In Defense of Faulkner.

Ali insisted that Faulkner was a part of the Illumination movement. This un-nerves me. There is an immediacy and Honesty with which Faulkner writes that is incontrovertibly True. Yet this does not seem to occur to Ali, or if it does he muddies it with knowledge. To speak of Faulkner’s Truth as though it were the kind of ‘truth’ that Derrida could deconstruct is entirely arbitrary. I refuse to be seduced. How could one even relate the two and do justice to their sovereignty? One must draw a distinction betwixt them! This truth can be deconstructed; that one can not.

To confuse the two as one is ironically Fascistic; it is to deny the Individual. My entire life has been a negative enterprise. The individual says No time and time again. No, I do not want to partake. No, don’t identify me with that. No, I am not a part of culture. Faulkner was not a product of a movement! One must judge the merit of the movement, if indeed he was influenced by it, by his sovereign integrity – Not vice-versa! But for an Extravert to draw such a line of Distinction – to depend upon such a line of distinction: Individuation! – is too much to ask.

Simply because we employ one word – Truth – for both means Nothing. One should know better than to worry if one is mis-understood; to know a Truth suffices. The artifice of truth – Culture – deserves and needs to be taken apart. It is malleable, and Directed Thought must serve Non-directed Thought. But Individual Truth, manifest in the non-social and the Non-directed, stands apart, in the healthy individual, as a monolithic source of authority by which Culture is modeled after private needs in the individual psyche.

 

Dm.A.A.