A clumsy question and Faulkner’s powerful answer
“But as—about reading, any experience the writer has ever suffered is going to influence what he does” – William Faulkner
60 years old William Faulkner had some clues on the importance of his works and what would be his legacy when he accepted to be the first writer in residence at the University of Virginia. He wrote while he was there but he also had a lot to say. For his interviews and seminars he even accepted to read again some of his works, something uncommon for him who believed authors had no need to revisit their own books.
The two stays in 1957 and 1958 generated a lot of content, both from the author and the academics. In the website dedicated for this period it’s possible to hear Faulkner talking art, literature and even his hesitations towards cinema.
In one of these lectures Faulkner reads excerpts from “The sound and the fury”, his favorite. Of course, such a statement wouldn’t go unnoticed and a participant asked him the reasons for this:
Unidentified participant: What is the reason that this book from which you read is your favorite [novel]?
William Faulkner: I think that—that no writer is ever quite satisfied with—with the book. That's why he writes another one. That he is trying to put on paper something that is going to be a little better than anybody else has put on paper up to date, and this is my favorite one because I worked the hardest on it, not to accomplish what I hoped to do with it, but I anguished and—and raged over it more than over any other to try to make something out of it, that it was impossible for—for me to do. It's the same feeling that the parent may have toward the—the incorrigible or the abnormal child, maybe.
Echoing the position of Anne Marie-Willis about how the world can influence ourselves, William Faulkner points the importance of the most indirect activities for the artist development:
Unidentified participant: Your books have been compared to Bach's fugues. Do you objectively plan out that they're going to have that [...] effect or does it just come naturally?
William Faulkner: Well, it's—it's not quite planned because probably I am not capable of that, but I think that there's too much work goes into—to any book to call it a natural process. But as—about reading, any experience the writer has ever suffered is going to influence what he does, and that is not only what he's read, but the music he's heard, the pictures he's seen, and it wasn't that I went to Bach to—to get myself out of a—a—a jam in the work, but probably what I had heard of Bach—at the moment when I needed to use counterpoint, there it was.
For Jorge Luís Borges the accident that risked his literature would also be denying the meaning of his life if his fears proved real. This passion followed by a profound sense of meaningfulness is also present in Faulkner’s words while answering to a clumsy question:
Unidentified participant: Do you think—what I'm trying[...] . [audience laughter] [...]. Do you—do you think before you write or do you write— [audience laughter]
William Faulkner: Well, I'm glad you stopped there. Thank you. [audience laughter] Did—I think I know what you mean by the stimulus. It's—you're alive in the world. You see man. You have an insatiable curiosity about him, but more than that you have an admiration for him. He is frail and fragile, a web of flesh and bone and mostly water. He's flung willy nilly into a ramshackle universe stuck together with electricity. [audience laughter] The problems he faces are always a little bigger than he is, and yet, amazingly enough, he copes with them, not individually but—but as a race. He endures. He's outlasted dinosaurs. He's outlasted atom bombs. He'll outlast communism. Simply because there's some part in him that keeps him from ever knowing that he's whipped, I suppose. That as frail as he is, he—he lives up to his codes of behavior. He shows compassion when there's no reason why he should. He's braver than he should be. He's more honest. The writer is—is so interested, he sees this as so amazing and—and you might say so beautiful. Anyway, it—it's so moving to him that he wants to put it down on paper or in music or on canvas, that he simply wants to isolate one of these instances in which man—frail, foolish man—has acted miles above his head in some amusing or dramatic or tragic way. Anyway, some gallant way. That, I suppose, is the incentive to write, apart from it being fun. I sort of believe that is the reason that people are artists. It's—it's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do. You're never bored. You never reach satiation.
Complement your reading with this text by one of the greatest female brazilian writers, Lygia Fagundes Telles, on the role of the writer.
5 quotes to make you read: Notes from the underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Through a nameless, lonely and unhappy narrator, Dostoyevsky goes from the monologue to the narrative in a short but powerful book in which, in the end, nothing stays unharmed during the life of the underground man.
1
"In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat."
2
"Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. ‘I am alone and they are EVERYONE,’ I thought—and pondered.
From that it is evident that I was still a youngster."
3
"And how few, how few words, I thought, in passing, were needed; how little of the idyllic (and affectedly, bookishly, artificially idyllic too) had sufficed to turn a whole human life at once according to my will. That’s virginity, to be sure! Freshness of soil!"
4
"But at this point a strange thing happened. I was so accustomed to think and imagine everything from books, and to picture everything in the world to myself just as I had made it up in my dreams beforehand, that I could not all at once take in this strange circumstance. What happened was this: Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood a great deal more than I imagined. She understood from all this what a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself unhappy."
5
"Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man."
The alienating architectural machine projected by its alienated product, the architect
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals;
To the architect, the drawing, as any language, is a subjective process, dependent on the interpretation of what we see, but subjacent to that there´s something essential that may pass unnoticed. The architect as designer is also a canvas, painted by himself and always modulated, reesculpted by the multiple realities in which one’s submerged, or as proposed by Anne Marie-Willis, there’s always a loop of variating influences imposing their own inconstancy upon both the architect and the project:
“designing is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed” – Anne Marie-Willis
The prefiguration of the action is where the architect puts himself as the intermediary between what is and what is expected to happen. This prefiguration is dependent on the way the other will interpret it and in this frontier many complications can arise, sometimes even preventing the architect’s intents, as an author, to take place. Despite the architecture being experience and stretch beyond the symbols by which it’s composed, we can try to comprehend this problem through what Roland Barthes alerts about interpreting the creative activities without the original Author:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” – Roland Barthes
Not being only image, even if it’s constituted of symbols, and also based on external point of views to realize itself, the architecture is a foggy region between the seen and the unseen. It’s in this not seeing that much of it´s potential is lost or made real. This other side is what the theory tries to uncover and can be only be intellectually comprehended.
The urban tension, the many filters and focal points in shock inside the space are not visible in the moment of the experience. The architect’s duty is to know the space being altered, not only from the technical standpoint but also through the theoretic apparatus. Architecture is impossible without knowing the unseens behind the project. If a political, economic or social relation goes unnoticed and creates a future problem or maintain a segregatory status quo, for example, it’s not fair to exempt the architect since if the construction crumbled it wouldn’t be less of a disaster than your project perpetuating a historical problem in your country. This invisible side is part of the special reality and the architect must take responsibility over it.
In the city it’s wrong to suppose the architectural experience only as special, external and individualistic. This ideal autistic architect still thrives in the discourse used to comment the history of architecture. The creation of categories to such an extent that both drawing and project, where the intellectual, the design, the internalized activity happens, get to extremes that not only are far from real but also risk aesthetic and stylish solutions in flagrant opposition with a minor (as the term is used by Deleuze and Guattari to talk about literature) and less arrogant architecture.
Every action presupposes in some level a complex social and psychological mechanism. The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the idea of the human being composed by a dichotomy between internal and external or thought and action as totally distinct fields of the human nature. When proposing the humane as a psychophysical unit, Wittgenstein sees thinking and acting as one. Taking this concept freely and even with certain irresponsibility, we can think the architectonic prefiguration inhabiting the thinking and the acting as a process beyond the individual psychology, including the inescapable ranging from each society superstructure to each individual personality nuances.
The physical space is translated by the architect through the drawing – the language that will later become a text space – this intentional sewing to create a multiple tapestry of signs with their possibilities. The intentionality matters only as it relates to the designer’s thoughts since once it’s determined, there’s (or should have) an uprooting of the project before it can go to it´s true creation phase: the exposition to multiple and unrestricted interpretations steaming from the collective imaginary around those signs, bringing new meanings both for the project and for the signs at the same time. However, being a psychophysical unity, the architect and his entire creative production are based on an intellectual refinement that, in this situation, pass through the studies of a deep theoretical repertoire acting as a foundation for the architecture and is able of both to potencialize or to restrain. The architect truly capable of prefiguring an engaged architecture is that whose theoretical apparatus gives him the best tools to see that which is not visible.
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals; it does not prevent anyone from getting the diploma, but prevent many architecture students from seeing the neighborhood where they study and live, the people with whom they share the space, the surrounding shocks. Blindness and superficiality are both programmed, they have an agenda and it’s not in the best interest of the architect nor of the people who need his education.
We are being convinced that the architect is part of a fancy office or the hero of an aborted revolution, an egocentric artist, most of all an excess. Given this, to search for the unseen, this structure that, laid upon us, crush so many things is a necessity, an act of lucid rebellion. Without thinking outside the given conjuncture the architecture is just a name, a technic, one more product.
The ultimate objective of the polarization is the rupture. About our stolen country.
“Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses.”
We’re divided. It’s impossible to pass a day without dealing with at least some kind of polarization. A conversation that for sheer lack of touch ends up in a critical subject in which you (and the other) will discover if the civilized person talking to you is a disgusting ignorant or a illuminated friend. The poles exist to include and to divide, left, right, liberals, socialists, feminists, machos, activists, homofobics, conservatives. In everybody’s mind there’s the idealized human being and also it’s imperfect counterpart, that person who agrees with evertyhing you think or the person who draws anger and resentment due to their foolishness, defending what can only be unthinkable.
This judgement by oposition, rushing to judge people based only in how they get close to our ideas is a childish and improductive way of recognize ourselves as part of certain groups and deny other people’s approaches. The pettiness lies in the fact that this behavior reinforces the idea of non communicant groups, penalize those who are open to change their minds and, if we consider the collective space, it’s also clear that the negotiations are out of question. The lack of interaction and flux of ideas suffocate the collective imaginary, limitating diversity and preventing alterations due to an ambient where everybody hold desperately to partidary positions that arise more from a midiatic and electoral game than from a real interest for the complexity involving bigger issues.
In the dicotomy terrain the only things thriving in all their charm and inconsequence are the leaderships, gathering the constant tension to idealize and therefore, to obscure the real problems and it’s nuances to create a well rounded story about good guys and bad guys where, be they a nazi right or a stalinist left, the outcome is a blind course of action in face of what’s, almost always a scarecrow. This way of acting becomes, due to a complete avoidance of the intelectual debate, sometimes mistaken by shallow screaming and Facebook posts (or even lower, columns of the big media), a script defining both the position and the level of engagement of it’s followers.
Clash as a mean of resolution forces a inescapable structure where victory comes only over the loser’s expenses. Without space for debate and negotiation the discourses are always the most radicalized and simplistic, common place and obvious, even if it’s disastrous, specially for those who have no space in the decision making proccess. However, the intensification of this scenario comes from a mixture of interests, prejudices and fears that were instaled over the years and now broke loose over our society still recovering from a sordid amputation.
The polarization can only be disputed in the political space since the other channels are closed, reinforcing the power of the official institutions making it easier to dominate both sides by those who can dominate the most powerful positions inside the pre-established structure. It was interesting to see these very institutions being used to disarm the entire society and then being responsible for their own social political subversion, a metamorphosis that goes way beyond the usual in moments of transition.
What happened was a profound rupture through the intentional and organized dismembering of the social, political and economical model that guided the country in the last years. A model developed over years of democratic decisions with all the agregated influences that arised from the power dinamics of the country, always dependent of certain respect to the institutions – even with all the expected troubles – not only as the law guided, but also as it existed on the nation’s imaginary and according to the project of nation that, for good or evil, was kept legitimate.
As the dichotomy allows the articulation of the assailants it becomes a duty to think the scenario as a whole in order to hold back this general structure that’s failing brazilians. Even a victory by strong opposition, as it was for them, wouldn’t not mean a return anymore, nothing will erase from our history, both in short and in the long term, this ideological shock. Fighting for a return if not conservatism is at least a dangerous longing that can leave us unable to act when action is needed the most.
The only option is to resist, to call out the lack of legimity and demand reparations for the damage being done to Brazil. However, we must have in mind that a return is impossible. It´s urgent the rise of a new objective, that also won’t come rescued from our past as a mask to the present. Our past struggles must stay there as history for now we have to organize a new action plan. Fighting is essential but we have to think, to elaborate not only the next steps but also the future goals and to do this we must not forget what was taken from us. What we lost wasn’t a project of nation, we lost the very own hability to project and no fight will be enough if we keep asking for the past to come back, because it will not come, they made it impossible. What’s to come is uncertain, a sad uncertainty for all of us who had any optimism with Brazil prior the coup. As consolation there’s only the possibility, because our uncertainty is also theirs.