Faulkner and Sophist bastardry

In a blog on Wiiliam Faulkner, teacher John B. poses a fascinating question upon which I love to muse myself. For my own purposes I often reframe ithe query about whether our great writers must be sophist bastards in terms of suffering and misery, but I believe the issue is one and the same. Must one suffer for art and in turn be insufferable (to others and perhaps even to oneself). Along with this is the idea that these artists commit suicide either slowly via alcohol or drugs (Faulkner, Hemingway etc.) or all at once (Woolf, Plath, Kleist, etc.) Certainly it is part of the modernist myth of the "great" writer, painter, composer etc that one must suffer for one's art and that most "great" men (another part of the myth) do so. I have been assured by teachers of literature that it is not necessary to either suffer nor be a bastard, but somehow our culture loves the story of the suffering genius. I leave you, however, with the more optimistic words of Katherine Anne Porter:



“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own -even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.”

Katherine Anne Porter