First of all, I wonder if the people in the back would fill up seats to the front. This makes a better operation all the way around. In the very first row, I wonder if the members of the conference or other members of parliament?

A word about the microphone system, which is always a problem for everyone, has been solved very well here, I believe. That is, you're not supposed to walk to the microphone when you are making a statement from the audience. I'm told that if you merely look directly at the microphone from anywhere you are, the way they are scattered around is such that it will pick up the sound for this particular room. So instead of spending the afternoon stumbling over each other's feet, just speak from where you are at at that point.

The function of these afternoon sessions is to add new material to the subject of the conference and give further opportunity to work over things that have been stated previously. We're fortunate to have today as a speaker, who will talk for approximately half an hour or so, a man who will give us new material and, I think, be dealing also with the essential subjects that were raised last night and will, I assume, be raised throughout the rest of the meeting.

Professor Frohock has been a professor of French at Columbia University for some time. He is an authority on modern fiction. He's published a book about a certain group of American novels. The book's entitled, I believe-- I know the book well. I own the book. It's Novel of Violence in America. Is this correct?

And he has also written a volume about Malraux, and is to speak to us today about some of the problems of literary criticism and the novel. Are our critical systems and devices suitable for fiction in its contemporary form? Professor Frohock.

APPLAUSE

The briefest possible correction, as of July 1st, I changed my allegiance from Columbia University to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and hereby declare Columbia absolved from any responsibility, possibly eligible for your congratulations.

Let me remind you first of what went on last evening. I'm supposed to be, I understand, an authority on violence. Actually, that was a clip book and I didn't even select the title. Ever since I wrote the thing as it happened, people, mothers pull their babies out of the way and grown men look worried lest I produce a scalp or fire off a gun.

I was among those who enjoyed the peaceable quality of yesterday evening. We had a very mannerly meeting. There was no quibbling about terms and no descent into semantics. We didn't fight, although the assistant director of the summer session had solemnly predicted that we would object word-by-word to the title of the conference. We didn't quibble over the word "novel." We accepted tacitly the widest possible definition.

We didn't fight over the word "contemporary." Although as it happened, Mr. O'Connor's contemporary period seemed to end with Proust and the Joyce of the middle period, whereas Mr. Hyman's began just about where Mr. O'Connor's left off. We allowed Mr. O'Connor to have his way with the word "reality" and we didn't invite him to define it.

We let him consign to limbo all fiction that is underlain by an idealist view of the world, not without somewhat irascible protest from one end of the table.

We heard Mr. West characterize Mr. Ellison's Invisible Man in one of its aspects as Dickensian, whereas Mr. Hyman had previously identified it as a novel, which followed the modern trend of exploiting ritual and myth.

One of our members referred to Benjamin Constant. And after a bit of verification, I remind him that that was not one lady he saw Benjamin Constant with last night. That was Madame Trevor, Madame Lindsay, a lady whose name I forget, although it began with B and she lived up in the Alps, and of course, Madame de Stael.

Some of the things that I have just said I say in order to clarify a few references in this very brief discussion of criticism and the future of the novel. The future of the novel never looked darker than it does today. That is, if we believe what is written about it.

So here we go again. Every so often, someone, and someone, in this case, means critic, writes the obituary, "the novel is dying", "the novel is dead". Someone, and this time meaning someone not a critic, ought to write, "the death of the novel". But let him be ready to add a new chapter every decade or so for the corpse as a nastily inconvenient way of reviving and getting back on its feet again like an eternal Lazarus.

The future of the novel, as a matter of fact, never looked darker than it did in France just about 100 to 120 years ago. A stupendous amount of fiction was being published. The new literacy, which had followed the establishment of Democratic institutions, had produced a public avid for books, one with affluence to buy and with leisure to read. The Industrial Revolution had brought cheaper paper and abundant printers ink. The press had developed into a production machine.

And Michel-Levy had had the perfectly luminous idea that no law of nature required the publisher to sell an expensive binding with every book. Meanwhile, Émile de Girardin had invented the modern newspaper, more or less, and discovered that any continued story on the back page, so long as it regularly suspended at a high point in the action, was an immense help for sales.

Fiction prospered. But its quality, by and large, in these years from 1828 to, say, 1858, was perfectly terrible. It was awful, if you look at it as a whole, for the public that was buying newspapers and books had not been brought up in the good classical tradition and it lacked taste. It asked only to be amused and would accept, to the profit of author and publisher, pretty much whatever amused it.

Such demands create a vacuum that nature does not even have time to abhor. We do not even remember the names of most of those who helped fill it with what was mostly simply horrid, hackneyed, monotonous trash. At best, we can name superior ones, Dumas, Père, Eugene Sue.

But on the roster, indistinguishable to most eyes from the rest, were Balzac and Stendhal, Gozlan and Champfleury, Duranty and Murger. And to most eyes, I say they were indistinguishable from the rest.

One of the finest generations of critics France has ever known, men like Jules Janin, Gustave Planche, and the great Sainte-Beuve, complained, roared, and snubbed. But the thunders from Parnassus had absolutely no visible effect. The spate of fiction rolled on, regardless, while the critics raised the cry long since familiar to us all. Where is the good old novel of tradition?

They seem to have meant the romance in the manner of Scott, who had been popular in their youth, and the realistic episodic yarn, like that of the still widely read Lesage. And so critic after critic concluded that the day of good fiction had passed. Yet, of course, those years from 1828 to 1857 saw the French novel develop, the true French novel develop.

Lengthened the period by one decade, so that it will include the beginnings of French naturalism. And it would be hard to find another period which produced so much serious and excellent literature. Balzac and Stendhal fall into its early part, so did the minor realists, so a little later does Flaubert, so do Feydeau and Feuillet, those once popular predecessors of Bourget and Henry James.

So toward its close, through the beginnings of Zola and de Goncourt, where was the novel? Well, it was where the great critics weren't looking for it. Sainte-Beuve could not abide the cheap coarseness of Balzac. To Stendhal, he preferred the novels of Scott, Manzoni, and Xavier de Maistre, who wrote the monumentally insipid Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre.

LAUGHTER

He did better in understanding Flaubert for he was older in 1857 and knew more, and was not insensitive to the spirit of the times. But still, as his detractors still joyfully remind us, he hardly paid Madame Bovary its due and he had much company.

The story of how gradually French criticism became aware that men like Balzac, Stendhal, and then Champfleury and Flaubert had changed the nature of the novel, has not even yet been told in its entirety. But this much is clear, for a space, the critics were at least a quarter century behind the times. And in the case of Stendhal, they were even further off the pace.

Why? We had better be attentive to the answer, for these critics may have been any number of things, they were not malicious dolts. Not all of them can have been infected by the animosity regularly attributed to Sainte-Beuve. They were educated, careful readers, and men of taste. And some of them, at least, must really have wanted to know where the novel was.

Doubtless, they failed, in part, because they were prejudiced. They had been reared on an aristocratic literature, and the new novel was not aristocratic. And then, it is also true that winnowing the good out of the mediocre was a discouraging task. There was as there always is, from the critic's point of view, too much fiction. But it is true also, however hard to believe this may seem now, that they were unable to discriminate the good from the indifferent when they had the chance.

Balzac, for instance, was merely another noisy fortune seeker, a rather offensive one, who alienated so many critics that, eventually, almost the only voice raised in his behalf was his own. However much trouble we have in realizing it, Baudelaire and Taine were doing something that marked the beginning of a new day when they spoke out in real enthusiasm for his work.

For the run of critics, his fictions were too unlike the fictions they knew and admired. His novels bald and squalled. And the similarities of his works with those of Sue-- Look, for instance, at the character, Vautrin, straight out of Sue, until you look at him. --at some length, were all too obvious.

The lesson of the past, then, although it is the only guide we have, is that the past is not to be trusted. Everyone concedes that the novel has no rules and is free to develop in the most unpredictable directions. In any direction, that is, except one. It will not go backward any more than it will stand still.

The French critics were hamstrung by inability to recognize originality, because they were looking resolutely over their shoulders at what had been written. And so, if you believe me-- And if you don't, why there's our discussion for the afternoon.

LAUGHTER

So do ours, so are ours looking back over their shoulders today. The doubt that Americans read can be dispelled at any drugstore. Somewhere between the fountain and the cigar counter is mute evidence that even a good novel can be sold, if only we put it in soft colors, illustrated with irrefutable proof that woman is, above all else, a mammal.

LAUGHTER

And most of the fiction is junk, as always. But hidden amid the junk are, or soon must be, the fictions that assure the novel of the future. Our critics are confronted by a sterner task, as the one that faced the French a century ago. They seem, to me, unlikely to do the job any better. The safety of a pre-established rhetoric, based on what the novel has been, is simply too attractive, even to the most influential who least need protection and safety.

Ortega y Gasset's Notes on the Novel, for example, furnish a fairly convincing argument that the novel, as he understands that word, is nearly extinct. He means those fictions, which have just enough action to satisfy the psychological needs of the reader, who must have something to focus his mind on, but that abound in the rich texture of life that make us provincials in the country of the author and that delve deeply into human motive.

His contention that this novel becomes progressively harder to write is not hard to accept. Subject dunny situations do seem to become fewer as time goes on and, certainly, the supply is not inexhaustible. We are unlikely to get many more novels like those of Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Proust, Ortega's favorites on which his notion of the novel is based.

But since the writing of his note, we have had successful novels from France, Italy, and the United States, which are full of action, handled the question of motive by recourse to psychologies of obsession, can be said hardly to provincialize us, and convey a blessed little feeling of life's rich texture. In reality, what Ortega says is that the novel is unlikely to repeat itself. And that question hasn't been at issue.

And yet the American formalist critics-- And may I call attention to my use of the word "formalist" because I do not want to confuse them, necessarily, with the people we know as the new critics, although, at times, they may be the same people. The new criticism with its immense contribution in the way of linguistic criticism, I'd like to leave to one side, and simply look at the formalist attempts to understand and judge fiction.

These American formalist critics, who have recently turned from poetry to the novel, apparently expect the novel to repeat itself. We have learned much from this group, who have attacked the question of fictional form, armed with the rhetoric originally derived, in large part at least, from the critical prefaces of Henry James.

It is now obligatory to ask their questions of any novel and of any novelist. How does he handle point of view? And we no longer have to say what we mean by point of view. How and in what proportions does he use dramatized scene, portrait, and summary? What rhythms of repeated symbol, emblem or emblematic action? What recurrent juxtapositions of materials characterize the structure?

What means does he have of investigating motive and of registering the hidden psychological life of his characters? Does he show us the background of the action or does he make us feel it as climate? Is there a causal relation between what the background is and what the characters do?

How does he contrive to station the reader at an appropriate distance from the action? And how does he manage to convey to us the feeling that what happens to his specific individuals is of general human importance? There is, obviously, nothing wrong with asking such questions. But all the same danger in here is in them.

Earlier this year, Caroline Gordon reviewed the late EK Brown study of Willa Cather for The New York Times. Ms. Gordon is an established critic whose pronouncements carry weight. She is a formalist. Her House of Fiction, done in collaboration with Allen Tate, is respected.

But she reports her dissatisfaction with Willa Cather's books because of a dissatisfaction caused by Ms. Cather's refusal, or lack of disposition, to put a central moral consciousness into her novels. In other words, she would like Ms. Cather's novels better, if they were more like the novels of Henry James.

This judgment has the importance of a symptom. It appears likely that a criticism of fiction, based upon the precept and example of Henry James, is likeliest to predispose the critic toward those novels which are most Jamesian.

One can only surmise how different the scale of literary reputations would be in America today, if the formalists had not acquired their present prestige. Would Woolf, Farrow, and Dreiser be quite so far from the top, if their work lent itself a bit more easily to formal analysis?

We have done our best, of late years, to make a great writer out of Scott Fitzgerald, an easy subject for formalist criticism, while we have let the repute of Sinclair Lewis, about whom a formalist can say all he has to say in any 5 minutes, descend almost to absolute zero. The list could be continued, but let that pass.

The question here is merely whether a form of criticism, which is not entirely adequate to the literature of the present, will be of much help in detecting superior quality in the novels of the future? The novel of the future, we don't know what it will be. But we do know that it will not repeat itself and we do know that it will not be Jamesian. We have a good Jamesian novelist in our literary history already.

Meanwhile, our other dominant critical group, whom I'm calling the liberal ideologues, and I hope I'm not going to be asked to define ideology. There was a conference on ideology as it turned out here some two weeks ago.

Liberal ideologues are also intently scanning the past. Critics like Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv, less interested in literary form than in ideas and cultural attitudes, who, in fact, study the novel as the expression of culture, seeming not in as awkward a position vis-a-vis the future as do the formalist.

Trilling, even though his studies of fiction will add to anyone's enjoyment of reading, is so deeply convinced of the importance of the relationship between fiction and society that he is also convinced that only when manners and morals are supported by a firm social organization does the novelist succeed.

Unless I'm completely misreading the liberal imagination, he is really saying that the novels of which he is especially fond have been the work of authors who lived, or mistakenly thought that they lived, in such a society. Please, note the tense or tenses. No. Please, note the tense of the verbs just above.

In the past, such novels have indeed come from such conditions. But will the novel of the future require them? Is Trilling's kind of novel the only kind that can achieve excellence? Trilling is, by common consent, a learned and sensitive critic. But he is looking even so in the direction from which the new does not come.

He represents a group of critics who have made much, recently, of ethics. They affirm frequently that the novel is, and I quote, but I quote no one critic, I quote what all of them have said in one way or another, "an organization of experience by the moral imagination." This is far from being the self-evident truth.

Organization of experience, of course, it is, the novel is, and has to be. But why need the motive of the imagination be moral? There are other motives. Suppose, for instance, that some imaginations are urged on by a drive to reorder experience into something more fair and fit. That drive does not have to be moral any more than our feeling is exclusively moral when we find a pigsty or a slum repulsive.

Such critics are on firmer ground when they argue that the American novel, in recent years, has failed to take a firm enough grasp on experience, especially political experience, and thus has failed to do the job of reordering where it most needs to be done.

Philip Rahv's talk about Redskins and pale faces in Image and Idea comes down to some such charge. The novel, such critics say, has failed to cope with the central intellectual problems of our time. They may very well be right, at least as compared with the novels of Malraux, Kessler, and Silone, to mention the three who were always mentioned in this connection.

Some of our novelists look intellectually still to be in rompers. Be that as it may, the critics are overlooking the nature of the accomplishment of several important recent American novelists. Many of the latter-- I said "several" a minute ago. Let me stick to "several". Quite a number have spent their literary lives orchestrating one central emotion. Hemingway, Dos Passos, and especially Steinbeck, who rarely writes well, save when he is angry, are prime examples.

In another age, such men might well have become lyric poets. Their chief concern is their own relation to the universe, a personal matter. Mr. Rahv is asking them to be concerned with something else. Our public knows this. Sometimes, is embarrassingly aware of it.

You may remember that, not a year ago, when The Old Man and the Sea came out, an interpretation went flying on the wind around America. Everybody knew what this really meant. The sharks were Hemingway's critics, and so forth and on. I hope that that wasn't true. I hope that that was not Hemingway's intention. But I think it is significant of our reading and comprehension of Hemingway, that a yawn like that could get started. There's a sort of moral truth there that's fairly worrisome.

Well, as I say, Mr. Rahv is asking our novelists to be something desirable, no doubt, but something that they aren't. After all, everyone can't be Malraux. And as a matter of fact, having watched his conduct closely for some time, I'm fairly convinced that Malraux can't be Malraux all the time either.

If we persistently apply wrong categories to the literature of the present, where will we get with the emergent literature of the future? Mr. Rahv's interests are legitimate and honorable. He continues, really, that search, which has been going on for two generations now, for a usable past. Like the formalists' kind of criticism and like Lionel Trilling's, his criticism is performing one sort of function and a useful function.

But the fact is that we need a criticism which will perform a different one. Its motto will be Baudelaire, to transform delight into knowledge, "transformer ma volupté en connaissance." It will be banned, like Baudelaire's, on finding, in the work of art, what is new and unique.

It will not abandon what we have all learned from the formalists. But it will admit, more than the formalists have admitted in their practice, that considerations of form lead straight to the consideration of ideas, that, for example, characterization and psychological notation change meaning with each new discovery about the mental life of the human animal.

Such a criticism, when it picks up a book like the Invisible Man-- And if Mr. Ellison, who has heard an inordinate amount about The Invisible Man last night and today, can't stand it any longer and gets up and stomps out, I would understand the act and sympathize.

Even so, when such a criticism picks up a book like the Invisible Man, it will note that Mr. Ellison's novel has, at one moment in it, a situation that sounds like Malraux, certainly, the active worker has been sold out by the people above him in the party. It will say something, perhaps quite a bit, about other underground heroes in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Celine, and Bernanos. It may even note that, in places, the book has a Dickensian resonance.

But an adequate criticism of this novel will also have to become more interested still in the aspects of the Invisible Man, which are unique. One such, and this is simply tossed out as an example-- And it is entirely possible that Mr. Ellison will be first to say I'm wrong, in which case I shall concede the point, but merely argue that my example was badly chosen.

One such element is the particular tone of the part of the book which takes place in New York. The hero, a little man caught in the situation that would try a hero of completely tragic stature, is forced to assimilate experience faster than experience can be assimilated with equanimity.

The mind revolts. Reality buzzes and booms at him. The exterior world explodes at him, beats him up, shuts him up in a box. Experience shoots at him and throws spears. The hero's mind posits an objective, verifiable reality outside itself and assumes it to be where it should be.

But the continuous shock makes him perceive it as if it were hallucination. The impact of so violent a world keeps him on the ragged line that separates fantasy from waking, from waking and stably conscious life. This is the effect that Celine aims at in Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan without ever quite bringing it off.

How Ralph Ellison brings it off demands the attention of the kind of critic we so badly need. Criticism of the kind I've been asking for may be slow in coming, but we must have it, and it's not inconceivable that we shall.

APPLAUSE

I think today we should feel that we have the luxury of having time for discussion. Usually, after speeches, there's a great desire for the audience and participants in general to talk. Yet, there isn't enough time. Today, I think we should feel secure and in having at least until about 4:15. Therefore, I think everyone should feel he can say what he wants to say.

I should like to ask if there's any comment from any of the members of the conference. Mr. Hyman? Excuse me. If every speaker would just rise where he is, I believe that these microphones are not speaking to the audience, merely putting the proceedings on tape, and you will be picked up from wherever you are if you look at the microphone. Thank you.

Well, since I spoke last night of the moral imagination in a favorable tone, I imagine that I'm tarred with Mr. Frohock's brush. And I just want to put in one reservation that I think he's using the term in too limited a fashion to reduce the moral imagination to some kind of ethical concern, as perhaps Mr. Trilling, who is not entirely my favorite critic, does seems to me to be making too little of what I think, as I claimed last night, is a central phenomenon in all fictional or all imaginative writing.

I would insist, that is, that the moral imagination is not an ethical matter only but is the organization of experience into significance, that is, can be equated with form, can be equated with the craft of art. Insofar as this experience is made meaningful is organized, that is an exercise of the moral imagination.

These facts are related, are structured meaningfully in relation to human life. And I would add, too, along those lines, to Mr. Frohock's slogan from Baudelaire, one that I think I think is significant there. Freud's slogan, that we must colonize ed with ego. That spreading of the rational, the idea that Freud said was the principle of his work and that is probably the principle of ours, too.

The idea that somehow we have to drain these irrational marshes is the operation of the artist and, of course, is the operation of the moral imagination in infection and should probably be the critics' concern, too.

Mr. Frohock, please.

Under moral, would you include aesthetic?

Oh, I would, surely.

Well, then I'm right with you all the way. I don't think that Mr. Trilling does. In fact, I can put my hand on the Bible and say that he doesn't because we have discussed it. I think, then, probably that we're tied up in the ambiguity of a word that we may have to throw overboard.

Mr. Lytle?

I would say, why not just use imagination makes images? That said, in this instance, I would think that the beginning of criticism is that which the writer himself uses when he steps back and looks at his work.

And I would say that any kind of dramatic treatment of fiction-- that is, where the fiction is dramatic rather than the memoir type of novel-- that if you have some such image at the post as a kind of a controlling factor-- as I think War and Peace, for example, has and many others-- that you get out of this ambiguity.

By moral, of course, it is an aesthetic point. But it seems to me the mere fact of an image-- that is, an imagination makes pictures and images, and that is controlled through some dramatic action. And I believe-- I mean, I'm objecting also in terms of that to the word organization. I don't believe that's the way it grows.

I think it is a kind of growth that's controlled, that you use a craft, which is a concrete thing upon the invisible content of the mind. So some way in there, you get the creative act that nobody quite knows how it's done. It is finely mysterious. And it seems to me that in a matter of organization, the moment you organize a thing, you kill it, moment.

And so that is not actually the process. I know I've been speaking about two different things here. Since it is a general discussion, I propose then that you use just for imagination since it seems to me that is a thing that the artist himself uses directly. And by controlling it by craft, he reaches or may reach what he sets out to reach. But by organization, you will kill the creative act.

Well, Mr. Lytle, part of our difference there may be regional. I'm probably too much of a swamp Yankee to want to appear as the enemy of the word moral. But on the other hand, for the purposes that we're working at, which is to find a label, I would have no-- I think probably a good old word that has been batted around as much as imagination has is as useful as any.

If Mr. Hyman has a special reason for retaining the word moral, I'd rather he were the one to defend it. As for organization, the letter killeth I think by the word organization, we mean, really, simply ordering some activity of the mind, and we're pretty vague about the psychology of it.

The French use the object very frequently to the word organization as a barbarism and instead say, put order in. SPEAKING IN FRENCH such and such a thing, which really suggests-- unless it suggests the straitjacket-- suggests some sort of process. And I think that's all we're at. Am I wrong?

Well, I won't fight for organization, but I'm afraid I have to fight for moral. Organization is perhaps a bad word in that it does suggest this kind of mechanical operation. I'd be glad to move on to any other more satisfactory one. But just seeing this thing in terms of the imagination seems to me, again, to lack enough distinction.

I suspect that a boy pulling the wings off flies is exercising the imagination so that some other operation is involved in art. And I think probably I liked organization because of that idea of the ordering. There's a poem of Wallace Stevens called "A Jar in Tennessee," I think, about placing a jar on a bare hilltop in Tennessee, and all the wilderness around it comes into shape because of that jar.

That it seems to me is a little fable of the artist's role. That is, this organization of that wilderness by that jar is, I would insist, a moral act, is an act of the moral imagination, is the creation of art.

With that poem is an illustration, though. The poem goes on to point out that the wilderness also makes the jar somewhat-- this overly organized jar-- somewhat tawdry, so that I believe that the poem by Wallace Stevens doesn't answer this question. It's just in the middle of both sides of the discussion.

INAUDIBLE

Just a moment here, and then I won't get up any more. I believe I said that you put the image, which might be a symbol, even, at the post of observation. I must say that here I defend not the formless, but those people who use form. Formalism and the formalist-- again, I don't want to be quibbling-- but not quite the word.

But if you do suppose you do take a position. Well, don't you get a dichotomy there? That is, if you look only into your own imagination, into yourself, your ego, you get a narcissistic kind of thing. And if you look only over here into the world, you get lost into the discrete objects of the world.

But if you get kind of an insight into yourself and insight into the world and focus that all through this image here, this controlling image at the point of view, then the matter of the moral issue will be behind in your mind. That's what I'm at. I didn't mean to defend immorality here.

LAUGHTER

But that's the kind of thing I mean. It seems to me that is a sort of function that the artist may undertake. In other words, I'm saying the thing of organization-- to come to the other part-- is that it superimposes on the raw matter of the subject before you really know what it is, before you've dealt with it enough, a kind of arbitrary ordering, which might inhibit the creative act.

Mr. O'Connor?

I don't think I've got very much to say, Mr. Chairman. I just feel that this is no place for a simple-minded Irishman.

LAUGHTER

I gathered from Professor Frohock that he was against the criticism of form, and I also gathered that he was against criticism based on the social consciousness. And I also gather that he was against criticism based on ethical consciousness.

We were apparently starting a new school of criticism to be called the transformists. And the only principle of the transformist school of criticism is if I translate Baudelaire correctly to transform voluptuousness into information.

Now, I find that awfully difficult to follow--

LAUGHTER

--and I wish somebody would clarify it for me. As a mere artist, I feel that I'm being imposed upon, that I'm being asked to do a great number of things which I haven't the faintest intention of doing for anybody.

LAUGHTER

Can I ask--

Mr. Frohock?

Yes, please.

LAUGHTER

How would you like to be in my place?

LAUGHTER

First of all, I'm not the Irishman, and therefore, shouldn't be expected to be against everything. And I--

LAUGHTER

And I'm a little bit alarmed to discover that I've been understood to reject at least two forms of critical activity, which I thought I was recommending but calling incomplete.

And I'd like to correct myself, if I did seem to reject them, and insist that I was saying that each one by itself did an incomplete job and that because of their incompleteness they were more or less at liberty to walk around like those people in the inferno who are punished by having their heads twisted around in the other direction.

That, I hoped, was my point. As for transformism, dear, I associate that with biology, somehow, and I'm a little bit lost. But the main point is that Baudelaire wasn't asking the artist to do it. Baudelaire was asking the critic to do it.

The onus isn't on you, sir, except that, as you do so well once in a while, put on the wolf's clothing. You are under some obligation now and then.

LAUGHTER

Baudelaire was talking about Tannhauser of all things. And the music delighted him, and he discovered that other people underwent or experienced, rather, a very similar delight. And nobody had tried to say why, and that carried him from what I would call an intuitive experience-- almost a shock on the nerves, if you like-- into some sort of mental activity.

And he tries to figure out why it is that Tannhauser delights him, which seems to me one of the necessary operations of all criticism. In any case, although I recommend that attitude, I didn't invent it.

Mr. Ellison, would you speak to this subject? I'm not at this moment sure what the subject is, but would you speak to it nevertheless?

I'm afraid I'm in very much the same position. I would say this, that I rather agree with Mr. Hyman that despite our intentions, the novelist does perform a moral role. And the imagination is moral simply because it creates value.

Now, you can find in this ethics. You can find in it many other things. But it's implicit, and any form which is so obsessed with time, change, and the mysteries of society-- of course, of human experience.

I see no way of avoiding the fact that in the very business of selection and ordering, of giving a form of pattern, we do perform a moral operation-- not necessarily in the religious ethical sense, but it's a matter of choice. It's a matter of accepting and rejecting certain aspects of a given experience.

Incidentally, the novel always looks backward. I guess that was said last night. It's concerned with what has been and through what has been. Through extracting the meaning of what has been, we create values of the day.

Now, the other thing, which I would say to enforce it, is that the novel means to communicate. It is first of all a medium of communication. I don't care if it's restricted to a small group of existentialists-- you name it. There must be a shared experience in between the process of the novel-- the process which is a novel and the audience which received.

Mr. West? Do you have anything to say, got anything to say? Your hand was up a moment ago, sir. Has your question been answered, or would you like to ask it now?

Well--

Or a new one?

Lots of them.

All right. Any of them. All of them.

All of them? Well, one--

Would you stand up please so that the audience can hear you more clearly? Thank you.

One question I had for Mr. Frohock was in relation to the moral imagination. I think Mr. Ellison answered very well. But I would like to ask him how he considers-- He made a statement about it not being a moral act to be disgusted with a pigsty or a slum. It seems to me that--

The word was exclusively moral act-- explicitly moral. And I think the root of the question-- I see what's coming.

Well, the question is whether or not it is more of a moral act to be annoyed or disgusted or want to change a slum, or is it more of another kind of act? It seems to me that when you have an imagination without some kind of morality involved, what you get is Celine and not Mr. Ellison or Richard Wright, a writing of that kind.

This is the thing that is lacking in much of literature and that is needed. I think when you abstract-- if you want to go away from the formalist critics but you want something new, what it winds up with is an investigation of the technique that Mr. Ellison uses in this section of the novel that you mentioned, which seemed--

I'd like an answer that question, by the way, whether that was apropos. It seemed to me that section of the novel-- this is another question--

INTERPOSING VOICES

--is involved with this one.

Second one.

That section of the novel was merely where the protagonist was taken to a hospital after his experience in the paint company. Is that the one you--

INTERPOSING VOICES

Well no, I would also include the place where old Rass is up on the horse throwing spears wearing God knows what kind of costume. You must remember the place, Mr. Ellison.

LAUGHTER

INTERPOSING VOICES

Wasn't the technique in that section more straightforward and more naturalistic?

And not hallucinated?

Yes. I thought you were referring particularly to that section in the hospital.

No, I wasn't.

Well, what would you posit-- continue the question-- as an activity for the critic in terms of the novel rather than the consideration of the moral imagination?

I am a victim of my own inability, I think, to attend to any one set of words. Or maybe you let me off there a little bit. One of us is tying me in knots. Anyway, would you put the main question again?

I'm sorry. It wasn't. The main question that I have is whether or not you consider the moral imagination-- with emphasis on the moral-- to be the quintessence of the novelist job and activity.

You seem to be throwing out--

Can I answer?

Yeah.

No.

And what would you put?

I won't accept a the exclusive definition there of the moral of this job. There's motive there-- may be moral in Mr. Hyman's sense of the word or Mr. Trilling's sense of the word. Moral-- I don't see any reason in the world why it can't be purely aesthetic.

Or I don't see why it has to be exclusively one or the other as in my most unfortunate metaphor-- and I wish to God I hadn't said anything-- about the pigsty and the slum. If I had just stopped with the pigsty, I'd have been well off.

LAUGHTER

INTERPOSING VOICES

Mr. Hyman?

Well, I think we had Mr. Frohock agreeing before if we had a concept of the moral large enough to include the creation of beauty as a moral act, and I thought that he was willing to join on those terms, which it seems to me any deep and meaningful use of moral would include so that if the impulse of some artists is nothing more or less than to make a beautiful thing-- whether it be a pigsty or not-- we would certainly regard that as one of the possible moral activities.

Well, I did mean that.

You're in agreement.

Mr. O'Connor?

All I feel about this, Mr. Chairman, is that we are getting involved in this business of a moralist. I think there are certain novelists who are moralists. For instance, Jane Austen is one. Chekhov is a moralist.

Their main task is in relating society as they see it to their vision of a good man and a good woman. Trollope is not a moralist. Trollope is quite content to take the ordinary conventions of a society. He's got a wider range than either of these.

He hasn't got their intensity. I think we should distinguish-- we should admit that there are certain writers who are fundamentally moralists, and there are others who are not. And I entirely fail to understand this general agreement that morality is a form of aesthetics. It isn't.

Mr. Humes

INTERPOSING VOICES

Would you stand up?

There's half a dozen different meanings for the word moral. I'm wondering whether perhaps I'd like to ask Mr. Frohock what-- he doesn't mean that the passionate imagination or the compassionate imagination, the sympathetic imagination, or even the indignant imagination-- but moral imagination, as far as I can see, it seems to me to be a very useless tool.

If the aim-- if you accepted the hypothesis that the creation of beauty is a fundamental useless act or not utilitarian in the sense that serves no usable purpose-- that's not its fundamental aim. Someone may get satisfaction out of it incidental to the creation of piece of beauty.

But if you inject the notion of moral in the philosophical sense into the use of the imagination as a creative factor in the construction of a thing of beauty, it seems to me that we're no longer talking about art. We're talking about the styling of a new ford It doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the idea of creation. I know I'm being very incoherent about this thing, and I'm glad.

LAUGHTER

Am I in the position now of having to defend the word moral whether I wanted or not?

LAUGHTER

Sink or swim.

Well, how did I ever get there?

INAUDIBLE it seems like it's awfully--

I blamed it on somebody else. As a matter of fact, I told Stanley Edgar Hyman before this group met that I never wanted him to say again that he hadn't been stooged for.

LAUGHTER

I have done everything but get down on the floor and squirm about that word moral. As for compassionate imagination, sympathetic imagination, I'm awfully worried if I get very far into that that I will end up-- I seem to be doing things that I don't mean to do here-- end up proclaiming that my favorite novelist is John Steinbeck because he has more compassion than brains.

LAUGHTER

I don't want to do it.

Mr. Simenon? Will you?

INAUDIBLE

Yes, please.

I'd like to intrude something this, and that is that it seems to me that we're heading towards-- from one side to another-- that the pie in the sky will regenerate to the INAUDIBLE , that type of thing. In the world, there is both order and there is disorder, and it is our responsibility-- each man's responsibility, as well as the artist's responsibility-- to repair, to order, to proceed.

And the aesthetic experience is something that is above the disorder of the moment. And I think, therefore, that is an argument for the moral responsibility of the writer.

All right. Mr. INAUDIBLE ? Will you speak to any aspect of this or introduce a new aspect?

I had a question.

Fine. Thank you. It seemed to me when Mr. Frohock was speaking-- I'd like to get Mr. Frohock off the hook, but I don't see my way to advise since he apparently has insight into wanting the stuff that I don't have. The idea about manners in the novel and any relevance to this discussion.

It seems to me we're drifting clean off into Plutonic orbits in this morality, beauty business. You seem to feel that Mr. Trilling doesn't want to abandon the moral imagination, and yet we have some difficulty in not doing so.

And I wondered whether this idea of memories of in the novel is the kind of medial point that Trilling sought that is an invasion or perhaps a solution. In other words, what does Trilling mean by manners and knowledge? Or if you don't know the answer, perhaps someone here does.

I recommend a good chapter in the liberal imagination on the subject, which is the transcript of a speech that he made originally at Kenyon College, I believe. I can't answer your question. I don't have that much insight into Mr. Trilling.

But it sounds to me when I read him as though he wanted to restrict the meaning of the word novel to the kind of fiction which made its capital of manners, ways of living in groups, and so forth where those were rather strictly ruled by recognized conventions. Bad word. I can't imagine a convention that was unrecognized.

Now, do you think he means by manners anything like what Eliot means by a way of life when he speaks of that and the idea of political society particularly

I suspect so. I read Eliot's book I don't know how long ago and remember only my resentment of it at the time. But I suspect that there is a slight joining of minds in that direction. It's only a suspicion, and I could be easily refuted by anyone who has Eliot and INAUDIBLE at his fingertips.

Yes, yes.

I know that from something Mr. Frohock said, that he felt that if we had another sort of criticism or a different sort of criticism, a criticism of some kind, a novelist like Sinclair Lewis would be more highly regarded. I wish he would tell me what I can't see. I feel that Sinclair Lewis to many readers today is just dull.

I don't see how any kind of criticism can make them change their minds about it being being dull. But if they don't change their minds, why are they going to be interested, and why are they going to read it? I'd like some hint about what this kind of criticism could be and how it would operate.

So I think this is quite different from the kind of criticism that enables some people to understand what they previously didn't understand so to find something interesting simply because they're given a wider web, which I don't think would be at all the case about the type of criticism you would have to have, and it's possible, here.

Well, once again, why do I sit down?

LAUGHTER

Would anybody else like to talk? My point would be-- my point was-- that Sinclair Lewis does not, if I'm right, have the lowest state that he has on the critical ladder because of his dullness. And the question of his dullness hasn't been in most criticism of issue.

The issue has been that as far as literary form was concerned, his novels were, if you like, uninteresting to the critic. Now, maybe that's wrong. That is, maybe I've misunderstood the critic.

Do you feel then the critic should explain why so many readers do find Lewis dull?

I think that would be a good thing if somebody did it. I wouldn't mind at all, but you're not under the impression that a novelist's dullness keeps him from being read.

No. Are you?

LAUGHTER

Not in this day INAUDIBLE

LAUGHTER

And I would say the same for certain pages of, say, Albertine in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I happened to spend a year of my life making sure that a piece of coral rock out in the Pacific Ocean would not move. The Japanese didn't want to move it, but we couldn't go away.

It was one of the rarest opportunities I've ever had for reading, and I had the Random House two volume Proust out of the chaplain's library.

LAUGHTER

That's why you get books. It's the only place you can get books, so that's where it came from. And I kept it for a long, long time, and I read myself assiduously to sleep with it every night. And it was some time before a pair of my fellow defenders of that country admitted to me that they had been taking my bookmark night after night and putting it back in the text INAUDIBLE.

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER

And I admit I have been reading Cruz with just as much enthusiasm as usual. I don't think that dullness bothers a certain kind of reader. It should. It's a commentary on the man who isn't bothered. To get back to the question that you asked, and which I was perhaps a bit frivolous about, I wonder if Sinclair Lewis's dullness-- which I can't find for myself in the thing like The Man Who Knew Coolidge--

Why is it it varies from book to book and from reader to reader. But I do think that there are very many people today who simply can't read Sinclair Lewis. They just find him intolerably stupid.

But I would like to ask Mr. Hyman-- this is partly the cut off my own feet-- whether that isn't because some of the books are what you would call pseudo fictions.

This seems to be the carom question.

LAUGHTER

Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown--

LAUGHTER

--that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers.

And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out.

That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us.

And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him.

May I say something which will go a little bit beyond Sinclair Lewis? In the first place, we don't expect novels-- even great novels-- to stay fashionable constantly from year to year. They are encounters with experience, after all. And they are like-- and all novels, I think-- demand that we bring something to them.

What I'm trying to get at is there was a time when Sinclair Lewis did quite a bit for our awareness of ourselves as Americans, as members of society. I don't think that they are great art. We had the need at that time to have these things formulated for us. Babbitt is still a term, even though its meaning it's changed from the malignant over to the benign INAUDIBLE .

LAUGHTER

But nevertheless, he performed that function. And now, the emotion which we brought to it, and the lives of our own imagination which we brought to his words has receded. We are looking to place him elsewhere. There will be a time when-- I suspect-- when people will be reading Sinclair Lewis again and saying, this man is a classic. This is wonderful writing. And you'll have your Lewis cults just as we have our Fitzgerald cults.

I think it works that way. I think it's because the novel does communicate, because it must be fired-- like any work of art-- by the emotions, ideas, feelings of an audience. Thus, we have works which come up. They come into being and called into being through certain needs on the part of the viewer, the reader, listener. And after that need recedes, after the time changes-- and they must exist in time and can only exist in time-- they go into the veil.

Yes, please.

Some kind of person come down to Earth. I dare ask a question. A very distinguished professor emeritus of Harvard has said that, "William Faulkner writes for morons," unquote. May we have some expert comment on that?

Is there anyone who can speak to this?

Well, Mr. Collins, you are right on your feet.

LAUGHTER

Well he writes about morons. Well, he doesn't specifically aim at professors emeritus of Harvard University, obviously.

LAUGHTER

CLAPPING

And therefore, he may not attract their favorable attention. This is a big subject. We've been having big subject. Do you mean-- are you asking, essentially, whether or not William Faulkner has a moral imagination?

LAUGHTER

I think Professor--Mr.--Frohock said it.

I will say that I haven't made a living by, but I've supplemented my income by, giving a little talk around entitled-- just because of this problem-- entitled William Faulkner moralist, you see. To prove-- and any author who is a moralist-- the fact that I say is unproven-- but any author who is a moralist, we assume is not writing for morons because I think we assume that morons, at least the courts do, assume that they are neither eligible for officers candidate school nor are exempt in time of war and are not--

LAUGHTER

--and are not to be held totally responsible. They are frequently wards of the court or ward-- they are assigned people to take care of them as wards. No. William Faulkner, I think-- I'm naturally in a prejudiced position, here, because if I said I like him, this place would be in a category that you brought up. And I don't want to place myself there. The rest is up to you. But I think that without any doubt, whatever the Faulkner is an issue here.

He is not the newest breed of novelist. He wrote in an earlier period. But I think one of the reasons for his present popularity, for the enormous attention that he is receiving, is that the times have changed-- as Mr. Ellison suggested and he somehow seems, to more readers, to be speaking to them. And I think one of the reasons that he has been accused of writing for morons-- though I really don't take that very seriously.

I think he's been accused of writing for people who want to read filth. And this doesn't limit itself to morons. -- I think that William Faulkner has very-- fortunately for us at the moment, he wrote a kind of thing that wasn't extremely comprehensible at first glance to readers trained in another tradition. So that I find that the people who are his strongest supporters now are-- among his strongest supporters-- are the students who are, we hope, from whom the writers of the future will come.

They don't want to do just what he's doing. But they feel that among the older hands who have been making a living at this for some time, here is the man who's doing closer to what they are trying to do than other writers have been doing. And I believe that his revival is close to the center of what we've been discussing earlier today. And that is the question of reality, and organization, and whether or not-- and the question of last night-- whether or not the novel is popular, and should reach a large audience, and all the rest.

Now Dos Passos's USA was a very popular book when it came out. And this rose from the middle classes though he is not middle class. And it was read by the middle classes. And it seemed to me-- speaking to Mr O'Connor's point of last evening-- it seems to me that Dos Passos fitted in with a time period and had a great boom. To me-- and I like Dos Passos. I remember once I didn't like him-- past tense. I remember once when Big Money, the third of the trilogy, came out, I went to a bookstore in the morning, rented it-- this was in the depression, which the book was about.

And I thought I'd just glance at it that morning and found that I had finished it before I ate again. And this last summer, I tried to look over another volume of the trilogy thinking to assign it to some students. And over a period of a week of desperate struggle, I was unable to get more than halfway through it. Now, this has been presumed. Maybe it's just a solipsistic thing. Maybe just I have changed. But I don't think so. I think the times have changed. And I think that kind of thing is not of such interest.

Now there was a thing in one sense less organized-- if you can ever say that what we recognize as art is not organized-- but certainly much more loosely organized. It had presented no difficulties to the reader except problems of endurance, which have increased, as I say. Whereas Faulkner, writing in approximately the same period-- a little bit earlier than that third volume-- Faulkner wrote a thing like The Sound and the Fury, which immediately brings up a problem that Mr. O'Connor dealt with last night.

That is the question of external systems and so forth. Mr. O'Connor was speaking of great deal about Joyce, and very effectively about Joyce. And though I think I-- incidentally, I think I should resume my role as moderator this evening. But in the brief time remaining, I take it this is not comment vomit. It seems to me that it's quite right now to look at Joyce with a little less awe and almost approach Mr O'Connor's position because the trouble with Joyce is that these external systems-- The Odyssey or chart of human anatomy and so forth-- are presented in what has now begun to seem to a number of readers as in a sort of niggling fashion with an ulterior purpose.

These ulterior structures have an ulterior purpose, which is in great part to show what an extremely learned man Joyce was, it seems to me. And also, they're a part of an extreme mania that he has, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out, for association, which would lead him to absurd extremes. Now for a man to present a technique as a pioneer is a different thing from seeing his followers take it up and adapt it, fit it to a slightly later time, and also, fit it to the lack of being a pioneer.

A pioneer seems to me to perspire and be ungraceful, whereas the follower, settling a few waves behind the first wave of pioneering, can use these things, take them more as they come, fit them in, mesh the thing together, melt it down, and not use it so obviously. And in connection with these ulterior systems, I think Sound and Fury-- since you bring up Faulkner-- is a good example. The thing has at least three elaborately worked out ulterior external systems, which no critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed.

And yet, readers have liked-- some readers have liked it. And I think a growing number have liked it. Many of the students and would-be, hopeful writers that we speak of-- that wave of the future, if that phrase isn't hasn't a bad connotation. These people have got a lot of out of The Sound and the Fury. And they're what we would have to accept as so-called good writers-- good readers, I mean-- adequate readers.

They're not people who are just overjoyed solely with Forever Amber. And they are able to go away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling somewhat good, feeling they've got some their money's worth in part-- a good many of them are. Now, Mr. O'Connor has asked that authors be less self conscious and less intellectual. Joyce seems to him overly intellectual. And this would seem-- he seems so to me.

But, at the same time, Mr. O'Connor asks that the reader be extremely intellectual, and that if the novel has in it systems and things which are not subject to the reader's immediate conscious and intellectual examination, that the novel is a failure. And I'm of the opinion that there's a middle ground here where the author shouldn't be so self-conscious and intellectual and planned and smelling of the lamp as Joyce, a lamp with a reflector to show how much he's a poor figure, but a lamp which he wants to smell up to show he's spent the time near it. The author can do a little less of that.

And I think though the reader these days is likely to be a little intellectual, after all, he's been able to read James's prefaces and other things, as Mr. Frohock has pointed out, still, I think it's possible for a reader, whom we might call a good reader, one we accept as who knows any more than Arnold's suggestion that the best people in literary matters-- if this reader goes away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling good, feeling that something's come from this, if he doesn't know all the intellectual systems on which it's organized, who cares?

The novel, for example, has several-- involves four days. These are the days of Holy Week. It has Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter.

And throughout these-- the days-- the events assigned to these days, the symbolic and traditional operations of those days recur but so melted into the realism that Mr. O'Connor asks for that the readers have not been aware that on the Thursday, the boy does a lot of washing of his hands and so forth, though feet is done in the Bible. This is the way the author changes it. And there's harrowing of Hell and other things that go through this thing. But they're not sticking their heads up too far.

And then the title, following Joyce-- this, I believe, is an author who went to school with Joyce. And as Walt Whitman said something about the breadth of my students' shoulders only tests, I think, the breadth of my own shoulders, Faulkner, I think, has maybe taken Joyce's thing-- this is blasphemy to say-- and maybe done it better. The other pattern is as with Joyce, who took the-- who gave a title to his book to steer the reader to The Odyssey, so Faulkner takes a title from the fifth act of Macbeth, famous speech by Macbeth, and then organizes the book around this speech so that one of the monologues deals a great deal with "out, out brief candle."

The second monologue involves a great deal of life being a walking shadow. Quentin Compson, before he found himself up somewhere near the Brighton abattoir here in Charles River, walks his shadow around a great deal. And in the third monologue, the poor player struts and frets upon the stage. And in the end, where the peak of sound with Jason, or with the Idiot, and the fury with Jason, where they reach their peak, the novel ends with showing that it signifies nothing for these people, who fit into the novel as one of the big-- a novel that deals with one of the big subjects of our time, which is love or the lack of love in its broadest sense. And the novel has made very clear throughout that these children are being-- are suffering, or as the novel says two times, "poisoned" by the lack of affection from the parents, lack of support and lift from the hypochondriac mother and the cynical and alcoholic father.

And this novel is a moralistic novel saying that that ain't right. And one of the ways it shows this is that the three interior monologues are also organized, as Joyce organized parts around the Chart of Human Anatomy. In this, they're organized around the Chart of Human Personality but as laid out by Freud so that the idiot's speech, so-called, the one assigned to the idiot, draws very carefully on Freud's definition of the id.

The second monologue is very carefully based on Freud's definition as available to Faulkner in translation. And he did read a lot of Freud then, and he has this kind of mind. Based on the ego, Jason, the one who wants to repress all pleasure, who's the only one who cares what the community thinks, who in their three brothers' concentration on their sister is the one who hates her and who is against all voluptuousness, whether it leads to information or not.

CHUCKLING

This-- Jason is strictly based on the superego. And such details as the idiot's trying to break out of the fence through the gate, and as a result, being brought in and by Jason being castrated, this is how the textbook, too, that famous portal that Freud set up in his spatial figure when he was moving from his hydraulic images to the geographical ones, this is the kind of episode which means something on the realistic level. Anybody with an idiot in the family, 33 years old with a mind of a 3-year-old, is going to be interested, as Jason is, in keeping him back of the house, inside the fence, not out presumably, or probably not actually molesting schoolgirls.

But still, the thing has a life at another level. And I see no real harm in this. If the novel is able to live since 1929 with all kinds of people treading over it and dealing with it in every way, and these systems are so completely buried that all they've done is guide the author maybe and guide the reader perhaps subtly, or at least give him a feeling there's some unity here, I see no objection in doing this because the author has in two ways not paraded this learning. He has not made it stick out in the novel to such an extent as Joyce did. And he has not slyly said to an equivalent of Mr. Gilbert, yes, if you look farther, you'll see really something here.

The analogy here, I think, is possibly that between the horse and horseman. The-- though I don't want the reader to be in every way equated to the horse because though readers are sharply different from authors, there are some readers who can approach being-- approach some authors. But I think that just as a horse not knowing where he and the horseman are going, as anyone who rides at all knows, is a little more happy, subtle things are conveyed by the hands, knees, and seat of the pants. And the horse somehow senses that the author, the horseman, is-- he'll change in a minute at the next jump.

The horseman is aware of where he's going and knows the technique for getting the horse to go there. And the horse has a happier day. He had-- the ride he enjoys more.

And I think that if an author, in dealing with this rapid flux that passes and giving it some kind of shape, has something that makes him-- I hope he has an internal smile, not a kind of leer or sneer. But if he's happily smiling to himself that he's got a gimmick now that will work, and if he doesn't intrude it too much, I think art works in subtle ways and that somehow, some readers, and apparently in growing numbers, have begun to sense that maybe something's going on here. Now if-- I do not believe that they buy this book and read it so that they can end up with a kind of mystery of the sort of the lady or the tiger. So when they get through, they say, well, what happened in this book?

They may not know all these things happened. And because I say they happened doesn't prove they do. They may not happen there at all.

But I do think that because the author has had this kind of plan and has been able to use it and adapt it, as Mr. Ellison said last night in the roundtable, taking these new techniques and the novels looking backward but not trying to move there, it seems to me that here is a possible place where some of this adaptation has been made.

And if the reader does not know when he gets through everything that has happened, that's all right. But on the other hand, to return to your professor emeritus of Harvard, it is quite true that if the reader approaches this expecting a straight-out naturalistic with a capital N chronological order of the kind that Faulkner has in As I Lay Dying, which for many years was his most admired book because the woman died. The family tried to take her to a burying ground, and in the end they got there.

CHUCKLING

This novel had a crystal, linear clarity, if there's such a thing, which made many readers say, Faulkner can't write a novel, but he wrote one here. Well, Faulkner's-- measured by those devices, these other novels are certainly chaotic. It doesn't even run Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it has another kind of order.

To take another example, Malcolm Cowley, who's in great part responsible for much of Faulkner's-- well, for part of Faulkner's boom in this country, or at least making the books available through the Viking Portable, has felt that Faulkner so abandoned the naturalistic novel that he needed to be rewritten. The canute thing operated with Mr. Cowley. So Mr. Cowley and the Viking Portable Faulkner has written the only good Faulkner novel.

It has a chronological order. We start with Indians. We get early settlers. These are snippets from various places. And we come up to the very present.

Now this has a beauty all its own, which has been imposed by Mr. Cowley. On the assumption that William Faulkner in his individual works had no aesthetic plan whatever, as in The Sound and the Fury, and that the important thing is he's dealt with one county to a considerable extent, but that it's so hard for the readers to find this out that now in this one volume they can do it. And so the important thing is the history of the county, which you can get from some-- also from some volumes prepared by the WPA.

CHUCKLING

Mr. Cowley's also said that William Faulkner never wrote a unified novel. In other words, he writes for morons. And he cites the-- as Light in August, in which the two main protagonists, the main woman and the main man, never meet.

Now this is a Procrustean bed that I don't propose to make the novel take for its lodging this night or any other. The novel has a theme which requires that these two characters never meet, a theme that has to do with time. One of the characters is embedded in the past. One is morbidly fixed on the future.

And-- no, excuse me. The one doesn't meet. There are three characters here. The man we just spoke of frozen in the past, and the woman I just spoke of, the major one, eternally in the present, using figures from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

This is an author who may write for morons. But he's read the poems which are popular with professors emeritus in general. And he knows them rather well.

And the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" sets up this girl as running through eternal present. And then another woman, who is killed by the man, is frozen in the future. Now this-- and to mention strictly parenthetically a thing that Mr. Frohock referred to in The Inferno, where some characters there have their heads turned backward, it's not really in connection. But to give you an idea of how really moronic this author is and how many schemes he uses which are not intellectually available to the reader without-- I've been reading them over and over again for money, you see? This is different.

In this novel, when the man who is embedded in the past kills the woman who is fixed on the future, he cuts her throat in a scene which rather horrified some people. And when her body is carried out of this building, which is burning naturally, and this openly-- blanket in which it's been brought out is open in the yard, we see that her head is turned backward on the body. And there are some readers of a squeamish sort who asked whether or not this twist was necessary.

LAUGHTER

And the point is that the people in The Inferno passage that Mr. Frohock spoke of were Cassandra, Tiresias, and others, whose sin was they looked too far in the future. So this woman who looked too far in the future, when her throat is cut and she's brought out, her head is turned backward on her body. Now this is maybe morbidly the author having games with himself.

There is an element in all of this of the author's being the kind of person who could satisfactorily own a stolen Mona Lisa, in which he knows that everyone is looking for it. Those so-and-sos out there, and I'm the man who knows where it is. He can't tell his wife. He can't tell anybody else. But he's-- he knows it, and this is fine.

There is this element, and it's a big risk. But when these external systems, this metaphor, so that this woman doesn't have a choice as to which way her body will lie as Bloom, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out last night, doesn't have a choice as to whether he'll go upstairs or out in the yard, this woman doesn't have the choice in the novel of whether her head will, when murdered, will be forward or aft. A metaphor requires that it be turned. But I don't mind that if the author doesn't force me to feel terribly unhappy if I don't get the point.

But as soon as the theme of time appears, thousands of these details fit in. And I don't favor crossword puzzles. I never worked one in my life, even on a-- in a day coach. And I don't want to work them here.

But I think that somehow the author-- maybe realism of an extraordinarily flat variety has come to its end for the moment. And I think for an author to deal with these things in a way which maybe has a new meaning, I mean, for him to deal in this way may have a new meaning and may convey it to some readers. But by the all standards set up of an earlier time, you're quite right. Your professor's quite right. He writes for morons.

CHUCKLING

APPLAUSE

That was not a moderate-- moderator's speech. I'm sorry. If there are other questions for any of the-- Mr. Frohock or any members of the panel-- yes, please.

Seems to me that the most-- the very generalized discussion, which brought down INAUDIBLE , it was Ellison who said that the novel is a form of communication. And going from that, this question is directed to Mr. O'Connor, who has confused me considerably. I feel every time I stand up, there's a great chasm opening. And into this chasm disappear too many of my heroes.

LAUGHTER

Mr. O'Connor, spoke INAUDIBLE of the novel of 1970-- '50 as emphasize middle-class values. And I think I got a pattern in my mind. This has been carried on.

In the '30s, we had the proletariat semi-political novels of Dos Passos and Steinbeck in dubious battle, which communicated the values of proletariat. And since the war, it seems to me we have a great many novelists who were in the war who are trying to communicate now the great uncertainty of the orgy of violence without reason that they were engulfed in. And I wonder if, Mr. O'Connor, do you think this is a valid thing for novels to communicate?

I know it's subjective. And is very personal to an individual. The novel has certainly become that, as you pointed out last night.

Yet isn't this all part of a pattern of communication, starting with the novel's forebearers?

Mr. O'Connor?

I'm afraid that question is really too difficult for me. I don't know that I've got it quite clearly. I agree with Mr. Ellison's point about the novel is a communication. But it's obviously a great deal more than communication.

The novel is also a work of art. And that we're rather inclined to forget. That is, whether we like the term or we don't like the term, it's organized. And it's organized according to a certain system.

Now I don't think these particular proletarian novels are works of art. Undoubtedly, they're communication. They were going on all through the 19th century. They're not regarded as great 19th-century novels.

You've got novels describing the appalling conditions in the Lancashire mill towns. And they are a merely communication. Their principal object is not the creation of a work of art. It's not the creation of a work of beauty.

It is to express the writer's views upon industrial conditions or some other sort of conditions, conditions of the war. We got a great mass of these after the First World War. And they've all, as far as I know, disappeared because they weren't works of art. They merely were works of communication.

I don't know if that's answering the question, but then as I said, I'm not quite clear about the significance of the question.

Well, I was thinking particularly of the novel since the war. The novel that you seem to think has become so subjective -- too subjective, too much within --

I wasn't aware that that was what I was saying. I don't feel-- I feel that, on the contrary, the novel since the war-- since the last war in Europe-- has become more and more objective. There is more and more a throwing over of the Joycean, Lawrence Gide, and indeed the Faulkner type of novel.

In that book which I was referring to last night, SPEAKING FRENCH, he describes the middle classes of Europe committing suicide. And he describes them in terms of a French bourgeois who comes home at night to his wife and children-- wife and daughters. Ayme thinks all the bad literature of our time derives from the fact that it's all written for women.

I don't hold with that, but he says the bourgeois comes home to his wife, and his wife says, "Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." And the businessman says, "oui, Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." But he's never read Faulkner. Or if he tried to read Faulkner he's always stopped in the middle because it was too difficult. And Ayme is arguing that this is intellectual suicide. It is the suicide of the bourgeoisie. And I think Ayme himself, and a number of young writers in England, are trying to get away from that. They're trying to get towards a new objectivity.

Now that doesn't mean just going back to the 19th century novel. Obviously you can't do that. You can't go back to a form of society which no longer exists. It does mean, as Mr. Lytle said earlier-- the one statement with which I found myself heartily in agreement-- that it's the relationship between the internal man, between the god within you and the reality outside you.

Yes?

This is a return to morality INAUDIBLE . Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability, or to repair it that somebody said earlier

Mr. Lytle?

Well, I didn't get that. Will you repeat this question? Would you stand please? It's very hard to hear you without standing.

Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability or to repair that society, as someone in here said today?

Well, I will-- go ahead Mr. Ellison. Yes.

Yes. I think that that-- that's the writer's business. And oh, if his business was to write and to describe reality with as much truth and-- god, here I go-- beauty, he's writing works as he's possible to achieve. And he-- if he has any other role to play, it-- it is to reveal the mystery and possibility inherent in given reality.

But beyond that, you have politicians, experts on social organization and a whole apparatus who function in their own way. But I don't-- for the life of me, I don't see how-- how a writer can do anything more than write. It's a terrifically difficult thing, this business of trying to decide what is real, what is valuable, what is-- is reality.

People who want to-- I mean, you see him again, you-- you-- well this will lead to asking the writer to get out with-- on the picket line. Which is all right with me, but it isn't writing. And I don't think the two functions should be confused. I think that-- that there is enough pain, there's enough psychological misery involved in really grappling with reality in terms of art. And that the sheer job of mastering art, especially in a time like ours when the corpus of the novel and then the technique of the novel, the ideologies of the novel is so bad.

I think that the proper thing to do is stop now and bring up these questions again at the meeting tomorrow. Mr. Campbell, are there any announcements that I have forgotten to make at the moment?

I don't think so. INAUDIBLE

Oh, we again want all the speakers to be on the stage at the table if you will. Thank you.