William Faulkner wrote detailed portraits of life in Mississippi’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, often using long, winding sentences in densely packed paragraphs.
Newly available recordings at the University of Virginia allow people to hear Faulkner’s soft drawl by listening to him talk about his writing, his career and current events. Listeners also can hear him explain to students how to pronounce “Yoknapatawpha (Yok nuh puh TAW’ fuh),” the setting for his numerous works, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!
Faulkner spent 1957 and 1958 as the university’s first writer-in-residence, giving lectures and readings and chatting with students and members of the community. Two professors at the Charlottesville school recorded his talks on reel-to-reel tapes, and after a 15-year effort led by English professor Stephen Railton, the result is now online.
Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and winning his first Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his novel A Fable (his second came posthumously in 1963 for The Reivers) thrust the shy and largely reclusive writer into the public eye.
The university recordings show that Faulkner took pleasure in reaching a wider audience, Railton said in a recent interview.
“I think he’s come to see that the artist needs to be in contact with the larger public,” he said. “It’s good for the art and good for the public.”
“Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive” contains about 28 hours of the author’s speeches, readings of his works and his answers to more than 1,400 questions. All the audio is transcribed and presented in small segments that are searchable by keyword, and users are able to bookmark specific clips.
While Faulkner was gracious and candid in answering audience questions, he was sometimes unwilling to explicitly define the themes and ideas readers discovered in his books.
“I didn’t know about all these things and so I’m quite interested to hear that they were in there,” he told one student.
“They must’ve been in there for people to find them,” he said.
Faulkner did not want to come between his writing and the readers; he wanted them to interpret stories on their own, Railton said.
He also discussed other writers’ works, admiring Ernest Hemingway and telling students that he sympathized with the alienation felt by Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
Of Tennessee Williams, he said Cat on a Hot Tin Roof focused on the wrong characters.
“The story was the old man’s story,” Faulkner said. “I think that the anguishes of children ain’t worth three acts.”
Advances in technology have made it possible to give more depth to American literature, said Railton, who has also compiled digital collections of Mark Twain and the role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in American culture.
He and others hope that hearing Faulkner will inspire people to read Faulkner.
“This is where I want people to end up, lost in Faulkner’s fiction,” Railton said. “When they read the books, it’ll mean more.”
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