SESSION: 8 MAY 1958





1.5 MB
.MP3 FILE
    Q.   Mr. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom! does any one of the people who talks about Sutpen have the right view, or it is more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?

    A.   That's it exactly. I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin's father saw what he believed was truth, that was all he saw. But the old man was himself a little too big for people no greater in stature than Quentin and Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson to see all at once. It would have taken probably a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see him as the was. It was, as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the truth.


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