To cater to is not to love and not to serve well either. We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it’s no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he’s living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
Time, though it can make happenings and trappings out of date, cannot do much to change the realities apprehended by the imagination. History will change in Mississippi, and the hope is that it will change in a beneficial direction and with a merciful speed, and above all bring insight, understanding. But when William Faulkner’s novels come to be pictures of a society that is no more, they will still be good and still be authentic because of what went into them from the man himself. Mankind still tries the same things and suffers the same falls, climbs up to try again, and novels are as true at one time as at another. Love and hate, hope and despair, justice and injustice, compassion and prejudice, truth-telling and lying work in all men; their story can be told in whatever skin they are wearing and in whatever year the writer can put them down.
Faulkner is not receding from us. Indeed, his work, though it can’t increase in itself, increases us. His work throws light on the past and on today as it becomes the past—the day in its journey. This being so, it informs the future too.
What is written in the South from now on is going to be taken into account by Faulkner’s work; I mean the remark literally. Once Faulkner had written, we could never unknow what he told us and showed us. And his work will do the same thing tomorrow. We inherit from him, while we can get fresh and firsthand news of ourselves from his work at any time.
A source of illumination is not dated by what passes along under its ray, is not qualified or disqualified by the nature of the traffic. When the light of Faulkner’s work will be discovering things to us no more, it will be discovering us. Even we shall lie enfolded in perspective one day: what we hoped along with what we did, what we didn’t do, and not only what we were but what we missed being, what others yet to come might dare to be. For we are our own crusade. Before ever we write, we are. Instead of our judging Faulkner, he will be revealing us in books to later minds.
1965
“Is PHOENIX JACKSON’S GRANDSON REALLY DEAD?”
A story writer is more than happy to be read by students; the fact that these serious readers think and feel something in response to his work he finds life-giving. At the same time he may not always be able to reply to their specific questions in kind. I wondered if it might clarify something, for both the questioners and myself, if I set down a general reply to the question that comes to me most often in the mail, from both students and their teachers, after some classroom discussion. The unrivaled favorite is this: “Is Phoenix Jackson’s grandson really dead?”
It refers to a short story I wrote years ago called “A Worn Path,” which tells of a day’s journey an old woman makes on foot from deep in the country into town and into a doctor’s office on behalf of her little grandson; he is at home, periodically ill, and periodically she comes for his medicine; they give it to her as usual, she receives it and starts the journey back.
I had not meant to mystify readers by withholding any fact; it is not a writer’s business to tease. The story is told through Phoenix’s mind as she undertakes her errand. As the author at one with the character as I tell it, I must assume that the boy is alive. As the reader, you are free to think as you like, of course: the story invites you to believe that no matter what happens, Phoenix for as long as she is able to walk and can hold to her purpose will make her journey. The possibility that she would keep on even if he were dead is there in her devotion and its single-minded, single-track errand. Certainly the artistic truth, which should be good enough for the fact, lies in Phoenix’s own answer to that question. When the nurse asks, “He isn’t dead, is he?” she speaks for herself: “He still the same. He going to last.”
The grandchild is the incentive. But it is the journey, the going of the errand, that is the story, and the question is not whether the grandchild is in reality alive or dead. It doesn’t affect the outcome of the story or its meaning from start to finish. But it is not the question itself that has struck me as much as the idea, almost without exception implied in the asking, that for Phoenix’s grandson to be dead would somehow make the story “better.”
It’s all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It’s all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing—ambiguity is a fact of life. A fiction writer’s responsibility covers not only what he presents as the facts of a given story but what he chooses to stir up as their implications; in the end, these implications, too, become facts, in the larger, fictional sense. But it is not all right, not in good faith, for things not to mean what they say.
The grandson’s plight was real and it made the truth of the story, which is the story of an errand of love carried out. If the child no longer lived, the truth would persist in the “wornness” of the path. But his being dead can’t increase the truth of the story, can’t affect it one way or the other. I think I signal this, because the end of the story has been reached before old Phoenix gets home again: she simply starts back. To the question “Is the grandson really dead?” I could reply that it doesn’t make any difference. I could also say that I did not make him up in order to let him play a trick on Phoenix. But my best answer would be: “Phoenix is alive.”
The origin of a story is sometimes a trustworthy clue to the author—or can provide him with the clue—to its key image; maybe in this case it will do the same for the reader. One day I saw a solitary old woman like Phoenix. She was walking; I saw her, at middle distance, in a winter country landscape, and watched her slowly make her way across my line of vision. That sight of her made me write the story. I invented an errand for her, but that only seemed a living part of the figure she was herself: what errand other than for someone else could be making her go? And her going was the first thing, her persisting in her landscape was the real thing, and the first and the real were what I wanted and worked to keep. I brought her up close enough, by imagination, to describe her face, make her present to the eyes, but the full-length figure moving across the winter fields was the indelible one and the image to keep, and the perspective extending into the vanishing distance the true one to hold in mind.
I invented for my character, as I wrote, some passing adventures—some dreams and harassments and a small triumph or two, some jolts to her pride, some flights of fancy to console her, one or two encounters to scare her, a moment that gave her cause to feel ashamed, a moment to dance and preen—for it had to be a journey, and all these things belonged to that, parts of life’s uncertainty.
A narrative line is in its deeper sense, of course, the tracing out of a meaning, and the real continuity of a story lies in this probing forward. The real dramatic force of a story depends on the strength of the emotion that has set it going. The emotional value is the measure of the reach of the story. What gives any such content to “A Worn Path” is not its circumstances but its subject: the deep-grained habit of love.
What I hoped would come clear was that in the whole surround of this story, the world it threads through, the only certain thing at all is the worn path. The habit of love cuts through confusion and stumbles or contrives its way out of difficulty, it remembers the way even when it forgets, for a dumbfounded moment, its reason for being. The path is the thing that matters.
Her victory—old Phoenix’s—is when she sees the diploma in the doctor’s office, when she finds “nailed up on the wall the document that had been sta
mped with the gold seal and framed in the gold frame, which matched the dream that was hung up in her head.” The return with the medicine is just a matter of retracing her own footsteps. It is the part of the journey, and of the story, that can now go without saying.
In the matter of function, old Phoenix’s way might even do as a sort of parallel to your way of work if you are a writer of stories. The way to get there is the all-important, all-absorbing problem, and this problem is your reason for undertaking the story. Your only guide, too, is your sureness about your subject, about what this subject is. Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets you may have brought on yourself, to reach a meaning—using inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck. And finally too, like Phoenix, you have to assume that what you are working in aid of is life, not death.
But you would make the trip anyway—wouldn’t you?—just on hope.
1974
SOME NOTES ON TIME IN FICTION
Time and place, the two bases of reference upon which the novel, in seeking to come to grips with human experience, must depend for its validity, operate together, of course. They might be taken for granted as ordinary factors, until the novelist at his work comes to scrutinize them apart.
Place, the accessible one, the inhabited one, has blessed identity—a proper name, a human history, a visible character. Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it’s the same face the world over. While place is in itself as informing as an old gossip, time tells us nothing about itself except by the signals that it is passing. It has never given anything away.
Unlike time, place has surface, which will take the imprint of man—his hand, his foot, his mind; it can be tamed, domesticized. It has shape, size, boundaries; man can measure himself against them. It has atmosphere and temperature, change of light and show of season, qualities to which man spontaneously responds. Place has always nursed, nourished and instructed man; he in turn can rule it and ruin it, take it and lose it, suffer if he is exiled from it, and after living on it he goes to it in his grave. It is the stuff of fiction, as close to our living lives as the earth we can pick up and rub between our fingers, something we can feel and smell. But time is like the wind of the abstract. Beyond its all-pervasiveness, it has no quality that we apprehend but rate of speed, and our own acts and thoughts are said to give it that. Man can feel love for place; he is prone to regard time as something of an enemy.
Yet the novelist lives on closer terms with time than he does with place. The reasons for this are much older than any novel; they reach back into our oldest lore. How many of our proverbs are little nutshells to pack the meat of time in! (“He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it.” “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”) The all-withstanding devices of myth and legend (the riddle of the Sphinx, Penelope’s web, the Thousand and One Nights) are constructed of time. And time goes to make that most central device of all, the plot itself—as Scheherazade showed us in her own telling.
Indeed, these little ingots of time are ingots of plot too. Not only do they contain stories, they convey the stories—they speak of life-in-the-movement, with a beginning and an end. All that needed to be added was the middle; then the novel came along and saw to that.
Only the nursery fairy tale is not answerable to time, and time has no effect upon it; time winds up like a toy, and toy it is: when set to “Once upon a time” it spins till it runs down at “Happy ever after.” Fairy tales don’t come from old wisdom, they come from old foolishness—just as potent. They follow rules of their own that are quite as strict as time’s (the magic of number and repetition, the governing of the spell); their fairy perfection forbids the existence of choices, and the telling always has to be the same. Their listener is the child, whose gratification comes of the fairy tale’s having no suspense. The tale is about wishes, and thus grants a wish itself.
Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own resolutions. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel’s progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a main condition of our existence. Suspense is known only to mortals, and its agent and messenger is time.
The novel is time’s child—“I could a tale unfold”—and bears all the earmarks, and all the consequences.
The novelist can never do otherwise than work with time, and nothing in his novel can escape it. The novel cannot begin without his starting of the clock; the characters then, and not until then, are seen to be alive, in motion; their situation can declare itself only by its unfolding. While place lies passive, time moves and is a mover. Time is the bringer-on of action, the instrument of change. If time should break down, the novel itself would lie in collapse, its meaning gone. For time has the closest possible connection with the novel’s meaning, in being the chief conductor of the plot.
Thus time is not a simple length, on which to string beadlike the novel’s episodes. Though it does join acts and events in a row, it’s truer to say that it leads them in a direction, it induces each one out of the one before and into the one next. It is not only the story’s “then—and then,” it may also be a “but” or a “nevertheless”; and it is always a “thus” and a “therefore.”
Why does a man do a certain thing now, what in the past has brought him to it, what in the future will come of it, and into what sequence will he set things moving now? Time, in which the characters behave and perform, alone and with others, through the changes rung by their situation, uncovers motive and develops the consequences. Time carries out a role of resolver. (“As a man soweth, so shall he reap.”)
Clock time has an arbitrary, bullying power over daily affairs that of course can’t be got around (the Mad Hatter’s tea party). But it has not the same power in fiction that it has in life. Time is plot’s right arm, indeed, but is always answerable to it. It can act only in accordance with the plot, lead only toward the plot’s development and fulfillment.
Fiction does not hesitate to accelerate time, slow it down, project it forward or run it backward, cause it to skip over itself or repeat itself. It may require time to travel in a circle, to meet itself in coincidence. It can freeze an action in the middle of its performance. It can expand a single moment like the skin of a balloon or bite off a life like a thread. It can put time through the hoop of a dream, trap it inside an obsession. It can set a fragment of the past within a frame of the present and cause them to exist simultaneously. In Katherine Anne Porter’s perfect short story “The Grave,” a forgotten incident from her country-Texas childhood abruptly projects itself upon a woman’s present; its meaning—too deep for the child’s understanding—travels twenty years through time and strikes her full force on a city street in another country. In this story, time moves by metamorphosis, and in the flash it discloses another, earlier metamorphosis—the real one, which had lain there all the while in the past that the young woman had left behind her.
In going in the direction of meaning, time has to move through a mind. What it will bring about is an awakening there. Through whatever motions it goes through, it will call forth, in a mind or heart, some crucial recognition. (“I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.”)
What can a character come to know, of himself and others, by working through a given situation? This is what fiction asks, with an emotional urgency driving it all the way; and can he know it in time? Thus time becomes, as sharply as needed, an instrument of pressure. Any novel’s situation must constitute some version of a matter of life or death. In the face of time, life is always at stake. This may or may not
be the case in a literal sense; but it does need to be always the case as a matter of spiritual or moral survival. It may lie not so much in being rescued as in having learned what constitutes one’s own danger, and one’s own salvation. With the refinements of the danger involved, suspense is increased. Suspense has exactly the value of its own meaning.
In fiction, then, time can throb like a pulse, tick like a bomb, beat like the waves of a rising tide against the shore; it can be made out as the whisper of attrition, or come to an end with the explosion of a gun. For time is of course subjective, too. (“It tolls for thee.”)
Time appears to do all these things in novels, but they are effects, necessary illusions performed by the novelist; and they make no alteration in the pace of the novel, which is one of a uniform steadiness and imperturbability. The novel might be told episodically, hovering over one section of time and skipping over the next; or by some eccentric method—Henry Green spoke of his as going crabwise; but however its style of moving, its own advance must remain smooth and unbroken, its own time all of a piece. The plot goes forward at the pace of its own necessity, its own heartbeat. Its way ahead, its line of meaning, is kept clear and unsnarled, stretched tight as a tuned string.
Time in a novel is the course through which, and by which, all things in their turn are brought forth in their significance—events, emotions, relationships in their changes, in their synchronized move toward resolution. It provides the order for the dramatic unfolding of the plot: revelation is not revelation until it is dramatically conceived and carried out.
The close three-way alliance of time, plot and significance can be seen clearly demonstrated in the well-written detective novel. We can learn from it that plot, by the very strength, spareness and boldness of its construction-in-motion, forms a kind of metaphor. I believe every wellmade plot does, and needs to do so. But a living metaphor. From the simplest to the most awesomely complicated, a plot is a device organic to human struggle designed for the searching out of human truth. It is from inception highly sensitive to time, it acts within time, and it is in its time that we ourselves see it and follow it.