipate other peoples views.

I have to agree somewhat with Dapper, the whole beginning of the story built on the fact that she as "a little off" so the end is no surprise. We never got close enough to Emily to even care, it as like we were looking at here through a window.

I do like the story though, it's very southern.

[Virgil]

I'll let Antiquarian take the lead in starting the discussion. But let me say i enjoyed the story very much, and as we get into it I hope to point out much of the craft that went into the story. It is finely crafted. It's a credit to Faulkner that he can write a gothic story line such as this and frankly make it so believable that it's within the realm of possibilty. I almost can believe it really occurring.

[Chester]

the nameless narrator shifts his/her point-of-view from one character to another. I wonder if any of the posters who didn't like the story even wondered who the nameless narrator of the story was. Faulkner never lets us know and I don't think, in his personal writings, he ever gave any indication of it.

Yes I thought a lot about the narrator since reading it yesterday for the second time. What occurred to me that didn’t occur to me on the first reading was that the story seems more character sketch than anything else. Not about Miss Emily or any other specific character, but about the town itself. And telling it first person from a town representative made for a very effective way to fill in the sketch. “We thought” this and “we did” that seemed like the town itself speaking. And so we have a picture of a small, southern town. Interesting. And a good story to boot. But that’s as far as it reached for me. I do appreciate the craft.