The second afternoon session discussion on August 5th, which continues from Part Three, concludes. The participants leave the Forum Room to gather together later in the evening of August 5th in Sanders Theater for the third evening of public talks.
The media file is not availableTime | Annotation | Layer |
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4:36 | No, no. | Frank O'Connor |
4:39 | --clearly the writers can get overlooked. And that this does not diminish one whit the number or the quality of the words they've written. But in the end, I have never found a neglected masterpiece in my life. And believe me, if any of you really have hold of one, I would be very happy to give you my telephone number and office address. Because the second time around, as Mr. Simenon says quite a lot of money might be made off INAUDIBLE. | Frank O'Connor |
4:38 | INTERPOSING VOICES | Panelists |
2:47 | Because a lot of novels were not read for years and years, and then they are now-- now by everybody. The point of view of the publisher is the immediate point of view. He looks at the people who will read a novel the next week or the next three months. But maybe a novel that will have five readers in the next three months will be a very large, well-known novel INAUDIBLE years later. | George Simenon |
3:12 | In the case of Flaubert that we spoke yesterday-- at the time of Flaubert he would certainly not have the publish problem because at this time nobody thinks that people will read it. Madame Bovary looked like something very boring for the people at this time, and now everybody knows it. So it's very naive, this point of view, because the man who will today throw the book is maybe the same one who in 20 years will read avidly-- avidly this book when scholars would explain to him what is in it. You know what I mean? | George Simenon |
3:45 | INAUDIBLE that Mr. Sloanee was really trying to justify the publication of a novel at that point I think. The publishing of it, not the reading or the writing of it. | George Simenon |
0:00 - 5:11 | August 5 Session Discussion | Program |
1:27 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
2:18 | LAUGHTER APPLAUSE | Audience |
5:07 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
2:26 | Before we close this session, I like to note that I seemed to-- previously to note an objection in part to Mr. Simenon and Mr. Holthusen when Mr. Sloanee said that if the novel is closed and put aside by the reader, that the novel does not become art. | Carver Collins |
3:57 | Bill? | Carver Collins |
4:37 | If this gesture continues-- | Carver Collins |
5:11 | Well, it's rather late, and 8:00 the panel-- people on the panel I think have found is closer to this hour than it had seemed earlier. So I think we better adjourn today. Meet again at 8:00 tonight in Sander's Theatre. | Carver Collins |
0:01 | And by dull, I mean that I was not interested in them and they didn't convince me. And by being uninterested and unconvinced, I simply mean that they conveyed no impression of reality to me. And I think from the writer's point of view, it would be foolish to go any farther. The business of technical, critical dissection is another matter. But I have great faith that writers will never wholly turn into metaphysicians, and that somehow or other, the novel will survive this period of introspection, analysis, and dissection. | William Sloane |
0:31 | Those writers who are not quite as disturbed about it as this have extraordinary audiences in this country, as I'm sure Ms. Livingston will affirm either tonight or right now if she wants to. There is a fundamental human drive in all of us and it is to communicate with each other. And if every novel is an act of communication, then Mr. O'Connor is right. Unless this act of communication is existing, the novel has no existence. It is the reader who-- who makes the novel, and without that there is nothing. Art doesn't exist in the abstract. As far as we're concerned, there is no art on the planet Venus. | William Sloane |
1:15 | I felt a little, during the course of this earlier discussion, like a man in the haberdashery business who has been paid an evangelical call by a convinced nudist. | William Sloane |
1:30 | I assure you, the people of the United States do read novels, and I think that there is a great danger in claiming that the emperor hasn't any clothes on all the time. There really is such a thing as a novel, and people really do read them and they really are hungry for them. And the core of it, in my opinion, is what Mr. O'Connor has said in one way and what I'm trying to say in the other. | William Sloane |
1:52 | And I can also point out that it requires an extremely trained and sophisticated taste to get any kind of genuine entertainment out of a Kafka novel. And you could submit-- you could go right over to Boston and corral 2,000 people and give them each a copy of a Kafka book. And I would be astonished to learn that four of them actually liked it. This is a very specialized taste, but as long as you are all reading Kafka, Kafka by my standards is an existing novelist. | William Sloane |
3:59 | Well, this is a hard point to answer because actually, we don't know of any great works of fiction which haven't been read. I have to say, when this act occurred I simply pointed out that the reason why Flaubert remains great and alive in Mr. Simenon's mind, and to a lesser extent mine and I have no doubt Mr. O'Connor's and all of you, is simply the fact that we have read him and do read him. I never said that this had to take place the week of publication or even the month or the year of INAUDIBLE . I'm not trying to-- | William Sloane |