[DUBLIN - Not everyone was thrilled by the decision last month to give the Man Booker Prize, Britain's most influential literary award, to] The Sea ... Never Let Me Go.

A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself

A literary man - with a wooden leg.

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.