Just as I started to set down these few words my attention was caught by an advertisement for a book of essays which claimed to challenge, among other things, The Confessions of Nat Turner and its “condescending and degrading opinions about Negroes.” It was not the modifiers—condescending and degrading—that bothered me so much as the key word: opinions. I had an old hurtful twinge of resentment, and my first impulse was to say here something mean-spirited and elaborately defensive about this familiar response to my work. I am sure there is some wisdom in my not doing so, for this award is one which by its very essence tends to make any bitterness I might still harbor quite unimportant.
It seems to me that in honoring my work this award underscores some certainties about the nature of literature. One of these is that a novel worthy of the name is not, nor ever has been, valuable because of its opinions; a novel is speculative, composed of paradoxes and riddles; at its best it is magnificently unopinionated. As Chekhov said, fiction does not provide answers but asks questions—even, I might add, as it struggles to make sense out of the fearful ambiguities of time and history. This award therefore implies an understanding that a novel can possess a significance apart from its subject matter and that the story of a nineteenth-century black slave may try to say at least as much about longing, loneliness, personal betrayal, madness, and the quest for God as it does about Negroes or the institution of slavery. It implies the understanding that fiction, which almost by definition is a kind of dream, often tells truths that are very difficult to bear, yet—again as in dreams—is able to liberate the mind through the catharsis of fantasy, enigma, and terror.
By recognizing Nat Turner this award really honors all of those of my contemporaries who have steadfastly refused to write propaganda or indulge in mythmaking but have been impelled to search instead for those insights which, however raggedly and imperfectly, attempt to demonstrate the variety, the quirkiness, the fragility, the courage, the good humor, desperation, corruption, and mortality of all men. And finally it ratifies my own conviction that a writer jeopardizes his very freedom by insisting that he be bound or defined by his race, or by almost anything else. For one of the enduring marvels of art is its ability to soar through any barrier, to explore any territory of experience, and I say that only by venturing from time to time into strange territory shall artists, of whatever commitment, risk discovering and illuminating the human spirit that we all share.
[Acceptance speech for the 1970 Howells Medal. Published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 2nd series, no. 21, 1971.]