Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive

Welcome. Here you can listen in on William Faulkner's sessions with audiences at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, during his two terms as UVA's first Writer-in-Residence. Under CONTEXTS you'll find an introduction to this archive as well as essays, news articles, photographs and other materials to provide backgrounds to the writer, the times and the place. BROWSE allows you to read and play transcripts of those sessions, one tape recording or one question&answer at a time. Use SEARCH if you want to hear something in particular, such as Faulkner's comments on one of his works or on writing or on the Civil Rights movement of that time.

A writer in residence is supposed to enrich the environment by participating in the community, sharing experience and wisdom with the students and, when one's as famous as Faulkner, allow the community to pick his brain. He spoke at 36 public events and answered more than 1,400 questions during more than 28 hours of tape.

In that "Browse" section, a transcript of questions from a meeting Faulkner had with the Department of Psychiatry on May 7 1958 caught my eye. It's nicely laid out with an opportunity to hear the entire half-hour audio of Part 1 or listen to individual questions. Here's a snippet:

Unidentified participant: This freedom that you insist on interests me a great deal. It seems to me that that's where much of psychiatry goes astray, is in loss of--of freedom to think and act and so forth as we would if we were totally free or, as you say, relinquish our individuality. Aside from joining [things, though], do you find--find that it's a constant path of maintaining freedom or is--is it something that comes natural to you. In other words, are you a natural rebel against convention or conformity?

William Faulkner: I don't know whether I believe there's such things as natural rebel. I think that man's impulse--that man really doesn't want to be free, that he is willing to relinquish his freedom to anyone that will give him bread and circuses, that it takes a certain amount of education or precept by someone older and wiser to make a--a young man value freedom enough to struggle for it. It's very easy for him to submit to the constant pressure from the people who have got to sell him something in order to keep an economy of waste in motion like ours. To be free, he's an anachronism. He's against--he's a fly in their ointment. And whether he had a--an impulse to be free, that impulse will not be enough in a young man against all the concerted, organized pressure to make him relinquish freedom into the hands of whoever runs the finance company that collects on his automobile or--or compels him to be married in order to sell a--another dishwashing machine to somebody.

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