Creativity Quote by Tom T. Hall

Tom T. Hall’s line lands like a back-porch aside that’s half confession, half gentle jab at the culture industry. “Faulkner was almost oriental” isn’t a literary argument so much as a glimpse of how highbrow Southern canon can feel to someone whose art came out of honky-tonks, radio stations, and plainspoken storytelling. The word “oriental” is dated and blunt, and that bluntness matters: it signals distance, not study. Hall is reaching for a quick metaphor for Faulkner’s density and strangeness, for prose that can feel perfumed, labyrinthine, and coded compared to the clean emotional angles of a three-minute song. He’s calling Faulkner “foreign” inside the South.

Then he punctures any pretense: “I never got into Faulkner.” That second sentence is the real thesis. Hall refuses the ritual where every Southern artist is expected to genuflect before the same bookshelf. The subtext is anti-performative taste: it’s okay not to claim the correct influences, not to fake comprehension for cultural credit.

Contextually, it’s also a quiet class and medium critique. Faulkner’s difficulty has long operated as a gatekeeping device; Hall built a career on radical accessibility, on narratives that don’t require a seminar to unlock. The intent isn’t to dethrone Faulkner so much as to defend an alternate Southern intelligence: one that values clarity, immediacy, and lived detail over mythic sprawl. The sting is in how casually he says it. Hall makes nonparticipation sound like freedom.