On August 5th, the last afternoon of the conference in the Forum Room, Hans Egon Holthusen gives a lecture in response to the conference talks and discussions from the evening before. This recording also includes the first part of the August 5th session discussion, which continues on the next recording in Part Two.
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| 26:49 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 0:01 | Today we have a talk again to start the discussion. The speaker today has very kindly cooperated with a suggestion from the administrative staff and from myself that, because the session so far has been so extremely mannerly in the way that I take questions yesterday, please, even Mr. Trilling, we thought it was time here at the end, so that any fights that started wouldn't last too long, well, for us to urge someone to take off the gloves or abandon at least the Marquess of Queensbury rules. | Carvel Collins |
| 0:46 | Today our speaker is Mr. Holthusen, who is a poet and critic from Germany who is a member of the international seminar this summer. And he is going to talk to the general subject that we have been dealing with in the conference. Mr. Holthusen Thank you. | Carvel Collins |
| 26:58 | Mr. O'Connor. | Carvel Collins |
| 27:05 | I've taken so many notes in the last 20 minutes that I don't know whether I'll be able to follow them. The last speaker referred to the fact that the novel doesn't flourish in Germany today. All I would say is what I've already said to my class. It never has flourished in Germany. | Frank O'Connor |
| 27:35 | The novel has never been a German art in spite of Thomas Mann. And even in Thomas Mann, you get the work of a man who is really a philosopher and essayist rather than a novelist, who just does not have the plastic imagination of a novelist, the thing which first and foremost makes the novelist. | Frank O'Connor |
| 27:56 | I was horrified at his picture of a German reader slinking away with a copy of Proust or INAUDIBLE, speaking of bad functions about reading a novel. But that also is not a very new thing. You get a wonderful description in Pride and Prejudice of Mr. Collins, who agrees to read to the company, until he realizes that what they want to hear is a novel and then he respectfully declines as a novel is something that no serious man will read. | Frank O'Connor |
| 28:38 | I don't really believe a statement that there are no further significant relationships in life. How can we live in with such a belief? How can we believe that our relationships with our friends and with the people we love are not significant relationships? | Frank O'Connor |
| 28:57 | Tomorrow I have to speak of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's great novel about his own relationship to his mother. Is anybody going to tell me that is not a significant relationship or that relationship does not continue and will not continue all through history? I don't believe it. | Frank O'Connor |
| 29:17 | The whole description we got of the imaginative position of the poet, the difficulties he had, the relations of his work to the essayist, reminded me of that wonderful poem of Yeats. He was exasperated by a passage in Thomas Mann. It really maddened him. Thomas Mann says, in our time, the destiny of man is reflected in politics. | Frank O'Connor |
| 29:47 | And Yeats got very cross with them as you would expect Yeats to go. And then he wrote that wonderful poem which begins, "How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fixed on Russian, or on Chinese, or on Spanish politics," the one that ends up, "And there is a man who knows the truth of war, and war's alarms, but oh that I were young again and held her in my arms." Not, of course, a significant relationship. | Frank O'Connor |
| 30:24 | Now also I don't really believe that our forefathers had a naive form of consciousness. I don't like the idea of those simple-minded people Aristotle and Plato dismissed in this lofty way. I still think they have something to say. And I still think the historical tradition of literature has a great deal to say. I don't believe there is anything really in common between the poem and the essay. And if modern poetry has reached the point where it's difficult, according to the speaker, to see what the two have in common, all I can say is they never had anything in common. | Frank O'Connor |
| 31:05 | Poetry is still what it always was. It's a song more than anything else. The speaker, having told us the staggering news, that existentialism was the death blow of the novel, then asked a rhetorical question who is Benn, to, which I only want to reply, what is existentialism? What is existentialism to say that we should say it's the death blow of the novel? | Frank O'Connor |
| 31:38 | Also, this feeling that the only reality is the work of art has already been dealt with by Proust. And it's part of the objective quality of our time that Proust really could believe that there is no objective reality. The only reality that exists is the work of art. And I don't believe that either. I still think that naive and Euclidean man Aristotle has quite a lot to say on the subject. And I think it ought to be listened to. | Frank O'Connor |
| 32:15 | One of our difficulties in this discussion from the very beginning has been the fact that we never have done what any decent Aristotelian would have done straight away to define our terms. We've been talking about things which have absolutely nothing in common. We listen to a discussion of the novels of Kafka. | Frank O'Connor |
| 32:36 | I've already pointed out that the novels of Kafka are not novels. We've been told that the characters in this novel are simply described as Mr. K, or Surveyor so-and-so, but that sort of thing was done long ago by the man whom Kafka most resembles, John INAUDIBLE. | Frank O'Connor |
| 1:11 | Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Campbell and Mr. Collins asked me, by all means, to say something provocative. It did not matter what I said. It mattered only that it should be provocative and that it should have at least something to do with the situation of the novel in our time. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 1:33 | Since I could not say no, I decided to consider the novel conference as like a so-called highly GERMAN as the inquiry which precedes canonization and in whose proceedings someone has to play the advocatus diaboli in order to advance against the candidate everything imaginable. I should like to be considered as this advocatus diaboli. And if your breast swells with wrath and indignation, I should ask you to remember that my function is a dialectical one. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 2:17 | I myself am not quite convinced that the novel as a genre is finished or no longer possible in the sense that one might say, for example, that in the 18th century, a great theology had become impossible. But I should like to advance a few arguments on the side of this judgment. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 2:40 | I should like not for a moment losing sight of the reticence implied in my role of advocatus diaboli to maintain that the novel is not, as is claimed by so many literary critics and above all of course by the novelists, the most significant and important form of literary expression, that we live, as it were, in the age of the novel. That, as I have already said, is merely an act of provocation and a question. At bottom, I am convinced that the novel will emerge victorious from its trial and that the College of Cardinals represented, in this case, ladies and gentlemen, by yourselves will triumph over the advocatus diaboli since we are in a country in which the novel still appears to be in full bloom. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 3:40 | I should take as my starting point the simple fact that, among the writers of the first rank in my country, it is impossible to name a single novelist. In making this remark, I do not wish to make an issue of the two grand old men of the German novel, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Both of them have been living abroad for decades and are quite out of touch with the most recent developments in our country. And both reached their zenith in the Roaring '20s, more or less at the same time as the great masterpieces of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 4:24 | Within the secret of literary activity inside Germany at any rate, the novel does not play a leading role. Of course, there is the normal crowd of prolific and successful writers of novels. But scarcely one of them is capable of prompting in me the feeling to NON-ENGLISH . Scarcely one can affect me in the very center of my consciousness in the same way in which I am affected when I read Rilke, or Auden, or Kafka, or Valery, Most of these novelists are honorable but unstimulating, seem to exist only to satisfy a kind of Arabian night complex. That is the eternal desire of a fanciful public for exciting and touching stories. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 5:18 | One never reads them without a certain feeling of impatience and, for the most part, with a slight admixture of bad conscience, as if one were stuffing into oneself too much ice cream. This could suggest the suspicion that the novel itself-- that there was something amiss with the novel itself quite apart from the lack of promising new talent. But there is much to suggest that the impulse to expression among writers of the first rank no longer desires or is no longer able to use the novel form. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 6:00 | The experience of the war, for example, the most important theme by far of the younger generation, has so far produced no first rate novel. The best work that has been written about the war has appeared in the form of lyric poetry or personal diaries. It seems as if the impulse to our truth on the part of the writer had suppressed the principle of fiction or we're no longer willing to place confidence in it, as if his emotional intensity shrank from the complication of a plot. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 6:44 | The question is, can one convey the sense of situation and the consciousness of reality of modern men in a novel plot? Does there exist at all in our life significant relationship, starting points, climaxes, and above all conclusions? And if no such things exist, why should one, in the development of a novel, introduce make believe equivalents? | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 7:14 | It is not a new question. Answers of genius have already been given to it by Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. But it is a question which emerges in you today and perhaps in a more radical fashion than ever before. I further believe that the historical situation in which we are living, or rather the historical experiences through which we have lived, are peculiarly adapted to disencourage an inventor of stories. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 7:51 | Must we not confess that we have understood and mastered almost nothing that we have seen with our own eyes, that our imagination does not stretch to cope with the stormy and barbaric history of the 20th century whose witnesses we are? Is the power of the factual and the actual not so overwhelmingly great that the imagination of the artist has no chance? | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 8:23 | What is left for us but objectively to document and coolly to reflect on what we have seen? What is left for us apart from the reportage, or in the diary, or, if you will forgive someone who has published a couple of volumes of verse and has had the good fortune to arouse some interest in a handful of readers, or the poem. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 8:51 | The poem is an essence and crystallization of a complex moment of living. The poem as an expressive abbreviation and summar of 20 novel plots. I believe that there exists between the lyrical mode of expression and a reflective prose a certain relationship and I believe that it is characteristic of the spiritual situation of our time that we should find in a whole series of authors of the first or of representative rank in quite distinct countries of our civilization a fruitful combination of lyrical and reflective gifts. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 9:37 | I think, for example, of TS Eliot, of Paul Valery of Auden, and of Germans like Gottfried Benn and Alexander Schroeder. It is hard to define what the essay has in common with the poem. But I hope that you will agree with me when I say that, in both forms, we find a high degree of stylistic or linguistic density and intellectual tension which distinguishes them from the novel or at least from the classical novel. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 10:12 | In the essay, as in the poem, the author renounces the purely material, more or less cause tension of an invented plot, in favor of the more subtle tension which exists between a constellation of intellectual points and stylistic inflections. The imagination of the author outsource the broad hunting grounds of narrative detail and focuses on decisive points in the evolution of a human consciousness. The imagination is no longer concerned with inventing and relating but with understanding and evoking. It is concerned with the question, "what is the situation of man?" | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 11:04 | But has this not always been the concern-- always been at an all times being the concern of all art and all literature? Of course. But in the situation of which the modern artist has to speak, the problem of the human condition has become, in a special and acute sense, critical. The questioning by men of man's own nature has become peculiarly urgent. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 11:33 | A trend which is common to many of the leading writers of modern literature seems to be the remarkable radicalisation of the questions raised. That is to say the rejection and overthrow of the received and, to our way of thinking, somewhat naive frame of consciousness of our fathers and the questioning of being at all. The word existential occurs to me here, the much abused catchword of our age. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 12:11 | The new word, as Ben puts it, that has been there for a few years and which is certainly the most important expression of an inward transformation. It withdraws the emphasis of the ego from the domain of psychology and of INAUDIBLE into the generic, the dark, the concentrated, the core. In such words, I believe we have the evidence of a new situation on which men knows with certainty only the point of the reductibility of mere existence while all else has been lost. The unquestioning scenes of a sense of reality, which went without saying for our fathers, the intelligible world, the doorway to the world, as Rilke puts it, has disappeared from view. The writer asks questions about the very possibility of being. And reality itself has become a problem. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 13:23 | When Shakespeare begins his 18th sonnet with the line, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day," or Sir Philip Sidney his Arcadia with, "you goatherd gods that love the grassy mountains, you nymphs that haunt the spring and pleasant valleys," the situation, the self, and the objects of the world, or the mythological background, all belong to a world of experience given, valid, and common to all. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 13:59 | The modern poet, however, knows no given situation, no unquestioning repose in fate. What he sings is mere naked being that lives behind the slings and arrows of fortune, mere being alive. In Rilke's conclusion of the ninth Duino elegy, for example the climax of a very great poem, SPEAKING GERMAN, "Behold, I live." All definable situations are left behind for what is here asserted and secured is the consciousness of reality as such. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 14:39 | And when in the fifth elegy he speaks of the cheap winter heads of fate, the cheap winter hats of fate, the SPEAKING GERMAN , Rilke is describing fate as a curiously distorting and misleading attribute of the being of man seen through the ironical perspective of consciousness that is without a local habitation and a name. To use a metaphor from modern mathematics, it may be said that this consciousness has, as it were, left the Euclidean space of classical poetry and assumed a non-Euclidean vantage point from which being and reality are no longer unquestionably assured, and given but merely possible, and from which feeling must fight for being in reality and gain and secure them afresh in every new poem. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 15:39 | This new non-Euclidean perspective, which appears, for example, in Rilke, is by no means a unique case. We find similar discoveries in Eliot, in Valery, and others. The classical poet is concerned, so to speak, with objects in being. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 16:03 | The modern poet ponders over the mere existence of being. He looks at himself and is shocked by the fact of his mere incarnation. He has found a new sense of wonder and, in this amazement, a new dimension of senses is revealed to him. But if we are to ascribe to this new sense of being on a certain level of distinction, as certain if not an absolute general value, then the prospects of the novel may well appear slight. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 16:41 | Existential, is the death blow of the novel. Existential is the NON-ENGLISH, says Benn in one of his recent prose works, a bold, radical, a daring but inspired sentence, which gave me the courage in the first place to play the advocatus diaboli among you. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 17:05 | But who is Benn, you may ask, to dare to say such a thing. Let me repeat, if I may, a few remarks that I made a fortnight ago in a talk on German literature of the present day. Benn is today recognized in Germany as the most outstanding lyrical poet indeed with Ernstuner and Bear Brecht as one of the most important of the German writers. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 17:31 | His work is a swan song of the great expressionistic generation. His theme is the tension between a heavily emotionally charged biological outlook on the one hand and an icy intellectualism on the other. On the one hand, the welling up of creation, the phallic, the urgent, the European yearning for escape to the South Seas, the drunken flood of precocious conditions. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 18:07 | On the other hand, the biting negative, which intellect opposes to nature. His prose, which is for the time being more interesting for us as his poetry, is the most individual mixture imaginable of reflective narrative and descriptive elements. It is a style of expressive evocation which shatters the syntactical unity and juxtaposes the fragments in a haunting jazz rhythm, a style which uses scientific and philosophical language but which also includes echoes of technical and military terminology, as well as the language of art and literary criticism, and of INAUDIBLE , and Civil Service German, and of course slang from the Berlin gutter. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 19:07 | It is a style of the city which offers its objective correlative to the world of technological civilization in which we live, lit up by flashes of irony, of parody and cynicism, incredibly precise and at the same time rhapsodic, lyrical, and, on the whole, peculiarly moving. Whenever the withering and robust cynicism of the author brings forth its most fantastic flowers, there are to be find the most wonderful of cadenzas, the most ravishing poetry. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 19:49 | Benn's prose is, as far as I see it, a unique attempt to produce purely poetic effects with purely prosaic means. He does it by achieving the maximum of density of subject matters and careful calculation of rhythm. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 20:13 | It is an attempt to overcome the classical narrative principle of the mere addition, the naive and then, and then, of the traditional epic, and thus to resolve the problem of an absolute prose, a prose, that is to say, what is no longer simply communication but pure poetry, which has rejected time and syntax and all idea of coherence within a plot, and which emerges directly from the voiceless depths of the soul, like a poem. A prose beyond space and time as the author puts it, built up in the world of mere imagination projected on an even plane of the momentary. Its counterpart is typology and evolution. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 21:07 | You see Benn is seeking an absolute expression, a world of expression, an GERMAN , which can endure in the senseless circle of time. He seeks a world of expression, I repeat GERMAN, in the place of a world of history, for history for him is a chaos of blood and nonsense, a senseless circle of agonizing vacuities. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 21:36 | The only reality in which he believes is the work of art. It is his answer to the form demanding power of nothingness, a phenomenon beyond space, and time, and history, stone, verse, sound of the flute. Thus he affirms Andre Moro's vision that the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues. I repeat the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 22:15 | For Benn, the enemy is a novel. The enemy is psychology. The enemy is evolution, the servitude of time and syntax, all these inevitable attributes of the classical novel which, in his opinion, must be overthrown in order to make way for new truths and new expression. But psychology was likewise the enemy for Kafka. Psychology, for the last time, this eruption is to be found in his diary. Kafka transformed the novel form into a means of expression of an existential ontological consciousness no longer concerned with psychology. His theme is the mere existence of man caught up in being. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 23:10 | His figures are no longer characters with subtle psychological ramifications. They are colorless, anonymous. They are called simple K only with the letter K, surveyor K or chief clerk K. They are not characters but puppets in the game of metaphysical thought. They are the geometrical position from which the metaphysical quant and paradoxes can be read. It would be possible, in addition to this, to show that as early as Proust, the dimension of time is suspended. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 23:58 | His La Recherche du Temps Perdu is the heroic attempt through the artistic evocation of time experienced to reach, as it were, a point behind time, like the celebrated ape reaching behind the mirror. But what time is we cannot finally find. One can only apprehend it by a mystic illumination. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 24:24 | This happens when Proust in the last volume of his novels, Le Temps Retrouve, perceives intuitively the secret of remembrance in the tactile experience of a minute irregularity between paving stones in a Venetian church and thus finds the difference between time and past, time past and time present, suspended. In this way, he reaches a position beyond the time from which the passage of time no longer exists. And so you see, ladies and gentlemen, that it looks as if the advocatus diaboli had contradicted himself by speaking of a novel which is the negation of the novel. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 25:24 | Permit me just a few more remarks. Kafka, Proust, Ulysses are 30 years behind us. And what has happened since then that is really new? I confess that I am a fervent admirer of the American novel and that, like many Europeans, I have for years been a victim of Hemingway and Faulkner. I won't say a victim of Henry James. But is America not an exception? | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 25:57 | I believe that the flourishing of the American novel is related to the following factors, very superficially-- the youthfulness of American civilization, its historical ascendancy, the integrity of its society. The problem of the novel seems to me to show that American civilization is in a different phase of its development than that of Europe. For Germany, at any rate, this seems to me to be true. And the judgment of Benn, NON-ENGLISH SPEECH, existential that is the death blow of the novel, does mean something, even if it is not to be taken seriously except as in provocation. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 0:00 - 26:49 | Hans Egon Holthusen Lecture | Program |
| 26:57 - 32:36 | August 5 Session Discussion | Program |