On Writing Read Online Free PDF

kinless, peopleless—are stretched out alike.
    “The Bear” ends with the death of three and a falling tree, as, you remember, “The Fox” ended—if you count the life-in-death of March and Henry as one death shared. The tree in Faulkner’s story, along with the dying bear and his burden of victim and killer, is a wilderness falling. The fox is a denizen of the inner world, purely. The bear is, equally purely, of the outer world—not simply the material, three-dimensional outer world, which is good enough, but the measureless outer world of experience, the knowing and sentient past, the wisdom of Time and Place. Both bear and fox are vanquished by acts of the destructive will of man’s aggression. But Faulkner’s battles, taking place in an ever-present physical territory which now and again is also some projected country of the spirit, are conscious battles. Faulkner deals with such aspects ofthe human being as dignity and glory and corruptibility and incorruptibility and ridicule and defeat and pride and endurance—especially endurance, a word that might as well be in Cherokee to Lawrence. Lawrence’s battles are won and lost in the “blood consciousness.” It’s as if the two worlds of Faulkner and Lawrence were, here, the inside-out of each other.
    Faulkner seems to me, rather than an intuitive writer, a divining one. And his stories seem to race with time, race with the world, in an indirect ratio, perhaps, to the length of his sentences. The sixteen-thousand-word sentence in “The Bear” races like a dinosaur across the early fields of time. It runs along with a strange quality of seeming all to happen at once. It makes us realize once again that prose is a structure in its every part, that the imagination is engineered when we write. A sentence may be in as perfect control as a church or a bridge.
    “The Bear” is an apocalyptic story of the end of the wilderness. It ends with the senseless clang on clang of a man idiotically pounding pieces of his broken gun together while in the isolated gum tree over his head forty or fifty squirrels are running frantically round and round. It signifies, for one thing, the arrival of the machine age and the squealing treadmill. This story encompasses past and future, all the past of the land from Indian times on to now. It has towering heroic figures, wilderness figures, symbolic figures; and through the hunter—whom we see in the present, in boyhood, the past, the future, in ancestry (in the ledgers and memories and paraphernalia of the place)—we are aware in every happening of its power to happen again, over and over; we are aware of the whole world of the wilderness, the whole history of Mississippi.
    For in “The Bear,” the structure of time is constantly in danger of being ripped away, torn down by the author; the
whole
time bulges, tries to get into the present-time of the story. This dilation in time sense and intractability in space sense, the whole surface of the story, has of itself a kind of looming quality, a portentousness. Like the skin of a balloon, time and space are stretched to hold more and more, while the story still holds it as long as it can, and in both form and function it dangerously increases.
    And in Part Four of this long story the flimsy partition that keeps the story-time apart from whole time is allowed to fly away entirely. So the entire history of the land and a people crowds into a chapter whose expansion, in sentence and paragraph, is almost outrageous to the eye alone. Time and space have been too well invoked, and they tear through the story running backward and forward, up and down and around, like a pack of beasts themselves out of the world’s wilderness. And this is the beauty of the story. Its self-destruction, self-immolation, is the way the story transcends all it might have been had it stayed intact and properly nailed together. There is its wonder.
    Of course, such transcending might belong to some subjects and