Dry and Wild and Faint

"So it wasn’t just memory.  Memory was just half of it, it wasn’t enough.  But it must be somewhere he thought.  There’s the waste.  Not just me.  At least I think I dont mean just me.  Hope I dont mean just me.  Let it be anyone thinking of, remembering, the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things.  It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask.  With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeated clinging not even to the defeat but just to an old habit; accepting the defeat even to be allowed to cling to the habit – the wheezing lungs, the troublesome guts incapable of pleasure.  But after all memory could live in the old wheezing entrails:  and now it did stand to his hand, incontrovertible and plain, serene, the palm clashing and murmuring dry and wild and faint and it the night but he could face it, thinking, Not could.  Will.  I want to.  So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old.  Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. – Yes he thought.  Between grief and nothing I will take grief."

William Faulkner, The Wild Palms 

The Past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner. 

I watched a conversation two nights ago between Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vasquéz at the pretty damned fine Wheeler Centre for Writing, Books and Ideas. The conversation, like their respective novels, revolved around the meeting point between history and memory and the role of the novelist in unravelling what we believe to be true and historical, and what we believe to be subjective and remembered. Vasquéz and Cercas both talked at length (ruing their agreement on ideas and approaches, as they would have preferred to disagree and make the 'show' more fun) about the notion that 'remembering is a moral duty' for a writer and how a novel that treads the path between fiction and non fiction can provide an alternative to the implicit objectivity of official history. Truth and cultural history, they said, can be found in fiction as much as falsity in service of power can be found in non fiction.

Although they explored these ideas by way of Cervantes, Bellow, Stendhal, Roth and Aristotle, for these two writers, their main literary obsession is the landscape of their own country's memory. And, like many countries with turbulent recent histories, the role of remembering in their homelands is intricately intertwined with the practise of making art. In Cercas' Spain and Vasquéz' Colombia, the shadows of civil war, of dictatorships, massacres and violence are heavy shadows that loom over the creative act. It made me reflect that, strangely, in a country such as Australia, where our violence has been carried out, often without military uniforms, without formality, and in the sanctioned space of language, governance, bureacracy, and out of the eyes and minds of the majority of the populace, our creative lives are more often occupied with forgetting than remembrance.

It was Vasquéz, though, that reminded me of the Faulkner quote above from Requiem for a Nun. That "the past is never dead. It's not even past." And these words echo as much for the concerns of the historical novel as for a chump like me interested in the spaces and abysses between humans as expressed in cinema. The ways we continue to live the past - and the echoes of personal and cultural history - in every moment of the present are the greatest complications for our movement into the future. The more we continually revive and resuscitate what has passed - in both shadow and light - the more we see how the past distorts our perception of the lived present. In Australia, a country that fights to live only in the present or in a falsified and nostalgic myth of what we wish we might have been in the past, this act of resuscitation becomes a necessity. There will always be a quiet violence when we try to forget or allow forgetting to happen and it was a small, good thing to be reminded of it by these wandering writers.

Imagination and Cruelty

"I use imagination when I have to and cruelty as a last resort."

William Faulkner

I recently read a killer article that consisted almost solely of a transcript of a "class" that a very fortunate group of writing students, studying at the University of Mississippi in 1947, had with William Faulkner (one of the writers that I revere with a fanboy-ish, Star Warsy type geekery minus the desire to count errors in his novels or recreate scenes on Youtube). As it is told, Faulkner banished the regular writing teacher and, left alone with the students, steered the "class" to consist of nothing more than his willingness to answer any question they put to him.

Nothing more needs to be said about this, about Faulkner, or about my continual desire to elevate him to a godlike status, except that few writers can twist the English language into such forceful and delicate passages that dance and destroy with equal power; and, therefore, he can answer any question, put to him by any student now living out their old age in a Southern nursing home, and I will fold my arms reverentially and listen.

So, here are some favourite excerpts from this question and answer session held in some chalk dust coated classroom in the heat of 1947 Mississippi:

Q: Why do you present the picture you do of our area?

WF: I have seen no other. I try to tell the truth of man. I use imagination when I have to and cruelty as a last resort. The area is incidental. That's just all I know.

•

Q: How do you find time to write?

WF: You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression.

•

Q: What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?

WF: Read, read, read! Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You'll absorb it. Write. If it is good you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

•

Q: Are we degenerating?

WF: No. Reading is something that is in a way necessary like heaven or a clean collar, but not important. We want culture but don't want to go to any trouble to get it. We prefer reading condensations.

Q: That sounds like a slam on our way of living.

WF: Our way of living needs slamming. Everybody's aim is to help people, turn them to heaven. You write to help people. The existence of this class in creative writing is good in that you take time off to learn to write and you are in a period where time is your most valuable possession.

•

Q: What is the best age for writing?

WF: For fiction the best age is from 35-45. Your fire is not all used up and you know more. Fiction is slower. For poetry the best age is from 17 to 26. Poetry writing is more like a skyrocket with all your fire condensed in one rocket.

•

Q: I understand you use a minimum of restrictions.

WF: I let the novel write itself - no length or style compunctions.

•

Q: How do you like Hollywood?

WF: I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65. I prefer Florida.

•

Q: If you don't think it too personal, how do you rank yourself with contemporary writers?

WF: 1. Thomas Wolfe: he had much courage and wrote as if he didn't have long to live; 2. William Faulkner; 3. Dos Passos; 4. Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause a reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used. 5. John Steinbeck: at one time I had great hopes for him - now I don't know.

•

Q: Mr. Faulkner, do you mind our repeating anything we have heard outside of class?

WF: No. It was true yesterday, is true today, and will be true tomorrow.

Faulkner by Cartier-Bresson

This is a photograph that Cartier-Bresson took of William Faulkner.


I'm not sure if you realise but a distant galaxy actually exploded at the moment that the shutter was depressed and these two men merged into a single searing, blinding point of light and were never heard from again... True story.

Instant Novel #3

This image alone is an instant novel but, to me, it is also the lovers half of Faulkner's 'Wild Palms'. Now if I could only find an image of a fictional raging storm flooding New Orleans...