Second Evening Talks and Panel Discussion, August 4, 1953, Sanders Theater (Part One)
After an afternoon session of talks and discussion, the conference participants gather together on the evening of August 4th in Sanders Theater for the second evening of public talks. This recording includes Opening Remarks by Carvel Collins and the first part of George Simenon’s talk “The Era of the Novel?”. Simenon’s talk and Ralph Ellison’s “Certain Neglected Aspects of the American Novel” continue in Part Two.
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| 8:59 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 10:55 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 11:24 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 11:40 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 16:58 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 21:06 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 0:05 | We had expected that one of the speakers last night would be Miss Katherine Anne Porter. She, however, has been ill. We have been expecting day-by-day, as have she and her physician, that she would be well enough to come right up until this afternoon when an emissary from the conference called at her request and prepared to help her get started from New York-- from Washington here. But she-- though she was willing to come and have the show go on, in true tradition of the theater, our agent there thought that was too much of a hardship for her, that she still with a fever should not be subjected to the trip. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:56 | The program tomorrow night will continue as announced last night. One of the speakers will be Miss Hilda Livingston, who represents the New American Library which publishes successfully large numbers of paperback books. The other speaker will be Mr. William Sloan, editorial vice-president of Funk & Wagnalls, who has had great experience in the publication of I don't know what column, but non-paperback books. | Carvel Collins |
| 1:29 | This will be followed by, I trust, a rousing panel discussion by all the members of the panel, this being a chance for authors to argue over some of the matters that the publishers will bring up. One of the themes I know in advance from talking to the speakers will be the problem of just what does money have to do with what the contemporary novel is? And this, of course, has always been a problem and is one now, and has many ramifications at the moment. | Carvel Collins |
| 1:59 | And the editorial policy, whether or not it's free-- as free to choose and follow various art forms as it used to be-- will be the subject at that point. Tonight, the two talks are, again, by authors-- novelists-- as last evening, and the subjects we will deal with later. | Carvel Collins |
| 2:24 | I want to take the time of the conference this evening for about five or six minutes to summarize what went on last evening, because the panel discussion after the two speeches and after the commentary by Professor Frohock on the two speeches will probably include some of the matters brought up last night and not fully dealt with. Mr. Hyman, speaking last evening on some trends in the novel, pointed out three unattractive trends. | Carvel Collins |
| 2:54 | First, what he calls self-parody, finding certain writers-- Hemingway, Faulkner, and others-- writing now in their what he presented as their later days writing rehashes of earlier works and doing an inferior job. The second unattractive trend he noticed was what he called the disguises of love, taking the title from a novel by Robie Macaulay, in which he dealt with the problem of heterosexual-- homosexual love being presented as heterosexual love. The third trend which he found unattractive was what he called pseudo fictions, the kind of thing the recent novel-- essentially, The Life of Scott Fitzgerald and Mr. Hershey's The Wall and such works of that sort. | Carvel Collins |
| 3:38 | Among the hopeful trends Mr. Hyman noted was a tendency for fiction to begin to merge naturalism with myth and ritual, and the second thing that he felt was an attractive trend and cause for hope was more concentration on the experience of the individual as actor, not just as spectator, and as a real participant in things. And third-- among the third attractive trend that he sees is more interest in form-- more effective interest in form-- and coupled with this, what he called "moral imagination." | Carvel Collins |
| 4:20 | In commenting on Mr. Hyman's speech, Mr. West had a great many things to say, and I will only touch on these things. And this is my impression of his response to Mr. Hyman's paper. When it came to the matter of the unattractive trend number one-- self-parody-- Mr. West's point was that this is not new, that this has happened with many novelists, and he cited an example of Conrad writing in The Rover work inferior to his earlier work, and in one sense, one might say a parody of it. | Carvel Collins |
| 4:52 | In dealing with the second unattractive trend Mr. Hyman noted, the so-called disguises of love, Mr. Hyman suggested that it might not-- Mr. West, I'm sorry-- suggests that it might not be a total loss to have novels dealing with homosexuality, especially if converted in the fiction to seem to be heterosexual love, because there may be a different feeling now from that in the 19th century on the individual part. Not about sex and sexual perversion, but the feeling of entrapment in general, and that the homosexual may feel this lack of freedom and this box he is in, and that this may be a device for appealing to a larger audience using this aberration as a symbol of a larger thing that is more widespread in the population and of more interest to readers in general. | Carvel Collins |
| 5:43 | As for pseudo fictions-- real events dressed up, real episodes, real series of events dressed up as novels-- Mr. West's point again, I think, was that we have had these for some time and perhaps they will always be with us. He castigated Mr. Hyman somewhat for the statement about myth and ritual, when Mr. Hyman turned to his hopeful trends. I take it-- and this is a great risk of putting words in a speaker's mouth in these rather abrupt summaries-- but Mr. West's point seemed to be that it was very hard to develop a myth in a society as confused as ours without a central core out of which myths grew in the past. And he didn't see this-- I believe he did not see this as such a hopeful trend. | Carvel Collins |
| 6:34 | Mr. O'Connor's speech in general suggested that much that we think of as contemporary in contemporary fiction is not pleasant to Mr. O'Connor. He felt, first of all, that much of modern fiction is too subjective. And he said that from the time of Proust to the present, things have been too subjective in fiction too often, and that Proust, following Bergson's theories, had not examined reality sufficiently. And that, in connection with this subjectivity, there was too much Freud and Jung in modern writers, making them often rather mechanically following systems that they didn't understand and which may have been Mr. O'Connor's opinion false in the first place. | Carvel Collins |
| 7:26 | He went on to say that there's too much in modern fiction of elaborate metaphors, so that a character, such as Bloom and Joyce's Ulysses, is not free to act as a human being would, but he has no choices. He must follow out his metaphorical function as one of simultaneously a character in early 20th century Dublin, and in Homer's Odyssey. Mr. O'Connor felt that it is time to return to reality in fiction, and he cited the 19th century as a point when this had reached its peak in the novel. | Carvel Collins |
| 8:04 | Mr. Weston, commenting on this speech, said that first, among other things, that he didn't feel that Proust was too subjective. That Proust did deal with reality, and dealt with it effectively. Mr. West doesn't seem to disagree with Mr. O'Connor about the excessive use of metaphor in fiction. Mr. O'Connor had objected to Kafka, and I take it Mr. West shares in this objection, but I don't think he wanted to cut out these elaborate metaphors-- the biggest example being Joyce, for example-- as much as Mr. O'Connor did. | Carvel Collins |
| 8:40 | And I don't think that Mr. West felt last evening that the novel could return very readily to the 19th century. That perhaps it had to go on, for better or for worse. The panel in general last evening discussed the questions of what is reality, and this question remains unsettled. | Carvel Collins |
| 9:02 | Though-- and there was some suggestion that the new techniques were here. We're kind of stuck with it. Why not make out the best one can and try to always be doing better, but not necessarily be moving backward? Now, to turn to this evening-- which I'm very glad to do-- our first speaker will-- I'm glad to stop summary and let the panel, the members of the conference, do what they have been doing and should be doing-- speaking for themselves. | Carvel Collins |
| 9:37 | Our first speaker is, in the opinion of many critics, the outstanding novelist writing in French today, and an outstanding novelist of the contemporary world. His works are among the leading literary models for a large number of the most promising young writers. He meets Mr. O'Connor's requirement-- which I forgot to mention a moment ago-- that the novel should reach a large popular audience. | Carvel Collins |
| 10:07 | Mr. Simenon is able to do this, his works being translated into a score of languages and being translated also into scores of movies, and reaching a large public audience in all sorts of ways. But simultaneously, his novels have attracted the attention of the most sophisticated readers and critics who regard him as an extraordinarily important figure in contemporary fiction. | Carvel Collins |
| 10:35 | The title of Mr. Simenon's speech is The Era of the Novel?, with a question mark. This is his first formal speech in the United States-- though he has spoken in small groups before-- and it is our great privilege to welcome him here this evening. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:00 - 8:40 | August 4 Panel Discussion | Program |
| 9:00 - 52:20 | "The Era of the Novel?", George Simenon | Program |
| 11:07 | Ladies and gentlemen, before starting to read my paper, I think I am better to apologize. For about an half hour, you will suffer because of my catastrophic accent. | George Simenon |
| 11:24 | But if it may help, I will suffer even more. So I will do my best, as well all I can do, and don't shoot the panelists. So now INAUDIBLE. | George Simenon |
| 11:47 | Ladies and gentlemen-- again-- I say I'm not a scholar, but only an artisan. I confess that I was surprised and equally flattered to be honored by your invitation to participate in this seminar. Should I have declined this honor? I hesitated to accept it, realizing how light is my intellectual baggage. Realizing, also, that I am incapable of the discipline of thought, of the logic, and of the clarity to which you are accustomed. | George Simenon |
| 12:28 | As for my references-- if any-- I knew they well might be sketchy or approximate. Only in a groping fashion can I approach a problem, which is too close to my heart for me not to bring to my expose more passion than clearness of thought, and I cannot ever hope to shine by my originality. | George Simenon |
| 12:58 | The general theme I was kindly asked to develop was "The future of the novel." I would prefer to use an expression that I used some ten years ago, and that you may deem too optimistic-- the error of the novel. There would remain to show that our era deserves such a label, which for me would be a difficult, if not impossible task, since my contention is more an act of faith than a rational conclusion. Yet I shall try to give you, slapdash, the reasons for my faith in a form of literature which I hold dear. | George Simenon |
| 13:45 | The first reason will no doubt seem rather a fallacious thought. To me, it is the most striking. Each era has had its favorite medium of expression, be it the epic poem or the tragedy, the medieval romance or the Shakespearean drama, the philosophical tale, the romantic theater, the study of morals, the novel of introspection, and God knows what else. Isn't it a sort of touchstone, to see at a given moment of history, all those who have, or think they have something to say, use the same medium of expression? | George Simenon |
| 14:34 | As an indication, I would go so far as to put more stock in those who think they have something to say-- in the amateurs and the wits who, being incapable of creativeness, are only following a powerful trend. Young knights and lovely ladies of the court in the 16th century vied with each other in spouting madrigals and epigrams, and later, they were to write tragedies for trying Caligula or King Solomon. | George Simenon |
| 15:07 | Still later was the advent of Voltaire, Didot, and the encyclopedists that tried their hand at the philosophical tale. Once upon a time, it was common dictum that every young man had a five act play in verse hidden away in his desk. While after La Martin, Walt Whitman, and Baudelaire, everybody more or less delved in poetry, the world being divided into two inequal parts-- the poets on one side, and the so-called bourgeois, or the Philistines, on the other. | George Simenon |
| 15:47 | Isn't everybody today not writing or dreaming of writing a novel? This medium, long considered inferior-- treated as a poor relation-- had assert itself so forcefully, has acquired such prestige that it has drawn to its fall poets, essayists, and philosophers alike, listing under the same heading such names as those of Joyce and Proust, of Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Gide of Gertrude Stein, of Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley, of professors and self-made men, of INAUDIBLE | George Simenon |
| 16:33 | And I take it as a sign of the times that a school like Sade should have chosen the artifice of the novel as a means to set forth his philosophical theory. As a sign of the times, too, that the taxi driver or the college girl should confide, with a sigh, what a novel my life would make if I should only write it. | George Simenon |
| 17:01 | The very internationality of the novel is, in my opinion, one of its main assets. Man today is not interested only in his gods, his heroes, and in the men around him, but in all mankind, from whom he no longer feels utterly remote. This is so true that in most countries of the world, as many, if not more, translations are read than the works in the original language. What literary form stands up better under translation than the novel? | George Simenon |
| 17:44 | After some firsthand theories, it remains well-nigh impossible to translate Shakespeare's adequately, yet nobody feels the need to learn Russian in order to understand Gogol or Dostoevsky, yet Balzac and Stendhal are appreciated the world over. Yet Faulkner has found a large audience in Europe before gaining recognition in America. | George Simenon |
| 18:12 | I find another indication of the actuality of the novel-- of it's predominance, which is not, I hope be fleeting-- which will not, I hope be fleeting, sorry-- and this sign is even less conclusive than the others. During the last decades, men have invented new mechanical devices, which were such tempting, practical, and spectacular media of expression, that each time a new one cropped up, the death of reading-- the death of the novel-- was widely heralded. | George Simenon |
| 18:53 | Yet whether the cinema, radio, or television, it is precisely from the novel that those media draw the greater power of their raw material. And it is not done to make things easy or to save time, because the raw material already exists. The fact is that, with a few exceptions, the original scripts like plausible, lifelike characters-- characters with compelling personalities. And it is finally in the works of the novelist that such characters have to be solved. | George Simenon |
| 19:37 | One last thing last sign impressed me while the theater has so long enjoyed an autonomous existence, and, at certain times, an unchallenged supremacy, there are now on Broadway, on the London or Paris stages, countless offerings which are adaptations of novels. From Tobacco Road, to Gigi, from Mr. Roberts to the works of Molière, of Cocteau, and of Isherwood. | George Simenon |
| 20:08 | Not only does the author of a successful novel immediately receive bids for the dramatic heights, but stage adaptations are now covered in the standard printed contact forms of the publishing houses. Commercialization? Perhaps. But this commercialization of the novel, running the gamut of magazines serialization, the motion pictures, radio, television, and the theater, is no less a sign of the times than it's, to me, the fantastic upsurge of the paperbacks. | George Simenon |
| 20:52 | No longer is the novel as it once was-- food for the scholars, the snobs or the id-el-- idle-- I don't know. Id-el or idle, choose it. | George Simenon |
| 21:09 | One form one another, it has broken into everyday living. Talking so much about the past and the present, I must seem to be playing hooky from the theme given to me to develop, which was the novel of tomorrow. But in order to foresee what the novel will become, it is not indispensable that to know, first of all, what it will not be. To know what things, for one reason or another, are not, or will no longer be, a part of its essence. | George Simenon |
| 21:50 | Literary forms, like artistic forms in general-- whether Gothic architecture, or Gregorian singing, for example-- have all followed the same evolution. Fumbling at birth, borrowing from their predecessors, gradually adapting themselves to the needs of the moment, and at the height of their glory, achieving classical purity. At that point, rules such as the dramatic unities were established. | George Simenon |
| 22:26 | Tending to protect, to keep the perfection. To make it impervious to change, and against those rules, sooner or later, artists have revolted, thereby creating another chaos out of which would emerge another school of thought. Has the novel ever known such rigor of discipline? | George Simenon |
| 22:53 | As early as the Middle Ages, it is true, with the chivalric tales which give their name to the genre, each century or portion of century was marked by a certain number of works of a determinate facture. And no doubt is it to the Middle Ages that one must go back to discern some unity in the novel. For, as time went on, works most different in inspiration or form were tagged with the same love label. | George Simenon |
| 23:29 | Be it at Don Quixote or Pantagruel, Gulliver or Candide, (SPEAKING FRENCH), Robinson Crusoe or Robin Hood, be they from Fenimore Cooper, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Dostoevsky, or Melville. For a long time, under regimes afraid of freedom of thought and of expression, fiction was just a means to state political or philosophical ideas as safely as possible. | George Simenon |
| 24:01 | Walter Scott and his successors balled about the romantic novel, which was the starting point for Balzac's social fresco while Stendhal was already trying to disassemble man as he would have the mechanism of a clock. | George Simenon |
| 24:19 | I shall borrow from my friend Robert Desnos, French poet and novelist who died of exhaustion in Dachau at the very moment of its liberation by American troops, the diverse designations of the novel. He writes, "The psychological novel, the novel of introspection, the realistic, naturalistic, and social novels, the novel with a purpose, the originalistic, allegorical, and fantastic novels, the roman noir, the romantic novel, the penny dreadfuls, the serials, the humoristic and poetic novels, the novel of anticipation of an adventure, the novel of the sea, the detective and scientific novels, the biographical, satirical, philosophical, and sentimental novels, the novel of love, the sexy novel, the sagas, the Episcopalian novel, the novel of"-- and there's more. Let's not add what hodgepodge, what confusion. | George Simenon |
| 25:24 | How can one describe this misshapen monster, this limitless genre which no critic has ever clearly defined? How can one get his bearings among those arbitrary divisions which apply sometimes to styles, sometimes to subject matter, sometimes to the intellectual stand of the writer, sometimes to the weight of the novel or to the reading public. | George Simenon |
| 25:53 | Yet I am convinced that is it is out of this chaos that the genre will emerge, is already emerging, a very definite genre which will one day acquire its rules, will obtain a sort of purity, and remain as the mark of our time. Those peoples who, in the course of history, have found themself for a time at the head of civilization generally had to start by concerning themselves with the gods and each time furnished the hieratic period. | George Simenon |
| 26:41 | Then, when men became enhanced by their heroes came the epic, or classical, period, followed, when the individual became concerned with himself and his weaknesses, by the so-called realistic period. A few hours in a museum with its paintings and sculptures are enough to trace this evolution from the gods to man, oft repeat in the course of time. | George Simenon |
| 27:14 | Are we on the verge of a new cycle and, consequently, of hieratic era? Isn't man, on the contrary, ever more anxious to discover himself and to discover his fellow man? Where better than in the novel will he make this discovery? | George Simenon |
| 27:38 | It is Paul Valéry, the exact opposite of a novelist if ever there was one, who put the following words in the mouth of Mr. Teste. "If even I could know what makes a fool tick." And the same Valéry writes elsewhere, "The novelist gives life." | George Simenon |
| 27:59 | The Spanish essayist José Bergamín defines the genre in INAUDIBLE. The novel is the human revelation of the war. While Bergamín talks of the paradoxical and then crude reality with nothingness. And the French critic, Boulgadaen, writes: "The novel answers man's curiosity about other man, which can go from the most vulgar to the highest forms. Need for indiscretion, but also the need for knowledge." | George Simenon |
| 28:40 | I would like to be the passerby, the wish to get away from oneself, the wish to compare oneself with others, to penetrate a rhythm which is not ours if we cannot impose our own, the will to know, which can become a will of betterment. The question, what did he do there's another-- what would I have done in his stead? | George Simenon |
| 29:11 | Does it not seem as if man, in his uneasy concern, felt the need to reassure himself by a comparison with other men? Are they of the same mettle? Are they humiliated by the same weaknesses, by the same surrenders? And do they sometimes succumb to the same temptations? | George Simenon |
| 29:35 | Man, often unable to discover on his own the truth about his fellow man, will seek in the novel the answer to his doubts. The novel satisfies man's curiosity about other men. And that curiosity becomes all the more universal and relentless that the dogmas are more shaken or forgotten, that the guardrails are missing, that the end of a duel, as happens now, rid of social barriers, is left more to himself with all the opportunities for the best and for the worst. | George Simenon |
| 30:23 | Up to the last century, only a minority of people knew how to read. And for that minority, the literary works were written. In passing, we might note that this possibly explains the long-lasting pre-eminence of the theater, furnishing as it did flesh-and-bones illustrations of ideas and passions. | George Simenon |
| 30:52 | It is significant that the decline of the theater, which is sometimes attributed to the cinema, should have started much before, coinciding as it did with mass education. In the past, the theater was not a luxury but a necessity. Together with the art of eloquence, which happens to be also on the wane, it was the only means of addressing the masses. | George Simenon |
| 31:27 | Literature, which was geared to the taste of scholars and snobs, could afford all the subtleties, even all the preciosities, and it kept this somewhat exclusive aspect for some time after the enactment of compulsory education. It is so true that a misunderstanding arose then which is still not entirely cleared up. | George Simenon |
| 32:01 | Mostly in the second half of the last century, we witnessed, next to those works of which I have just spoken, the birth of a literature called popular, a literature of potboilers and penny dreadfuls established on a purely commercial basis. It has left its mark. Many are those who remain convinced that works which have nothing in common with literature, save to be printed and sold in volume form, are indispensable to the public at large and that the criterion for the serious novelist is to be accessible only to the chosen few. | George Simenon |
| 32:50 | Personally, I disagree with this contention. And the success in cheap editions of highly esteemed, unworthy works, even as the success sometimes needs to be bolstered by teasing jackets, appears to prove me right. Yet again, the novel must be other than a gymnastic of the mind, an erudite game, or the performance of a stylist. | George Simenon |
| 33:23 | If the novel is to satisfy the curiosity of man for his fellow man, its essential quality will be human resonance. And without going back too far in time, it is easy to establish that those novelists who have had the most consequence and who, sooner or later, have had the biggest audience were those who led a greater emphasis of mankind. | George Simenon |
| 33:55 | Critics who were the contemporaries of Balzac deplored what they called his execrable style and wrinkled their noses at Stendhal, just as have the bookish Englishmen at the works of Dickens, then of Stevenson. As for Dostoevsky, he was so careless as to change the names of his characters as he went along. And did not the purest band against Melville, as they did later against Dreiser, and as they do now against a few who are their most authentic successors? | George Simenon |
| 34:36 | It is Desnos again who speaks of "the invisible style peculiar to those works that are called eternal." And I am fond of thinking that he does not refer simply to the construction of sentence and the choice of words but to a more essential simplicity, to the self-effacement of the creator before his creation. | George Simenon |
| 35:08 | Someone has written about the last decades of the French novel, "Behind 99% of the novelist hides a bashful essayist or poet." This refers precisely to the era during which France, after producing the Balzac, the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant, and the Proust, has seen the prestige of our novelists diminish, not only abroad but in the country itself. | George Simenon |
| 35:42 | And who replace them in the favor of the elite or of the general public alike? A handful of American novelists whose names are Thomas Wolfe, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and a few others. Gertrude Stein, in a single sentence, has explained this phenomenon. "And then American realism became harder and sharper, and French realism became softer and more precious." | George Simenon |
| 36:19 | This would remain true if we were to replace the word "realism," too often used to denote a school of thought, by the word "novel." And it is precisely in the American novel of today that I perceive the basis for the novel of tomorrow, for what I would like to call the true novel. | George Simenon |
| 36:46 | Gide, who pondered these questions long, used the expression "true novel" also but gave those words the opposite meaning of the one I gave them here. For him, true novel means that novel which deals not with man but with ideas to bind somehow the disincarnate narrator, stripped of their identity and of their faces. | George Simenon |
| 37:24 | Of Edouard, the writer in The Counterfeiters, Gide wrote, "As soon as it becomes necessary to clothe the characters, to determine their social standing, their career, their income, as soon, especially as it becomes necessary to provide them with neighbors and relatives, to invent a family and friends for them, he's bored and closes up shop." I would like to call true novel that novel which would exclude all that is not the essence of the novel. All that is olde can be deemed to be impurities. | George Simenon |
| 38:14 | While reading Balzac, for instance, or Tolstoy or Stevenson, it is easy to discern what was necessary or useful at the time they wrote and what is obsolete today, what consequently belongs or does not belong to the essence of the novel. Let ten people of different tastes and of culture read one of their books, and I am convinced that the ten will skip the same passages or will be content to skim through. | George Simenon |
| 38:50 | They will skip the descriptions, first of all, which in the last century often took up several pages for the simple reason that later photography, nowadays trade magazine and periodicals, now in the movies and, perforce, television, had familiarized the public with certain settings. It takes but few words today to conjure the image of the Champs-Élysées before the eyes of an American reader or to evoke New York Harbor for European readers because we have unconsciously assimilated the settings, and they become alive with a simple trick. | George Simenon |
| 39:38 | We know, too, how and where live people of such and such social condition, how they dress, eat, and drink. If Balzac applied himself to spelling phonetically Nucingen's accent, which gives us some rather a hard reading, let us note that this was indispensable in an era when people have not shuttled back and forth, when the reader from Tulle or Angouleme had never heard a German talk. | George Simenon |
| 40:13 | When Balzac writes of a banker or of a tradesman like César Birotteau, he set forth technical details of their business which have become familiar to the bulk of the readers through the widely distributed newspapers of our day. You have guessed my plan. Let the novel be free of all that's not its intrinsic duty, free of what the public can take elsewhere. | George Simenon |
| 40:47 | And long is the list of servitudes which no longer bind the contemporary novelist. Be they Balzac, Dickens, or the Russians, their works forcibly contained some didactic elements. Count the pages where Balzac interrupts the course of his story to expound the scientific discoveries or the philosophical theories of the moment. | George Simenon |
| 41:14 | A casual mention would not have been enough. Those ideas were available only in learned works which were beyond the public's reach, while now, they are covered each week, along with discoveries in nuclear physics or in biology, by the popular magazines. | George Simenon |
| 41:38 | Need we still give proof that an alcoholic is a pathological case, that man's responsibility is relative, that some childhood memories can hound our lives and influence our deportment? Everybody knows this only too well, and the sexual life of different categories of peoples takes up a good third of all that is printed in the periodicals. All this, which is human, certainly does remain within the field of the novel, but it no longer calls for the same emphasis. | George Simenon |
| 42:18 | Even politics, now that every man and woman participate through their vote in the country's government, now that television brings into our homes the voices and the gestures of our leaders, even politics have lost its mystery, just like war has stripped geography and faraway countries of their glamour. In other words, the newspapers and the cinema, radio and television, easy traveling and compulsory education, have gradually relieved the novelist of part of a burden he thought himself duty-bound to shoulder. His field has narrowed. Other means of expression deal more adequately with picturesqueness, science, philosophy, and even ethics. | George Simenon |
| 43:16 | What's left to the novel? There remains precisely that which I hold to be its object and its nobility. There remains the living matter-- in other words, man, man with his heroism and his weaknesses, his greatness and his pettiness, his enthusiasms and his distaste, his patience and his fears, man who seeks himself so avidly and who seeks in the deportment of his fellow man reasons for its own excuses or hopes, for self-condemnation or self-indulgence, reasons to live in peace with himself or with others. | George Simenon |
| 44:06 | Man, face to face with destiny, that main preoccupation of the NON-ENGLISH, man in the grip of his passions, as tagged in the Shakespearean drama, INAUDIBLE, man and his ambitions of the Balzacian cycle, man pitted against himself answers Dostoevsky, and, finally, man who knows himself no more, who is afraid of becoming just a unit in the flock, of being crushed by the machine he has ambitiously conceived, and who seeks his proper place, his reason for being alive, his reason to believe. | George Simenon |
| 44:52 | Isn't this a vast, a fascinating realm? To recreate man, whom all the other men recognize to be brothers and who help them expel the fears. Quite simply, to recreate man with the symbols, means, and words so that, discovering them, we discover ourselves so that we may bow even more deeply enter the mystery of our own essential being, which, since Adam, terrifies us. | George Simenon |
| 45:35 | Shall I try to explore my thoughts fully? I am not sure that I can. For centuries, not only did mankind live under the discipline of dogmas but their influence extend to art, science, and government. | George Simenon |
| 45:56 | Each generation, or nearly, bred an ideal type whom everyone tried to resemble. And this ideal man served as a prototype in fields as different as, for instance, medicine and law. Even when, around the middle of the last century, rationalism attempt to shake off religion and replace it by science, this same rationalism adopted a dogmatic form and was only substituting one prototype for another, and hardly different prototype. | George Simenon |
| 46:41 | Did we not, in the last few decades, witness a complete transformation in the way human beings contemplate the species? It is not random that I spoke just now of medicine and law. It would be intriguing for a specialist to study from a strictly medical point of view the successive meanings which in one century were given to the words healthy man. | George Simenon |
| 47:15 | More essential still is the evolution of the concept of individual responsibility which forces most countries having them to change their laws, at least to amend them repeatedly and to transform their penal systems. Hardly 40 years ago, legally, as well as medically, a drunkard was a drinker fully responsible for his downfall while now, in every large city, he benefits from special clinics where he is treated as a medical case. | George Simenon |
| 47:53 | So it goes, too, for most of the delinquents whose fate depends less and less upon the judges and more and more upon the psychologist and the psychiatrist. Man is no longer a unit. The world is no longer made up of good and bad people who must be rewarded or punished but of human beings whose laws begin to recognize complexity and contradictory instinct of human beings whom institutions try to handle sociably-- in other words, to assimilate into society. | George Simenon |
| 48:38 | The same evolution exist in pediatrics and in the schools where the world's good or bad pupils are pretty near become taboo. And what about the multitude of diverse schools admitted in the different states indicating that the relationship of two people is no longer based on a dogma or on a few essential truths but suffer from the complexity of the human being and from his INAUDIBLE? | George Simenon |
| 49:12 | It is as though, after millenniums, the individual who was thought himself bound to resemble a predetermined model, who felt guilty every time he strived for it, it is as though the individual suddenly realized that what he had taken for an ideal is but a cold statue and that truth does not reside outside of him but within him. Would that not explain, for a large part, the frenetic thirst of man for knowledge of his fellow man? | George Simenon |
| 49:56 | And the novelist, consciously or not, strives to furnish this knowledge to mankind while seeking it for himself. And often, he has opened new vistas to the scientists, paving the way, as in the case of Dostoevsky, without whom Freud and his disciples might not have existed. And I don't think it is only in fun but also in the hope of countering the human truths that a philosopher like Bertrand Russell showed at the age of 80 termed the novel. | George Simenon |
| 50:37 | The novel, be it called the novel of today or of tomorrow, is still feeling its way. Manyfold, it is a sort of catchall where all the genres mingle and crossbreed. And I like to think that its effervescence it's a sign not of decadence but, on the contrary, a sign of vitality. | George Simenon |
| 51:04 | Trends are beginning to take shape, some which already have their masterpieces, two such trends, especially, fluctuating, at par one day, wildly apart the next. And if I have a personal favorite, I would not dare predict which will win out at the last. | George Simenon |
| 51:28 | I am speaking of the saga on the one hand, that novel commonly called in France the roman-fleuve, which with Thibault, we could term passive novel, and on the other hand, the roman chryse, the pinpoint novel, so to speak, which is nearer to the Greek tragedy and which might be the active novel. | George Simenon |
| 51:54 | In the saga, the lives of the characters flow like river. A generation, sometimes two or three, a family or more, a town, a group of people, had slowly to work toward their destiny, leaving the dead by the roadside, giving birth along the way, to the man of tomorrow whose story other novelist will tell. | George Simenon |
| 52:20 | The second form, harsher and quicker, gets hold of a person at a turning point-- | George Simenon |