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Article: "Memory believes before knowing remembers": Faulkner, Canetti, and survival.
- Article from:
- Papers on Language & Literature
- Article date:
- June 22, 2003
- Author:
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In his Nobel Prize acceptance address, William Faulkner, speaking of the "fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it" ("Address" 723), alluded to the instinctive fear of violence that threatens to reduce human existence to a barbaric world of threat and counterthreat. In this world, prejudice and mistrust are the controlling motives for human action, and society is ruled by mere force rather than by the power of reason or the rule of law. A world reduced to this level has no room for loyalty or selflessness, and in such a world it is always the weak who suffer the most. As Faulkner makes abundantly clear, the potential for such disorder is always present, yet ...