Coming Salons

Faulkner & his children . . .

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Portrait of William Faulkner,
Carl Van Vechten, Creative Commons via Wikimedia

“Good God! William Faulkner. What can I say? Certain books and certain writers knock you to your knees and lead you to wonder why you even bother to get up in the morning and think, much less write. I said to Eudora [Welty] one night that I thought of Faulkner as the biggest, boldest mountain, and I’m scared to even stand at the foot of it, so vast and frightening it is. And she lowered her head and her voice and said, ‘I won’t even visit the country in which that mountain stands.’ So that’s my response to your question about Faulkner. He’ll change your life for sure, but he’ll scare you when the topic of your own writing arises. Go with God, baby.“

Tennessee Williams, interview with James Grissom, New Orleans, 1982

This Salon series – a first in its focus on the works of a single author over a sustained period of time; his influence upon several generations of writers following him in the American South and abroad in Europe and Latin America; and the voluminous critical heritage generated in his wake – explores the enduring legacy of William Faulkner, tracing how his radical experiments with voice, time and memory reshaped American literature, and how subsequent writers wrestled with, revised and resisted his influence.  We hope that the ‘hybridity’ and experimental nature of this programme will introduce to some of our readers the works of great writers to whom they have not yet been exposed.

Over a number of months, we will engage in close, sustained readings of some of Faulkner’s major novels, including As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, works that fracture linear narrative, multiply perspectives and probe the moral and historical wounds of the American South. Together, we will attend closely to stylistic and thematic threads which we have come to consider quintessentially ‘Faulknerian’: his syntactic daring; experiments with stream of consciousness and shifts in time; refinement of the Gothic; mythic sense of history; and a relentless engagement with race, violence, inheritance and guilt.

From there, we will trace Faulkner’s influence upon a remarkable group of writers, some of whom were his contemporaries, others who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, most of whom were living in and writing about the American South but also in Europe and Latin America.

We will examine how Ralph Ellison transforms Faulkner’s techniques to explore modern Black identity and invisibility; how Toni Morrison’s own use of the Gothic genre both inherits and overturns Faulkner’s treatment of history, memory and race; how Flannery O’Connor adapts Faulknerian grotesque and violence to theological ends; and how figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Styron and Walker Percy engage his legacy across drama, historical fiction and existential inquiry.  Other authors under consideration for 2027 include Eudora Welty, Javier Marias, Jean Paul Sartre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy.

We will ask pressing questions: What does it mean to write ‘after’ Faulkner? Which of his innovations proved generative, and which demanded refusal or revision? How do later writers reckon with the ethical and aesthetic burden of his vision of the South? This study will be attentive to form, style and cultural context, inviting participants to experience the profound influence of Faulkner’s oeuvre across generations and continents.  

Our Faulkner series will commence with a three-day intensive study of As I Lay Dying, led by John Allemand and Toby Brothers, live on Zoom, on Friday 17, Saturday 18 July and Sunday 19 July from 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time).

Kazuo Ishiguro and the narrative of emotion

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Kazuo Ishiguro in the Stockholm Stock Exchange during the Swedish Academy’s press conference on December 6, 2017, photocredit: Frankie Fouganthin, CC BY-SA 4.0

Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his ‘novels of great emotional force, [which have] uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’ (in the words of the Nobel Committee).

As ever, the enigmatic Swedish judges failed to elaborate in any meaningful way on this statement. How exactly does Ishiguro achieve ‘great emotional force’ in such cool, dry, almost formal prose? What or where is this ‘abyss’?

One answer might lie in the way Ishiguro typically foregrounds the influence of the more ‘minor’ emotions on our lives. Literature has always explored the big emotions: love, hate, anger, jealousy, shame, sadness, pride. But what about our more ‘petty’, everyday feelings: the small embarrassments, boredoms, inconsequential anxieties, irrational resentments, uneasinesses and mood swings that, if we are honest, fill more of our inner lives than those grand, noble, more ‘consequential’ forces?

It is these that Ishiguro shows guiding the trajectories of his quietly suffering characters, whose lives follow paths unseen to them but gradually unveiled to us as readers. Think of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day, shutting Miss Kenton out of their evening chats in a fit of pique over a misunderstanding, permanently losing the momentum of their growing intimacy and denying both of them a chance of happiness. Haven’t we all over-reacted and then found it impossible to reverse the consequences?   

And in his more experimental novels, Ishiguro allows such feelings to direct the narrative beyond realism and into what at first seem like dreams or surreal landscapes, but which could also be interpreted as the waking inner life of his characters. Consider the long sequence towards the end of When We Were Orphans, which sees the detective Christopher Banks working his way through an increasingly surreal war-torn city landscape, apparently accompanied by his long-lost childhood friend Akira. Has this incredible coincidence really occurred? Or is the endlessly multiplying series of barriers Ishiguro’s way of representing the labyrinths of Banks’ mind, where a childhood trauma has never been resolved – to the extent that the past is more real to him than the present?  Banks thinks continually of his parents (as does Ryder in The Unconsoled) in a way that is more childlike than adult: an irrational refusal to accept the possibility of their ageing and death. Does this perhaps persist in all of our minds, however much we think we’ve left the illusions of childhood behind?

The novel in which Ishiguro has most fully explored the potential of emotions to direct the narrative is The Unconsoled (which you can read with the LitSalon from this February). What we may uncover in our reading of this ‘difficult’ novel is that its impossible movements of time, place and relationship are directed not by the ‘plot’ but by the passing thoughts and feelings of its irritable, sleep-deprived, somewhat pompous musician-narrator. Yet these seemingly trivial, even tiresome interludes are gradually revealed to show something terribly sad, even tragic about this man’s fate (and indeed that of all the other men and women in the novel) in life: they are doomed (like all of us?) by their patterns of thought and emotion to remain forever unconsoled.

Lewis Ward will lead an eight-week study of The Unconsoled from 2 February – 23 March 2026.

Great literature – pain or pleasure?

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“I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1856

“I snicker at the neologism [“graphic novel”] first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a ‘sanitation engineer.’ ” 

Daniel Raeburn (author and critic), 2010

Must great literature, by definition, be a slog? Difficult? Dense? Exclusive? Productive (of a more moral, dutiful, obedient citizenry)? And must literature that we readily absorb — that delights, entertains, challenges, changes or affirms us — be considered trash?

Coleridge railed against the novel in 1856, and he certainly wasn’t alone in his views at the time. (Though seriously, sir, if you think that this is the effect on your brain of Jane Eyre, what on earth do you think your opium habit is doing to your mind?) It’s no coincidence that Coleridge lost his cool the same year that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary emerged to great fanfare and an even greater outcry from the ‘Protectors of Morality & Art’. 

Why all this panic? What was the novel’s primary flaw in the eyes of its many detractors amongst clergy, social critics and traditional writers? What was the true source of alarm behind all their dark muttering about the decline of reason — and with it, Civilization with a capital “C”?

It was this: by the 19th century a variety of innovations and systemic shifts meant that everyday folks, including women and the burgeoning middle class, were reading for pleasure. 

Surely this cheapened Great Literature, which had previously been the exclusive purview of those sufficiently wealthy, privileged and educated to own and read poetry in Latin and Greek.  Surely pleasure challenged the social order by leading to the atrophy of moral character, intellectual rigour and the capacity for sustained thought? Surely the novel was a wicked thing because it stirred the imagination and made readers yearn for lives and circumstances different than their God-given lot (not to mention for more novels). 

What was the world coming to?

Now let’s consider the disdain Raeburn heaps on graphic novels in 2010, especially as I prepare to lead a study that opens with Alison Bechdel’s 2006 New York Times bestseller, Fun Home, a book which recalled Helen Vendler, the great poetry critic, telling our class at Boston University that “Every time a poet writes about a new place or topic, or brings a new identity to life, it’s like lighting up a part of the map.”

Could it be that Raeburn missed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus? Serialized from 1980-91, it brought the atrocity of the Holocaust to life to an expanded readership and a new generation, long after most of the world had settled for blaming it all on one country, then turning its back. Maus also centred the topics of scapegoating, complicity and individual and collective responsibility for one another during a decade when then-United States President Reagan refused to speak the name of the virus that escalated dramatically on his watch, ultimately killing nearly 100,000 people, most of them men who had sex with men and injection drug users.

I guess I should mention that in my childhood the only two books my mother ever banned were comic books. First, the Fantastic Four because, she said, The Hulk’s grammar was so bad. And then, an underground comic called Wet Satin that featured women artists writing and drawing about sex. That one I never understood, given that I’d scooped up everything from the diaries of Anaïs Nin to Portnoy’s Complaint from the pile by her bedside.

But perhaps I absorbed some of my mother’s disdain for words with pictures. Because when I visited Alison Bechdel at home in Vermont while she was writing and drawing Fun Home (due to her connection to my then-wife, who was one of the early out lesbian cartoonists and an editor at DC Comics), I was surprised by her fastidiousness — and that of every other person I met during that time who was in some way involved in the comics industry. 

It was the beginning of my realising that graphic novelists aren’t just drawing stuff on the backs of napkins. They aren’t illiterate or careless, or just not smart enough to read without pictures. They are creating a new art form that strikes the central nervous system with the immediacy, depth and intimacy of the forms that preceded it. Photos of hands covered the wall of Alison’s study next to where she was drawing one sequence. Pictures of 60s-era clothing; painstaking attention to every historical detail. And novels everywhere!

Discover more about the power of graphic literature and contemporary memoir in Growing Up, Nancy Goldstein’s live online study exploring the 21st Century Bildungsroman, starting on 18 January 2026.

Lee Miller at the Tate: why it’s selling out fast!

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Tate Britain must be delighted by the popularity of their current Lee Miller photography exhibition (2 October-15 February). They also appear to have been caught off guard by it. 

At least, that’s my impression. By the time I first visited, just three weeks into the exhibition’s five-month run, all framed editions of the official poster were gone. Ditto for the members’ night exclusive intro. Tickets had sold out within hours of every Miller-related tour and lecture advertised.

Miller (1907-1977), who was accustomed to being underestimated, probably would have shrugged. Smart, gorgeous, intrepid and born half a century before a woman could even have a bank account in her own name, she seized her opportunities and persevered, learning early on to make use of the way people fixated on her beauty while underestimating her talent, ambition, and grit.

When photographer Edward Steichen, who helped launch her modelling career, then inadvertently killed it by selling images of her to an advertising agency that used them to promote Kotex sanitary towels, Miller left for Paris with a letter from Steichen introducing her to Man Ray. It was the beginning of her switching positions from being the object of the camera’s gaze to being the person behind the lens.

Miller became Man Ray’s apprentice, model and lover, learning all she could from him about photography while eagerly taking on the assignments he found too quotidian. Along the way she co-created a number of Surrealist works attributed to Man Ray, made the first artistic use of ‘solarisation’ (until now credited solely to Man Ray), and was an early booster of the then-unknown Joseph Cornell. She knew everyone, taking some portraits for herself and others for Vogue of celebrities including Picasso, Colette, Charlie Chaplin, Dora Carrington, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Joan Miró, Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich.

When Miller became one of only four women officially accredited to cover the major events of World War II, she combined fearsome forensic and aesthetic skills with exquisite darkroom technique. First as a war correspondent for the Associated Press, and then for Vogue, Miller shared her front-row view of the Blitz while documenting the vast new contributions of women to the war effort.

When Miller was sent to cover the alleged liberation of Saint-Malo, only to find the city still under heavy siege, she defied the prohibition against women correspondents in combat zones and spent nearly a week alone, documenting the violent fighting, the civilian suffering and the first recorded use of napalm (on the city’s citadel). She developed her pictures in a deserted half-destroyed pharmacy. Later, while under house arrest for defying the terms of her accreditation, she assembled the photos and wrote the text for the article she then sold to Vogue.

When the German surrender came, days later, Miller was staying in the apartment Hitler and Eva Braun had fled. There she and her Jewish colleague, David Scherman, took turns taking pictures of themselves in Hitler’s bathtub. Behind a closed area of the Tate, you can find her pictures of suicided soldiers, piles of bones and bodies, and emaciated people she and Scherman found at the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Famous as an artist, innovator, Surrealist, model, photojournalist and war correspondent in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Miller appears to have done what so many people exposed to World War II’s atrocities did when they returned to civilian life. In an era long before anyone understood what trauma was or how to treat it, she clammed up, stuck her memories in the attic (literally, trunks and trunks full of photos, footage and notes), had a family, switched interests (becoming a world-class gourmet chef) and set to work drinking herself to death, though she is officially recorded as dying of lung cancer.

With any luck, the popularity of this retrospective at the Tate — the largest exhibition of her work in the UK to date — will return Lee Miller to her rightful place as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. At this time, when truth tellers are coming back into vogue and there’s a new thirst for reliable narrators of world events, that would be a fitting conclusion.

She was there.

You can still join Nancy Goldstein’s online study considering Lee Miller’s life, work and the Tate exhibition on Sunday 30 November (3.30-5.30pm GMT), followed by an optional in-person visit to Tate Britain on Friday 5 December 2025.

Reasons to be cheerful at the turn of the year!

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My favorite end-of-year ritual is listing all the great, unexpected things that have happened over the past twelve months. It began on a Brooklyn subway one New Year’s Day morning over a decade ago, and after a particularly garbage year, with me jotting stuff down on the back of a manilla folder.

I’ve done it ever since as a reminder that while my perceptions are valid, and often right, I don’t know everything that’s going to happen. Each year has had its share of unanticipated good stuff.

We’re still two months off the end of the year, but key items for my 2025 list so far?

  • Getting lost on the way to the BBC Proms, meeting a kind stranger who got me to the Royal Albert Hall, and her turning out to be Marina (Salonista extraordinaire), who introduced me to Toby, Nicky, and all of you.
  • Also, falling in love with Ernest Hemingway’s first short story collection: In Our Time (1925), written before he turned twenty-five. NOT on my Bingo card. But it happened. First, because I heard Margaret Atwood, the iconic feminist novelist who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, describe In Our Time as “one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th-century” during an NPR interview last year (you can listen to it for yourself here). Published 101 years ago, by the author I now refer to as ‘the Artist as a Very Different Young Man’, the stories of In Our Time still move with the weight, heft and athleticism of an Olympian.
  • When I decided to include two of those early Hemingway stories as ‘Tasters‘ this fall, both sessions sold out and the discussions were brilliant. Folks asked for more, so I decided to offer Hemingway’s entire In Our Time as a six meeting study starting Thursday evening, 13 November, from 6.30-8.30 pm GMT, running until 18 December. These are very short stories (each week’s set of 2-3 will take less than thirty minutes to read) and we all have super busy lives, so all six sessions can be booked individually, BUT those who sign up for the entire sequence get a substantial discount: six sessions for the price of five.
  • And then my study, Education and its Discontents: the 21st-Century Bildungsroman, reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Tara Westover’s Educated will begin soon.

We know that for many this is a very busy time of year, so if we find that either of these studies recruit fewer participants than expected we may have to postpone until 2026, so if you are interested in joining please book or let us know as soon as possible!

Finally, two more opportunities coming soon:

  • I’m going to be in London in person this November and December and will facilitate a study looking at the work of war photographer Lee Miller, whose blockbuster exhibition is currently running at Tate Britain. This will involve one online meeting on Sunday 30 November from 3.30-5.30 pm (GMT) and an informal in-person visit to the show on Friday 5 December at 10.00 am. Proceeds will be used to fund support for Salon participants who are unable to afford full fees. Read more about this here.
  • Also in London, on Sunday 28 December from 3.00-5.00 pm, we’re offering a two hour post-Christmas/Hanukkah in-person exploration of Alison Bechdel’s extraordinary graphic novel Fun Home (which, alongside Tara Westover’s Educated, is one of the two memoirs we’ll be reading in the six-week online 21st-Century Bildungsroman study). Please email for more information.

I’m excited to be part of the Salon, I hope you’ll come join me in one or more of these adventures!

Join me to explore the 21st Century Bildungsroman – here’s why!

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I’m Professor Nancy Goldstein, the latest facilitator to join the Salon team, starting with a study I’ve called Education and its Discontents: the 21st-Century Bildungsroman, running from 9 November to 14 December (Sunday evenings, 3.30 – 5.30 pm GMT).

We will be discussing a pair of brilliant, articulate, tragic and surprisingly funny memoirs that read like thrillers: the 2006 graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by cartoonist (and McArthur Genius Award winner) Alison Bechdel, and Tara Westover’s Educated (2018). As background, the Broadway production of Fun Home won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical, and Educated debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the NYT 10 Best Books of 2018.

As a way of introducing myself to the Salon, I’m offering three bite-sized ‘taster’ studies during October for the price of a pay-what-you-want donation to José Andres’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan. It’s entirely up to you to decide where, or whether, or how much to give: perhaps the price of your last flat white or pint?

Joining one (or all) of these ‘tasters’ before deciding to enrol in a six-session study is easy:

  • All readings for ‘tasters’ can be finished in under an hour and texts are available free online.
  • Each live online session runs for just 90 minutes.
  • We’ve carefully scheduled sessions on different days and times in the hope that everyone who wants to attend can find at least one that fits their schedule!

To register please click on one of the links in the session titles below so we can send you the Zoom link to join the discussion plus any additional online materials.

Taster #1: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man – Two Selections from Ernest Hemingway’s First Short Story Collection: In Our Time (1929) – Thursday, 9 October, 6.00 -7:30 pm (UK)

It was novelist Margaret Atwood, best known for her dystopian feminist classic The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), who convinced me to give Hemingway a serious try. During an interview with Rachel Martin on National Public Radio in 2024 (you can listen here), Atwood explained:

Margaret Atwood: “There’s a Hemingway story in which a young man is having a campout with his girlfriend, and she realizes that things aren’t the same and she says, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ So I think there are points in your life — for everybody’s life — when they think, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ It’s a pretty crushing thing to say.”

Rachel Martin, NPR: “I guess, but like, I don’t know. Ernest Hemingway I don’t want to hold up as my romantic role model.”

Margaret Atwood: “It’s not a question of romantic role model: it’s a question of good story writer. And no matter what you may think of Hemingway’s private life, which I know too much about, In Our Time is one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th-century. He was a nightmare as a husband and romantic partner, but that’s . . . a different thing.”

So I read In Our Time, and . . . Atwood really had a point. I found the incisive younger Hemingway, with his modernist sensibility and his consciousness about whiteness, womanhood, class, sex, love, race and privilege a fascinating, welcome surprise. I think he will be to many other participants too.

Taster #2: Poets in Recovery – Monday 13 October, 2.30 – 4.00 pm (UK)

Raymond Carver, who was born into an impoverished family towards the end of the Depression (1938), is widely considered to be one of the greatest 20th-Century American short story writers. He was also one of its most notorious drunks, with multiple hospitalizations for his alcoholism, plus a doctor’s warning that he wouldn’t live past 40 if he didn’t stop. Carver finally got sober in 1977.

For this study, we will be comparing Carver’s criminally neglected poem Yesterday, Snow (from sometime in the early 80s and available only as a PDF that will be sent to all registrants) with Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober (2016) by Kaveh Akbar.

The young Iranian American poet’s debut novel, Martyr! – which also addresses addiction, grief and art – made waves last year as a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction and was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The New Yorker. 

Taster #3: Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man – Two Selections from Ernest Hemingway’s First Short Story Collection: In Our Time (1929) – Tuesday 21 October, 1.00-2.30 pm (UK).

Why read Proust?

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In September 2025, for the ninth time, I will begin leading a group of keen (and possibly trepidatious) readers through Marcel Proust’s extraordinary masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Below I will explain why I believe reading Proust is a life-changing experience. If you are at all curious about joining please email us with any questions you may have.

For anyone keen to immerse themselves in the Paris of Proust and the Belle Époque (regardless of whether you have yet read Proust) we still have places available on our five-day travel study in September.

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”

Marcel Proust

Proust’s seven volume In Search of Lost Time  is a daunting prospect for most readers. I think of reading Proust as a kind of practice. It took me many years of teaching around Proust to finally decide to dive in to teach the work itself. And honestly, my first reading through Proust in 2017 felt quite laboured. But by the second journey, I started to soar in the prose—in the mode that Proust uses that blends the lived experience of a boy growing to a young man whose sense of wonder, curiosity and hunger to know often meets with disappointment in a world that is more artificial and transactional then glittering and authentic. Perhaps surprisingly, it is a comedy, but the comedy is often at the expense of the naïve narrator. But what Proust does so brilliantly is to use his narrator’s lived experience—the disappointments, jealousies, awkwardness, memories and false starts to explore how the mind gathers impressions and perceptions—and through imagination, desire and memory to create a universe.  And this is the material of the artist. 

As we accompany the narrator on his journey, we enter a world in a profound state of flux, traversing the decadence of the Belle Époque, the social and political ructions caused by the Dreyfus Affair and the trauma of World War One.

What previous readers of Proust with the Salon have said:

“I believe that no author understands human nature and his characters’ psychology more profoundly than Proust. They are more alive than any other author’s. Proust isn’t afraid to show the mix of good and bad motives and traits that add up to a human personality in everyone.“

“For me personally, reading Proust has been such a deep, meaningful experience over a long period of time. I feel it has become an important part of me. 

Could it be a revelatory reading experience? . . . a journey to be savoured – again . . . and . . . again?”

For more inspiration we suggest this article by Cath Pound on the BBC website: Why the world’s most difficult novel is so rewarding.

The Odyssey continues . . . join us in Greece!

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Gods and monsters are notably absent from the first of two new films based on Homer’s Odyssey, which focuses on the end of the poem as Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca to find Penelope besieged by suitors. Out in the UK today (it was released in the US at the end of 2024) Uberto Pasolini’s The Return reunites Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche for the first time since the multi-Academy Award winning dramatisation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and it’s hard to avoid reviews and comment in print, online and broadcast media. Here is a link to Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review (which includes a brief trailer for the film).

Meanwhile, preparations are afoot for the 2026 release of Christopher Nolan’s “action fantasy” interpretation of the epic, apparently described by Universal Pictures’ US head of distribution as “a visionary, once-in-a-generation cinematic masterpiece that Homer himself would quite likely be proud of.” Aside from the Trump-style hyperbole, The Odyssey does seem to be having a moment more than two-and-a-half thousand years after it was first written, so we are taking the opportunity to remind the Salon community (and friends and family) that there are still two places available on our week-long study on the Greek island of Agistri. It will be an amazing trip, email us if you would like to know more!

What Homer’s Odyssey can teach us in 2025 – and why Donald Trump won’t be reading it . . .

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Our annual Salon trip to the sun-drenched island of Agistri to study classical literature is always one of the year’s greatest highlights. Each day we wake to a different sunrise. We dip in the sparkling sea, embrace Jane’s heart-led yoga and savour the deliciously fresh and healthy food offered by Rosy’s village. Above all we relish the utter luxury of entering an enduring literary world with a group of bold fellow voyagers, for a week during which our reading is further expanded by Caroline’s illuminating poetic responses and Jane’s skill in realising dramatic possibilities. 

What is different for me this year is the clanging backdrop of global politics, louder than ever, and in particular the destruction of democracy in the United States. Our study of Homer’s Odyssey always reveals profound insights into the world we find ourselves in today: Oxen of the Sun gestures to the degradation of environmental balance, the encounter in Circe can be understood in terms of gender power dynamics seeking resolution, while the absolute struggle of Odysseus to survive and find his way home – not just for his own sake but for the men he leads – will open up our discussion about leadership. What makes a true leader? What does a leader owe those who follow? How does a group respond when leadership can no longer be trusted? Homer strips events back to their bare bones – in the Homeric world there is no interior narration, all happens on the surface and in the moment. 

The other predominant consideration in the Odyssey, and for us in the present day, is that of xenia – the relationship between guest and host. How do we treat the stranger arriving on our shore? How do we want to be treated when we are that stranger? What does this say about our culture, our home, our values? Homer makes us aware of how central this relationship has been to our humanity from the very earliest times of recorded history. 

In past years this rare escape into literature has provided context and perspective for the challenges of the modern world. It has given me renewed strength to oppose inequality and to encourage open and inclusive teaching practice for all. I come away from our Salon study experiences heartened by the many beautiful minds I have been privileged to encounter through shared exploration of these complex texts.

This year, I know it will not be easy to escape the horrors of the world, I will carry my worries with me. I have people in my community who are directly impacted by the destruction in the USA – I know people who have already lost their jobs and others who fear losing them, I know authors whose books have been banned, I know people in humanitarian aid around the world whose work is threatened daily – and I also know that this is just the beginning of direct, negative impact on the lives of so many. And yet, nearly three thousand years after it was first written, Homer’s Odyssey reminds me that with courage and persistence it is possible – eventually – to overcome adversity and return to rebuild one’s home and community.

We still have a few places available on our Odyssey study. If you are interested in the idea of sharing this experience with a group of keen and humane fellow readers and would like to know more, you are very welcome to email us.

Why read Faulkner now?

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Portrait of William Faulkner by Carl Van Vechten, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“. . . the twilight-coloured smell of honeysuckle . . .”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Why read Faulkner today? A difficult, old, white, long-dead male writer – one who lied about his military experience, whose mind was ravaged by drink and disappointment – who was also a Nobel laureate, a dreamer, a lover of beauty, a seeker of what shimmers in human relationships and who believed, against the violence and prejudice surrounding him, that human beings can strive for meaning and truth. 

Faulkner peeled back the skin of his life and allowed his art to feed on his exposed self. While it is true that at times he reflects the racial and gender prejudices of his time and cultural space, it is equally true that from the same space he also interrogates racism, misogyny and inequity through his own experience. His writing – sultry, tragic, comic and deeply philosophical – brings the reader utterly into his world and its agonies. But in the midst of the howling and rage, there is always the energy of seeking hope – whether it be in the form of a young woman who escapes her terrible inheritance, the endurance of the statuesque Dilsey, or the howling of the final inheritor of Sutpen’s magnificent dream – we see the human spirit fighting for integrity. 

Now – right now – I feel the need to find means to resist external forces that feel overwhelming. I am talking about political corruption, environmental degradation, disasters of fire and war, wilful ignorance, xenophobic power structures, and feelings of helplessness in the face of these monstrosities. Faulkner and other writers I revere help me to not turn away, reminding me that even in a cataclysm, a single act of bravery or resistance matters.  Language – words, rhythms, lyric content, jagged images – can give me a model for living within an indigestible world. 

William Faulkner’s Address Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature

As originally delivered 10 December, 1950 in Stockholm, Sweden

This is an excerpt—the whole speech is worth reading.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man, young woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he lives under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he releases – relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will still endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

We are currently offering studies of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!

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