Opening Evening Talks and Panel Discussion, August 3, 1953, Sanders Theater (Part Two)
The August 3 evening talks continue from Part One. Frank O’Connor finishes his lecture “The Modern Novel” and Anthony West is invited to respond to Hyman and O’Connor. Before Collins concludes the first evening, the panelists discuss what they have heard. On the next day, August 4, the conversation continues during Part One of the first afternoon sesssion.
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| 24:56 | Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, after the banquet and the washing up, the first thing that really struck me in Mr. Hyman's speech was the idea of myth and ritual as a basis for art and the novel. It made me think of William Morris and the sad occasion in pre-Raphaelite history when Mr. William Morris was reading aloud from one of his pseudo-Norse sagas, with a strong mythological basis, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. | Anthony West |
| 25:40 | Morris had the experience, which many people have had when reading aloud, that the other mind in the room slowly closed down and shut itself off. And a silence fell, and ultimately Rossetti became aware of it. And he broke it with an apology, which was at the same time a piece of criticism. | Anthony West |
| 26:04 | He said, I find it awfully difficult to take a real interest in a man whose brother is a dragon. This is the fundamental basis of failure in any art form which relies on myth in a literate society-- opinions are various, the myth is not universally acceptable, and the conditions break down. | Anthony West |
| 26:31 | We have a great many relics of myth-based cultures, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, which we know how they were produced. We know the conditions which gave them life. There was a culture with a unified field. The mythology was common property. The basis of the epic was common property. The audience knew every part of it through constant repetition. | Anthony West |
| 27:01 | The Iliad, as we know it, took its form over a process of about 600 years, annual and biennial and seven-year festivals, which the audiences came together to hear poets give this thing tiny variations in form. The metrical, metaphoric character, but the basis of structure remained the same. | Anthony West |
| 27:28 | I don't believe in our society, which cannot agree on any single myth, that we can support, for any period, this constant repetition that a myth involves. The individual's search for his identity, if we reduce it to a pattern of an individual, or with specific characters, characteristics, in search of fulfillment of a specific kind, it opens up a vista of intolerable monotony before us that David Copperfield-- if we accept our type individual as David Copperfield, that every young man at the crisis of his life, which Dickens then was, when he was achieving his personality, but was not quite satisfied with its effect on the outside world, he rewrote his youth. | Anthony West |
| 28:25 | If we had every young man who reached that stage of development giving us the same story, with his little variation of personal experience, the novel would become a torment to us. The prospects of the novel, in any case, are, I think, rather tormenting, we look at them with considerable fear and horror. We have had about 250 years of it, and it may go on like Chinese poetry. We may have novels going on in a literate society for another 600 or 700 years. | Anthony West |
| 29:00 | And I very much hope that, if I'm alive during that 600 or 700 years, it won't have a myth basis. Because all the variousness, the richness, and the fluidity of form and content which it enjoys will inevitably be expelled. | Anthony West |
| 29:19 | I think the idea of a blend of naturalism and myth, which I think Mr. Hyman suggests would keep it alive, that the constant injection of personal experience into a myth form would give it a variety, is a fallacy. We have had various art forms in which myth and realism have tried to coexist, and they had a very uneasy time of it. | Anthony West |
| 29:49 | The most obvious example, I think, that sort of puts the thing in the simplest form is to take painting-- where we have, in a very short period, the movement from icon to a sort of realism myth of things like the Matthias Grunewald altarpiece, to Manet's picture of the dead Christ. And it isn't clear that realism has destroyed the value of the symbols. | Anthony West |
| 30:18 | If you look at a Byzantine icon, you see concepts, you see ideas given a very formal pattern, which are universally valid. You're not dealing with anything particular or special, you are dealing with the cosmology, with the ideas of the Christian church in a compact form, which are available instantly to every Christian who sees them. | Anthony West |
| 30:45 | When you get to the Grunewald altarpiece, you have got beyond the universal application of the symbols-- you are faced with an instant, you are faced with a man at a particular phase of his life, as sufferings. The body has just died, it's about to begin to corrupt. The thorns are there, which will presently fall away-- they're material objects trapped in an instant of time. And they have already acquired the transitory value of an instant, and they have moved away from the permanent moment of the valid symbol. | Anthony West |
| 31:27 | When you finally come down to the Manet picture, it's a purely formal exercise with a cadaver from a mortuary. And the instant has passed-- all significance is drained away. And you wonder why Manet painted it. There is no focus of vitality or life on the picture at all. | Anthony West |
| 31:54 | I think that this uneasy marriage of naturalism and myth is an impossibility. Then we went on-- Mr. Hyman went on to talk of the pseudo-novel, in very severe forms, the novel which was a disguised report. And I was rather astonished that he spoke with such severity of this form, which seems to me an extremely old one. | Anthony West |
| 32:26 | Benjamin Constant beginning with a modern novel with that extraordinary exercise, the psychological novel of the relations of two people, which doesn't change throughout the book, but which is a revelation of two complete personalities. We know how autobiographical it is-- it's near a picture-- it's a picture as near to a picture of himself as he can paint, and the woman is as near to a portrait of the woman he knew and was longtime associated with as he could possibly make it. | Anthony West |
| 32:59 | At a very high level, it's reportage. And the greatest novelist of all, I think, the unchallenged master of the realistic 19th century novel, created an enormous, complete world, and an enormous population to inhabit it, Balzac-- as we know, his method was to report as closely as possible on the reality under his observation. | Anthony West |
| 33:29 | The particular example, I think, which is almost like a shorthand report of evidence, is the Distinguished Provincial in Paris-- we know that Balzac was the confidant of George Sand who confided every detail of her relationship with Jules Sandeau, and the relationship went straight into the book. And it is there, like a series of instantaneous photographs. The imagination has worked on the fact, and produced something which I don't think it's possible to call anything but magnificent. | Anthony West |
| 34:11 | And I had an uneasy feeling, too, when I was hearing Mr. Hyman talk of the tendency of writers to drop into self-parody as something new. I think we have known for a long time that people get old, and writers get old like everybody else. And most writers, after they are 40 or 45, cease to receive new material, and they are dredging at a reserve-- impression and a backlog of experience-- which is all they're going to have. | Anthony West |
| 34:45 | And as they get tired, and their control of their method softens off, they produce things which are weaker versions of what they have already written. Yesterday, we had Sinclair Lewis very sadly doing that in public. And the day before yesterday, we had Conrad at the end of his life producing The Rover. I don't think it's possible to say that the exhaustion of writers and their lapse into self-parody is a new thing at all. | Anthony West |
| 35:22 | The obsession with homosexuality, which Mr. Hyman touched on, seems to me to be a more important thing for the novel than he allowed it to be. I don't think it's a matter of individual attitudes, really, it comes from the very nature of the novel-- which Mr. O'Connor said was the art form of the middle class. | Anthony West |
| 35:52 | The point about the homosexual, the accepted point, is that he's sick-- mentally sick. He's out of control. And he's not responsible. He is a man who has gotten himself into a category, and he's not really an effective free agent. | Anthony West |
| 36:12 | The dramas, the novel, in which our novelists involve such people, are dramas of trapped people. I think the clue is in this. Balzac's world, which is one in which Rastignac can, in all seriousness, at the most depressing and shattering moment of his life, can go apart to a hill overlooking Paris, and challenge society inwardly. | Anthony West |
| 36:47 | He swears that he will master Paris and he will master all that Paris stands for. In fact, he is a free-- an entirely free man, who is going to make his own terms with destiny. And the century which produced Balzac, produced Rastignac, was firmly of the opinion that what was unsatisfactory about the world could be, by the use of reason, the concerted effort of reasonable men, could be very much improved. And that when you got away from the mass category of reasonable men down to individuals, that they could make their terms with fate, subtle what they like. | Anthony West |
| 37:31 | The great thing which has happened to the middle class senses a loss of courage and a loss of faith as a group in that idea. And I think that is symbolized by the movement of the novel. The modern novel's type figure, which is not anything like Rastignac. It's Kafka's nameless individual who is trapped in a machine that he can't understand. And he's ultimately killed for no reason that he can arrive at, like a dog. | Anthony West |
| 38:11 | You get this type figure occurring at every level, from best sellers down, or up, whichever you like to put it, to the most Avant Garde literature. James Jones' Trumpeter is the individual ground down by a social force, by the army, by the brutality of society and having an instrument like the army. | Anthony West |
| 38:39 | And at a very different level, the core of Hemingway is more explicitly, more consciously, saying the same thing-- the end of To Have and To Have Not is the moral that the dying Henry Morgan forces out with his life blood as he lies dying, is to say, a man alone hasn't got a chance. | Anthony West |
| 39:06 | This is an absolutely unthinkable statement 60 years ago, or 90 years ago, for people to take seriously. They believed that a man alone was responsible for himself. He was not in a hopeless position doomed to failure. | Anthony West |
| 39:26 | The basis of all of Hemingway's thought is that a man alone is doomed to failure. The only thing worth being is a man of action with a hunter's honor, and that that is something which society has no place for. | Anthony West |
| 39:42 | It's the same doctrine behind Intruder in the Dust-- really the final scene when the man walks through the town with his pride, is a scene of tragic import. The man is alone in a town which knows none of his values. There's that lament at the end of it for the car-owning, dishonorable, money-grubbing society, in which the hero, in his hour of triumph, is entirely meaningless. | Anthony West |
| 40:17 | You remember Edmund Wilson's wonderful essay about Hemingway, which called him the gauge of morale, like the morale is out of the middle class explicitly in his essay. | Anthony West |
| 40:36 | It seemed to me, too, that Mr. Hyman was a great deal less than just to Forster, in who return he said that in Forster, sin had become a matter of bad taste. I think there is a level of-- impressive level of weakness about Forster's work, but I think that's a technical impression because of the technique he adopted-- the tea-tabling technique, the description of shocking events, of violent events, in terms which you could do it over a tea tray with lace cloth on it, silver cups, and so on. The great Edwardian English technique of adopting as your standard of expression the conversation of a well-bred man. | Anthony West |
| 41:28 | I think that does great injustice to his content. The sin, in Forster's work, is of not speaking from the heart in matters of importance, in human relations. It's in a way, it's the well-bred declaration of the great theme in Lawrence's work-- the crime against life, which is the breach of the flow of complete honesty between honest people. | Anthony West |
| 42:05 | And Forster's work is all about a conflict between the children of warmth and light, who are candid and absolutely ruthless in their declaration of themselves, and the children of darkness, who are cold-hearted and hypocritical. And The Passage to India, which seems to be about the troubles of a rather ineffectual man, is-- I think it has the same intention as Shaw's Heartbreak House, and it's a much more dignified tragedy. | Anthony West |
| 42:42 | It's an expression of the failure to bridge a gap that could have been bridged by unfrozen and unfrightened hearts. And it's really the tragedy of the British failure in India, in individual terms, I think is a very magnificent novel. | Anthony West |
| 43:08 | I must say that I found it very hard to take the expressions of admiration for Kafka's Metamorphosis, which does seem to me, in essence, what is wrong with a large number of modern novels. It is a private view of a private obsession. And I think you can read into it almost anything you like, because it has no definition and no formal relation to any accepted body of thought. | Anthony West |
| 43:44 | It doesn't spring from any tradition. It's an individual cantrip-- a freak. And it has a sort of reputation at the moment, I think, is an entirely delusive one, because by having neither form nor substance, it enables anyone who reads it to write their own poetry, their commentary becomes the work. You import your own feelings into it and make it something. | Anthony West |
| 44:13 | By the standards of the 19th century, what would a reasonable man think of this story? The story of the boy who imagines that he is turning into a beetle, and who is worried because he smells like a cockroach, and so on? So this is silly stuff. And I think that basically is what it is. | Anthony West |
| 44:35 | I think The Trial is a great deal less silly. But I think there, again, we have a particular thing, a very private impression, which is expressed in such a manner that you can pin anything to it. Kafka was-- who existed on the fringe of the Austrian empire. It was the most cumbersome and the most corrupt bureaucracy that the world has ever seen, and it governed the most brilliant and sharp-witted group of people who exist anywhere in the world-- the people who live in the trouble corridor which is now behind the Iron Curtain. People who, by centuries of living under oppressions of various kind, have developed an extraordinary razor-like satirical technique and a wit entirely of their own. | Anthony West |
| 45:26 | And I believe that Kafka's Trial is a witty parody of Austrian life as it was lived by a very brilliant Jew who was in a Czech, and had no place in any particular life or society, and was under the shadow of this great, cumbersome, creaking machine. It is a symbolic treatment of that situation. | Anthony West |
| 45:51 | I don't believe it applies to the conscience, and I don't believe it has any of the depth, which nearly 50 years of arduous work have given-- or 30 years of arduous critical work-- have enriched it with. We have had a great many exciting feelings about it. We have pinned them to it. | Anthony West |
| 46:13 | I think some of our critical results are perfectly fascinating. I think the Kafka thing, when you look at it, and go really through it, you find that it's a most brilliant piece of writing. Nobody has described action so well. Known has described impressions of action by somebody going through it so well. | Anthony West |
| 46:35 | There's the actual use of language is, I think, extraordinarily impressive. And nobody who wants to write can do better than read Kafka, just for the sake of seeing how when the reader is told what happens. But I think that is where it ends. | Anthony West |
| 47:01 | I feel very reluctant to say anything about what Mr. O'Connor said in his lament for the 19th century novel. One hears these magnificent cries over grave mounds, and one throws one's ash on the thing and melts away with the rest of the crowd and leaves it at that. | Anthony West |
| 47:25 | But even so, I think Mr. O'Connor's Dead Man is, while rusted, he shows signs of life all the time to me. I think a few years back, we had Guard of Honor, which is a middlebrow novel-- it's not a work of enormous sensitivity, and it's not a work of very fresh ideas. | Anthony West |
| 47:51 | But it is a picture of that air base down in Florida, and particularly MacDill Field, and the set of circumstances, it's rich in characters, and incident follows incident. It's extraordinarily convincing, and has color and movement. And I must say, it seems to be the 19th century novel at the old stand working just about as well as it can work. | Anthony West |
| 48:19 | If the man had also been a great genius, and he'd had a great view of society, if he could have just given it a little more, we would have had something very exciting indeed. | Anthony West |
| 48:30 | And I think we have today a 19th century novelist who is full of vigor and life, who has a view of a particular social question, which is just as moving. He has strong moral feelings about it, he's writing just like Dickens about it. That is, the author of the Invisible Man. | Anthony West |
| 48:52 | I don't think when you read that, when you read the extraordinarily vivid actual descriptions of the man eating the hot yams by the street stand, the riot in Harlem, and so on, this is the Dickensian technique, and it is alive and it's working. And I don't see any reason why it shouldn't go on working. | Anthony West |
| 49:20 | I feel as sure as anything that, as long as we have people with moral indignation, and with large-- I might say rather loosely buttoned imaginations-- we'll go on getting those great, expansive, joyful, and moving vehicles. | Anthony West |
| 49:42 | The thing that we have is a society which has a great many facets. It is not the sort of unitary society which can produce a myth. It's unthinkable that we should now have a myth that should be acceptable to every single element in our community. | Anthony West |
| 50:04 | But it is a community which is conscious all the time moral issues. We open our newspapers and moral issues bark at us. And when we live our lives, we are rubbing our noses against them all the time. That is the life of the 19th century novel, and it is there. | Anthony West |
| 50:26 | I would say that the obscurantist novel, the novel of private impression, the novel which demands that you learn a new language, like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, seems to me to have less and less possibility. Joyce was-- it's almost impossible to understand Ulysses unless you were at school with Joyce in Dublin. | Anthony West |
| 50:49 | I have talked over various passages with a man who was at school with him in Dublin, and page after page, it was as if one was looking through an old fashioned camera with the ground glass panel at the back. And you turned the screw, and the thing came up in focus. | Anthony West |
| 51:09 | It seems to me to make an impossible demand on the reader, and an impossible demand really on the critical apparatus. Because if the number of people who are preparing keys for Ulysses, and so on, is as great as ever, and we're still far from attaining anything like complete understanding of it. You really have to become Joyce's perceptive mechanism to understand it at all. | Anthony West |
| 51:36 | People are resolutely as ever writing their private impression novels, but I think the phase of leisure, intellectual curiosity, which briefly existed in the '20s, has passed. There will be times again when we have periods of intellectual excitement, combined with the sort of material ease which will produce that sort of thing. It's inevitable-- it should be so. There have always been such episodes in the past, and there will be again. But I don't think it's any immediate trend in the novel is like to spring out of that. | Anthony West |
| 52:21 | I was rather impressed by what Mr. O'Connor said about Proust's annihilation of the external world-- his belief that his demand that you submit entirely to his impression. I think that's a little unjust to Proust. This, to base all this on the idea of the love which is reflected in some of the main personal relationships. | Anthony West |
| 52:51 | As a matter of fact, the images of a debt, which exist in the minds of her immediate admirers, are contrasted with images which are in the eye of an external being. The objective world does exist. | Anthony West |
| 53:11 | I only recall at this moment one incident where it's perfectly plain that that does happen-- a scene on the Champs Elysees, when the chestnut trees are in bloom. And it is towards noon, and all the smart Parisians are in their barouches and the carriages, and the men riding by. The two oldest gentlemen, passing under the chestnuts in their gray top hats-- a debt crisis carriage comes by. | Anthony West |
| 53:42 | And one old gentleman strokes his mustache and nudges the other and said, that's a debt crisis. I had her the night McMahon's government fell. It seems to me quite clear that a debt is visible to other eyes, and those are Swann's obsessions of what these old gentlemen are looking at her from somewhere quite outside that thing. | Anthony West |
| 54:07 | It seems to me that the great thing in Proust, which gives the book its life and vitality, is that it's not a monatic view of life, but I'd say it's a work in which there's a constant flow to and from the illusions of the characters and a report of the characters as they actually exist. It's a much richer thing, I think, than Mr. O'Connor allows it to be. | Anthony West |
| 54:48 | I don't think that there's any possibility of summing up these two extremely diffused-- these extremely opposed and unrelated views. | Anthony West |
| 55:07 | I'm sorry, I do this extremely badly. But it does seem to me that while you have such a wide view of what the novel is, what its prospects are, you come down ultimately to the fact that it is a remarkable form. It's like the mind of the middle class-- it has no particular shape, no particular form. It's open to new ideas, it's closed to any rules. | Anthony West |
| 55:33 | The novel is something infinitely flexible. It has no limitations of subject. All of life can be crammed into it. It allows people to preach, it allows people to report objectively, it allows people to give photographic pictures, allows people to give abstract interpretations. In all, it is a thing which may take any pattern as the society changes. | Anthony West |
| 56:02 | At the moment, it is depressed and unoptimistic, because the prevailing view of life, and the class which produces it, is unoptimistic and timid. I think we may be in for one of those periods, like the Baroque period in painting, when everybody is working very hard producing contorted brown pictures, which are not much fun. Painting is asleep for a time. | Anthony West |
| 56:28 | That period, it can come alive any minute. | Anthony West |
| 22:43 | I suggest that before going ahead with the commentary on these talks and discussion of them, everyone feel he has the right for about 40 seconds to stand up and stretch, it seems to me. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:06 | I think we'd better get on with the business of the evening. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:35 | The commentator on these speeches is himself a novelist and a critic, and needs no further introduction-- Mr. Anthony West. | Carvel Collins |
| 57:09 | Thank you, Mr. West. The program, I think, for the rest of the evening should be that first of all, we give the speakers a chance to speak to Mr. West's points. And then, people here on the panel discuss everyone-- discuss anything he wants to. And then we will have questions from the audience if there is time. | Carvel Collins |
| 57:31 | Should this evening-- the panel take up most of the time and there not be an opportunity for many questions from the audience, I think you might save them up. The whole program has a certain unity, at least of subject, and on Wednesday evening, there will perhaps be more time for questions from the audience. And some of your questions that you might want to raise this evening may be answered a little later this evening or tomorrow. | Carvel Collins |
| 58:02 | I'd like first of all to ask Mr. Hyman to use-- just let's all stay right here at the table-- to use that microphone, which I assume is alive, and speak to Mr. West's points. | Carvel Collins |
| 1:00:25 | All right, Mr. O'Connor? | Carvel Collins |
| 1:00:28 | Mr. O'Connor, would you move the-- | Carvel Collins |
| 22:13 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 24:47 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 55:00 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 56:39 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 1:01:04 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 58:27 | I don't have much to say to Mr. West's points, in that I think he summarized and commented on what I had to say fairly, with perhaps one small reservation-- that his feeling that I had somehow underrated E. M. Forster by saying that his work dealt with the vocabulary of bad taste rather than the vocabulary of sin, in writers like Graham Greene, I think is unwarranted. | Stanley Hyman |
| 59:00 | I was suggesting, and would argue, I think, that these are both major traditions in the serious and worthwhile novel. And if Graham Greene, and those like him, sees things in terms of sin, and Forster does not, I surely wouldn't submit that as a weakness in Forster. I would also note in that account that when I said that Foster's picture of the human heart was no darker than a well-kept front parlor, that of course, a well-kept front parlor is very dark. | Stanley Hyman |
| 59:50 | Other than that, I suppose the big issue is Kafka, which I think is too much to bring up as a discussion now. And all you can fairly say is that Mr. West apparently doesn't share my feelings for Kafka. I refuse to give them up for that reason, and will, left with what I imagine all of you are exercised with, too, which is simply a difference in taste and opinion. And that's all. | Stanley Hyman |
| 0:00 - 22:13 | Frank O'Connor, "The Modern Novel" | Program |
| 22:43 - 56:39 | Response to Hyman and O'Connor | Program |
| 57:00 - 1:03:35 | August 3 Panel Discusson | Program |
| 1:00 - 0:00 | All you've got to do is look at a Dutch interior to realize what the 19th century novel was going to be when it came. First of all, the old fanciful conception, the old genealogical conception, had been wiped out. And in its place, you got something which we can vaguely call realism. And everybody today tells me you can't define realism. | Frank O'Connor |
| 0:27 | And I don't mind whether you can define realism or not, it's there in Dutch painting. And it's there in the 19th century novel. And in the Dutch paintings, you get the poetry of everyday life expressed for the first time in the history of the human race. | Frank O'Connor |
| 0:48 | And when you come to the 19th century novel, that is really what you get. It was only today that a friend of mine referred me to an essay which I've never read, and which I'm quoting to you on trust, an essay by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade, in which he defines what the 19th century novel is going to be. And in this essay, he says, the novel-- as soon as the novelists have learned to deal with the new reading public-- will deal with the differences between professions. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:26 | It will deal with the differences between races. It will educate the new middle class about what ordinary life is like. And the amazing thing is that the Marquis de Sade never listened to his own advice. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:42 | There's a complete change in the values established by the 19th century novel. Instead of honor, the feudal conception, you get the conception of honesty. Trollope can write a masterpiece about an old clergyman who can't explain what he's done with a check for 25 pounds-- $75. And a whole novel is built upon this theme. | Frank O'Connor |
| 2:13 | And for the first time, again, you feel that certain subjects are being dealt with as they should be dealt with. When I read Tolstoy's description of Sebastopol, I feel that war, for the first time in the history of the human race, is being dealt with, with the gravity that it demands. | Frank O'Connor |
| 2:36 | And this thing was not confined to the novelists. It was part of the whole middle class conception of life. Because again, I'm repeating myself, and I'm quite prepared to go on repeating myself-- at the other side of the lines from Tolstoy, there was a young English woman called Florence Nightingale. And Florence Nightingale was trying to prove to the English government that women could make nurses. | Frank O'Connor |
| 3:06 | And she describes in her journals how these English boys who were dying of exposure and starvation outside Scutari, were being brought down to her. And she was haunted by the face of these English boys. And in her journals, she uses phrases like this-- "Oh, my poor men, I have been a bad mother to you. To go away and leave you in your Crimean graves. 76% in eight regiments in six months." | Frank O'Connor |
| 3:48 | And there you have the whole middle class conception of life which is also expressed in Sebastopol. For the first time, you've got that Shakespearean cry of emotion-- "My poor men, I have been a bad mother to you." But it's also expressed in percentages. | Frank O'Connor |
| 4:09 | For the first time, you get statistical diagnosis. And it's been practiced by a woman. | Frank O'Connor |
| 4:20 | And then, we move to the modern novel, and we find the whole picture is entirely different. I moved in this way simply because I lived in a provincial town, and nobody had told me that there was any gap. Nobody had told me that a classical novel had ended in 1880, and had begun again in 1910, with people like Forster, and Gide and Proust, and Joyce, and Lawrence. But it had, and it was an entirely different thing. | Frank O'Connor |
| 4:55 | To begin with, in Joyce's work, when I read it-- and I admired it extravagantly, because it was dealing with the sort of life I knew-- you got a type of realism which I didn't understand. And I didn't understand it until I turned to the work of Flaubert. And I realized that it wasn't realism-- it was naturalism. | Frank O'Connor |
| 5:19 | It was the man standing outside the situation he was describing, saying, "this has got nothing at all to do with me." In the realistic novel, the writer said, I'm just a man like these men. And I feel with them. And I don't mind weeping over them, and I don't mind laughing at them. | Frank O'Connor |
| 5:37 | But Flaubert said, you can't get involved in these things. And Joyce takes it up. And in stories like the stories in Dubliners, you get something which was entirely new to me-- you get naturalism, as opposed to realism. And after a time, it began to weary me enormously. | Frank O'Connor |
| 6:01 | As well as that, you get another thing in Dubliners-- which goes on through Portrait, and goes on through all Joyce's work, and goes on through the whole of modern literature, and that is the use of metaphor. You realize when you read a story like "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," or "The Dead," that the characters that Joyce is describing are not free. They are characters who are representing something else, and every action they perform, and every word they say is related to something else, which is a symbol, which is a metaphor. | Frank O'Connor |
| 6:47 | For instance, in "The Dead," not one single sentence is uttered which is not related to Joyce's idea of death. And that, again, was new to me. You get the same thing in the Portrait, except that it grows in complexity all the way through. And finally, you get it in Ulysses. | Frank O'Connor |
| 7:12 | In Ulysses, you get a character, Mr. Bloom, who is also the hero of The Odyssey. His wife at one time is Calypso, at another time, she's Penelope. | Frank O'Connor |
| 7:29 | And the unfortunate man whose funeral he's attending, a gentleman called Dignam, happens to be somebody called El Pinar in The Odyssey. And as El Pinar is a Semitic word which means drunk. Mr. Dignam has to be too fond of drink. That's what really kills him, eventually. | Frank O'Connor |
| 7:52 | There, you get something, again, entirely new in fiction. You get the character controlled from the word, "go." Mr. Bloom just is not allowed to say or do anything which is not relevant to the theme. | Frank O'Connor |
| 8:10 | I have to apologize for introducing all the scurrilous details, but today I found myself having to explain to my class why it is that Mr. Bloom, after breakfast, having occasion to go apart, shall we say, has the choice between going upstairs and going out to the yard. And the subject of the chapter is metempsychosis-- Mr. Bloom, in fact, is Ulysses, and he's following out the program of Ulysses in The Odyssey. | Frank O'Connor |
| 9:00 | Now, his freedom of action is considerably restricted, because Joyce is using the ordinary processes of life-- the growth of grass, crops, and so on, cattle feeding on them, the human beings finally feeding on the cattle, and the byproducts being returned to the Earth, and coming up again as grass-- he's using this as an analogy to illustrate the process of metempsychosis. Consequently, Mr. Bloom cannot go upstairs. | Frank O'Connor |
| 9:42 | The one thing a metaphor cannot do is let its author down. And the Almighty, at least, gave us two choices, but Joyce only gives us one. And all I can say is that I have no respect at all for a character who allows himself to be dictated to in this way, particularly in such intimate matters by an author. | Frank O'Connor |
| 10:14 | And of course, finally, in Finnegans Wake, you reach the position where what is in the unconscious in Ulysses just comes on top-- everything is a metaphor. Humanity, itself, is a metaphor. Every movement we make is a metaphor. It's all dictated, it's all determined-- we've got nothing at all to say to it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 10:38 | Then, I turn to Proust who is one of my earliest heroes, and I think will be until the day I die, and I notice again peculiar things which I don't notice in the classical novel. For instance, in Du coté de chez Swann you get a character called Swann who is in love with a woman called Odette. And that love story represents the pattern of all the love episodes through Proust. Every single love episode is based on that. | Frank O'Connor |
| 11:14 | And it describes the pattern is the pattern of a very rich, and a very cultured man, who falls in love with a woman definitely of the lower classes, who is completely uneducated, and who is entirely venal. And the theme that Proust is hammering home in every single one of these love stories is that, in effect, when we fall in love with a woman, we create the woman. | Frank O'Connor |
| 11:47 | There is no woman there. We create her. We fall out of love with her, she ceases to exist. | Frank O'Connor |
| 11:56 | And it's only after I had read Proust very carefully that I began to discover that this affected everything that Proust wrote. That in fact, the whole theory of Proust's work depends upon this one idea that in love, there is no reciprocity. Once you fall in love, you fall in love with an idea in your own mind, not with something in the external world. | Frank O'Connor |
| 12:23 | Accordingly, you get Proust laying down the law about it-- you get him saying that nothing but inaccurate observation will permit you to say that there is any truth in an object. All truth is in the mind. | Frank O'Connor |
| 12:43 | Now, I can make no distinction between what Joyce is saying and what Proust is saying. What they are saying is that the old objective world of the classical novel doesn't exist. There is nothing outside me as Coquelin and Yeats's last great play says, "I make the truth." | Frank O'Connor |
| 13:05 | And what I really want to know is, how does that differ from the statements of people like Mussolini and Hitler? Don't they say, "I make the truth?" What else is this, except literary fascism? | Frank O'Connor |
| 13:22 | And there, you come back to the intellectual background of the modern novel. You come back to the fact that, behind all this work, there is an intellectual background, which is entirely subjective. | Frank O'Connor |
| 13:36 | You come back to a psychological background-- of Freud and Jung-- which simply says, a certain pattern has been created for our lives, and we follow that pattern out. We don't control it-- it goes on in spite of us. | Frank O'Connor |
| 13:54 | What Proust is really saying is what Bergson says-- there, you get a subjective philosophy, which, in fact, refuses to distinguish between the subject and the object. Refuses to distinguish between me and the external world. | Frank O'Connor |
| 14:13 | Its part is one of these anti-rational philosophies which have been springing up all the time during the past 50 years. And as well as that, particularly in Joyce, particularly in Ulysses, and in Finnegans Wake, you get this subjective conception of history which begins with Flinders Petrie, and goes on through Spengler, and ends up in our own time with Toynbee, which says, that history is merely a pattern and we've got to fall into the pattern. We can't affect the pattern. There it is, dictated for us. And that is precisely what Joyce is saying, and precisely what the other writers are saying. | Frank O'Connor |
| 15:01 | Now, all that comes from, very curiously, the only critic I know who has traced this-- is a modern French novelist, whom I admire enormously, Marcel Ayme. And Marcel Ayme has written a brilliant book called, Le Confort Intellectual-- just enjoying yourself intellectually, if you like, in which he attacks the whole conception of modern literature, and maintains that modern literature has been going wrong since Baudelaire. And makes an awfully good case for it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 15:46 | The only way in which Ayme goes wrong is that he doesn't realize that Baudelaire is picking up something else which goes back to the romantic revival-- that is going back to Byronism, to sadism, to precisely what the Marquis de Sade was doing. That this thing ran underground right through the 19th century. That it came up in two people-- Baudelaire in poetry, and Flaubert in prose. | Frank O'Connor |
| 16:19 | In Flaubert, you get the naturalistic novel-- the novel which intends to be realistic, but all the time at its side, you get these wildly romantic writing. Things like the Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salammbo, in which all the perversions dealt with by Sade at last come to light. | Frank O'Connor |
| 16:48 | These continue along until 1880, the death of the classical novel. Mario Praz has dealt with this very brilliantly and very wickedly in his book, Romantic Agony. The interesting thing is that I've been saying for a great many years, since the classical novel died in 1880, and Mario Praz says, the extraordinary thing is, the full revival, a full romantic revival only comes with the year 1880. When the classical novel dies, the romantic revival books start coming out, you get Wilde, and all the rest of it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 17:32 | And in fact, what has happened, as far as I can see it, is that this literature of the romantic revival, approved by Freud, approved by Spengler, approved by Bergson, has become modern literature. That is the modern novel-- it is romantic revival literature with all the characteristics of the romantic revival about it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 18:01 | The unnatural triangle that you find in Swan, Odette and INAUDIBLE , and in Bloom and Blazes Boylan, and Marion Bloom, that you find all over the work of Lawrence, that you find in the work of Mr. Faulkner, Popeye's relationship with Temple Drake, that you find in Hemmingway's, The Sun Also Rises-- it is the old romantic sadistic conception. | Frank O'Connor |
| 18:36 | Now, I have very little time left, and all I want to say is, as I told you before, I found myself living through two periods of literary taste, and I have a feeling that I'm going to live to see the beginning of a third. Already all over Europe, I think there is a change, that is a difference in attitude, and it's very easy to see where that difference in attitude comes from. | Frank O'Connor |
| 19:09 | When you read Marcel Ayme's book on Le Confort Intellectual, you see that the thing that really impressed him was the horrors of the liberation-- the tens of thousands of Frenchmen who were massacred all over the place on no ground whatever, for no reason whatever. You get this fantasy of malice expressing itself. | Frank O'Connor |
| 19:34 | And as well as that, on the other hand, as he says, when the Allied troops burst into the concentration camps, what they found before them was a poem by Baudelaire. And it's Buchenwald, and Belsen, and the horrors of the liberation through Europe-- which I believe have wakened up the younger writers, have made them realize that you can't any longer live in a subject of world. That somehow or other, you've got to face the fact that objective reality exists, and you've got to come to terms with it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 20:11 | I believe there are signs of that in the work of Marcel Ayme, who was a much finer novelist than he's given credit for being. In the work of my friend, C. P. Snow. In the work of Joyce Kerry in England. And in particular, in the work of some followers of C. P. Snow, who believes as he does, that this period is over and done with, that you can never go back to what we call the modern novel. | Frank O'Connor |
| 20:40 | And I don't know what the answers are to the questions I've been raising tonight. All through history, you get this conflict between the inner man and the outer man, between the thing you feel to be true and the truth which is outside you. | Frank O'Connor |
| 21:06 | And the only light I've got on the subject is in that passage in the Gospels, which I keep on quoting whenever I'm asked about it, the passage in which Christ is asked by the doctor of the laws, which is the most important of the commandments. And Christ knew that if he said the first commandment, he was admitting that reality was subjective. If he said, the second commandment, he was saying that reality was objective. | Frank O'Connor |
| 21:38 | He simply quotes the first two commandments and says, there is no commandment more important than these. I've always felt that what he meant by that was reality is neither within us nor without us-- it's both within us and without us. And it's inapprehensible, except in moments when the two strike together, when they strike a spark from one another, and there is no truth more important than that. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:00:27 | Well, I'm in the-- | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:00:30 | I'm in the unfortunate position that I can't quarrel with anybody, either. I'd love to do it. The nearest thing I can get to a quarrel is with Mr. West on the subject of Kafka. I entirely agree that this thing needs discussion, whether we have time to discuss it or not is another matter. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:00:55 | The point is The Trial, Kafka's Trial has nothing at all to do with life under the Austro-Hungarian empire. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:01:08 | Kafka's two great novels, The Castle and The Trial are the modern equivalent of the Pilgrim's Progress-- they're allegories. And they're allegories written in Freudian terms. I don't particularly like Freud, and I don't particularly admire this as a technique, but there it is, on they're two wonderful books. And we ought to realize that they are dealing with man's destiny. And just man in face of eternity. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:01:40 | And beyond that, I haven't much to quarrel with. I think I gathered a reference to Mr. James Gould Cozzens novel, after which I picked up the words joyful, expansive, moving. Was I dreaming? | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:01:59 | Now, as well as that, Mr. West thinks I've exaggerated the subjective element in Proust's work. Actually, I minimized it all along the line of Proust's theory that the reality is in the subject, not in the object, is derived from the Bergsonian philosophy. And you get it all over the book. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:02:32 | And he devotes a whole novel, Le Temps Retrouve, to proving that a objective reality doesn't exist. The only reality which is apprehensive is whatever happens to remain in the unconscious mind after an event has occurred, which is, in itself, inapprehensible and indescribable. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:03:01 | I don't know that there's very much one can say about this question. But the general attack on Bergson is on that level, that he makes no distinction between the subject and the object. And it's not very easy to say with Proust whether he really says, there is an objective reality or not. You can quote occasional passages from Proust which seemed to suggest that he admitted the existence of a reality, though he maintained you could make no statement of value about it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:03:34 | On the other hand, you can quote innumerable passages from Proust which go to show that there is no reality in the object, whatever. | Frank O'Connor |
| 23:32 | You are listening to the Harvard Summer School conference on the contemporary novel, coming to you from Sanders Theater at Harvard, over WGBH Symphony Hall in Boston. We have heard the first two formal speeches of the evening-- the only actual formal speaking done by Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer and former director of the Abbey Theater in London-- in Dublin, that is-- and Stanley E. Hyman, who was our first speaker, critic and Professor of English literature at Bennington College. | WGBH Radio Announcement |