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Faulkner speaks

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“The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II” (Picador: 528 pp., $16 paper) may not be out until the end of October, but here’s a little tidbit to whet our appetites. Among the conversations in this new collection is one from 1956 with William Faulkner, who begins by explaining why he hates to be interviewed — “I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different” — before going on to talk at length about his own efforts and his sense of literary art.

The most difficult book for Faulkner to write, he tells interviewer Jean Stein, was “The Sound and the Fury,” which he had to compose “five separate times ... to rid myself of the dream which would continue to anguish me until I did.” Yet for all that, he asserts, the very issue of authorship may itself be moot.

“If I had not existed,” Faulkner says, “someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is ‘Hamlet’ and ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ — not who wrote them but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.”

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David L. Ulin

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