"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written"
About this Quote
A ruthless manifesto for artistic necessity is embedded in the phrase. To say everything goes by the board evokes a nautical image: when a storm hits, cargo and comforts are hurled overboard to keep the vessel afloat. Honor, pride, decency are not rejected because they are worthless, but because they become ballast when the only objective is to bring the book into being. The writer who chases truth must sometimes betray genteel codes, pierce social veneers, expose private pain, and risk appearing callous or disloyal. Faulkner names precisely the virtues prized in the Southern code he anatomized: public honor, personal pride, and the decorum of decency. Those values make communities livable and reputations intact, but they can also smooth away the jagged edges that fiction depends on. To get the book written, the writer jettisons the consolations that keep life comfortable.
The line grows sharper in light of Faulkner’s career. He proclaimed that a writer’s only responsibility is to his art and boasted that he would rob his own mother for a story, a provocation that dramatizes the costs of telling hard truths. His work strips the varnish from Southern myths, turning family honor and chivalry into tragic masks for cruelty, cowardice, and self-delusion. Even his methods suggest extremity: the feverish composition of As I Lay Dying, the controversial sensationalism of Sanctuary, the obsessive revisiting of Yoknapatawpha’s wounds. Such urgency courts moral hazard. To throw decency overboard risks exploitation, melodrama, or harm to the living models behind characters. Yet the paradox stands: art that refuses polite lies can arrive at a deeper ethical clarity precisely by violating surface respectability. Faulkner’s line is not a defense of cruelty for its own sake; it is an acknowledgment that the pursuit of literary truth exacts a toll on the writer and on the worlds he inhabits. The book gets written, and something is lost to the sea.
The line grows sharper in light of Faulkner’s career. He proclaimed that a writer’s only responsibility is to his art and boasted that he would rob his own mother for a story, a provocation that dramatizes the costs of telling hard truths. His work strips the varnish from Southern myths, turning family honor and chivalry into tragic masks for cruelty, cowardice, and self-delusion. Even his methods suggest extremity: the feverish composition of As I Lay Dying, the controversial sensationalism of Sanctuary, the obsessive revisiting of Yoknapatawpha’s wounds. Such urgency courts moral hazard. To throw decency overboard risks exploitation, melodrama, or harm to the living models behind characters. Yet the paradox stands: art that refuses polite lies can arrive at a deeper ethical clarity precisely by violating surface respectability. Faulkner’s line is not a defense of cruelty for its own sake; it is an acknowledgment that the pursuit of literary truth exacts a toll on the writer and on the worlds he inhabits. The book gets written, and something is lost to the sea.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by William
Add to List
