The August 5 afternoon session discussion continues from Part Two and continues on to Part Four.
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| 5:38 | Just to perhaps search for a link between this question of comedy and tragedy and the future of the novel, nobody has had anything very helpful to say about the comic novel and its future, if any. I was just wondering if most of the speakers feel that the nature of our times has sort of cast a blight over the comic spirit in general so that it's really pretty difficult for art to flourish. | Fletcher |
| 12:04 | As I Lay Dying, for example. It's high ironic comedy. | Fletcher |
| 0:01 | The main thing is, someone ought to suggest that Mr. Lytle's theory of total commitment needs, I would say, a good many qualifications. And I detect in this, as in almost everything else I have heard him say, what seems to me to be a bias towards romantic thinking that I personally am bothered by. | Anthony West |
| 0:24 | Now surely it would be possible to assemble a good deal of evidence to show that the artist, to whatever extent he commits himself totally to the work of art and the creative process, must go beyond that and must not merely commit himself totally. Or that if he does, he produces something that is romantic in quality. And surely this is true of great comedy. | Anthony West |
| 0:49 | If you think of something like-- some of you will not admit this to be a comedy, but I could prove my point If I had the time to do it. Surely if you think of a play like Ibsen's Wild Duck or of the comedy of Meredith or probably of the Way of the World, you have in those masterpieces a quality of detachment that certainly is above and beyond and something apart from total commitment. And that-- the wonderful thing that is there I don't believe could ever be achieved by an artist who was simply concerned with committing himself totally. I don't know what it is. | Anthony West |
| 1:30 | And I think that the academic profession in America has misled students in general by maintaining that the tragic experience is the one that matters, omitting to point out what is undeniably true-- that the aesthetic experience of great comedy is just as wonderful in its way as the aesthetic experience of great tragedy, that in general, professors do not admit this to their classes. And if they know this, they don't talk about it. | Anthony West |
| 1:56 | And surely in getting at that, it is not total commitment on the part of the artist, or probably on the part of the reader or the spectator. There is something else, an element of detachment that comes in that's highly important and certainly is of crucial significance in the achievement of the artist. | Anthony West |
| 2:31 | Well, I would deny that. | Anthony West |
| 3:09 | Well I think-- I know that amounts to a difference about definition of INAUDIBLE. | Anthony West |
| 7:54 | I thought there was an outstanding comic novel here very recently in France That seems to me an ideal example of the thing which produces comedy. It's really the first novel, I think, which is kind of first which is absolutely, ruthlessly true about the bad behavior of a great many French people at the lowest point in their history. They have had the worst thing of all the Europeans. They were the one state which knew complete defeat and was taken over whole, the official government. There was no rest, it was completely overwhelmed. | Anthony West |
| 8:27 | And this is the most horrible and shameful experience. But after the war you had that great period when every Frenchman you talked to hand began to talk about the Francais and so on. There was this great bellyache. And the first comic novel it produced was INAUDIBLE book, which is a political farce of extreme cruelty, 18th century cruelty like INAUDIBLE . Is another INAUDIBLE ? thing ? at the same time. | Anthony West |
| 8:57 | When-- when you've got the pain which is really unendurable, there's no other way of treating it. You've got the great comic novel, with a great element of humor. And Dickens is really all the painfulness, the horrible thing which happened to me, the ugliness and beastliness of this new culture which is swamping through the whole farming culture which I was brought up in. These are the things which produce comedy, and it's-- it's not a cruelty so much as you've come to the raw end of the nerve, and the only way you can deal with it is by writing a very, very funny book. | Anthony West |
| 10:11 | Only that much of Faulkner is terrifically funny and comic. The Sound and the Fury-- a great part of it is-- is just outrageously funny. Not only is Benjy funny, the-- the jokes which go all through that section, and luster, and these other surrogates of luster, the people who lived earllier as slaves. All of that stuff is funny, and especially is Jason comic. It seems to me he's a terrific-- | Ralph Ellison |
| 10:52 | Sure. | Ralph Ellison |
| 10:54 | The whole business that's going around here and Cambridge-- they fight with the fellow Freed, or whatever his name is. All of that is common. I think it's corrective, and I think that comedy is one of the unifying moves of American society and turns up in the best of our fiction. The only thing about it is that we are so damn solemn these days that half the time we don't recognize comedy. | Ralph Ellison |
| 11:27 | Part of it was a loss of-- well, it's exactly, Mr. Fletcher. I think the loss of the tragic view of life, the willingness to look at these ambiguous situations and feel them and then transcend them through saying, well hey, this is just so impossible I might as well laugh about it. And I think that that's where the-- the awareness of defeat, which in a sense is the awareness of the absurd, comes into-- to certain writing and gives it that tone which it has. | Ralph Ellison |
| 12:07 | That's just as funny They do everything. They go through fire and water and God knows what else. They-- they take so long that the woman is smelling all over the place, and when they finally get her in the ground he goes immediately and he comes back with a woman is who is described as being built like a duck, and he says, meet my new wife. Which-- | Ralph Ellison |
| 23:27 | Mr. Ellison and I have been sitting here feeling our commercial instincts losing more and more strongly to the force of our entire physiques. And perhaps a few words from the people who have to back the actual work of writers, and back it with their money, with their hearts, with their time, with their work, with their face, wouldn't be out of place here. | William Yandell Elliott |
| 21:34 | I should like to ask, the ruling out of The Trial as a novel because it's an allegory-- it seems to me to be something wrong somewhere here. Because it's so would you rule Samson Agonistes out as a poem because it's an allegory? It seems to me allegory is a technique which is a vital part of the novel's baggage, and I don't see why you say that The Trial is not a novel. It-- | Hill |
| 22:10 | Mr. O'Connor, you're in Hyde Park country. But I see your point more clearly now. | Hill |
| 22:32 | Well, The Trial-- The Trial is not-- is not a romantic novel either. I thought Mr. Simenon sort of laid that ghost last night with the quotation from Robert Desnos who had a monstrous collection of various types of novels. It seems to me that in trying to define the form, there's a danger of rarefying it to such an extent that several novelists that I know that are working in good faith are just about to close their notebook and go home and go back to selling shoes or something of that sort. Because there are a great many people who are absolutely convinced that they're writing novels, and I'm only glad, Mr. O'Connor, that you're not in charge of the jury which determines whether or not INAUDIBLE you got the job. | Hill |
| 0:00 - 31:58 | August 5 Session Discussion | Program |
| 6:15 | INAUDIBLE , We have a few comic novels, and in literature there are very, very few. And I think that the comic-- the bed is of comic is cruelty. And we are no more cruel in everything. We see the man who has too much sympathy-- too much sympathy? No, it's not the word. | George Simenon |
| 6:34 | Yes, compassion to be comics-- to be still comics. The comics is always bad. It's done something cruel. Look, remember Charlie Chaplin? Why do you love Charlie Chaplin? Because before-- because each time he tried to do something, he do it the wrong way. It's the basis of every comic. After all INAUDIBLE you already saying. | George Simenon |
| 7:02 | Certainly liberties INAUDIBLE -- | George Simenon |
| 7:04 | --awfully cruel, or is it? Certainly he looked the man with a very, very cruel eye. | George Simenon |
| 7:15 | Yeah, INAUDIBLE. | George Simenon |
| 7:24 | Yes, certainly. | George Simenon |
| 7:27 | Yes. But look how many-- | George Simenon |
| 7:32 | I am looking at how many comics out there we had in three centuries. There are very, very few. Less than-- and it's the same on the screen, it's the same for the stage. We have very, very few good comics. I think it's not difficult and it needs very little compassion from man. That's what I say. | George Simenon |
| 22:17 | INAUDIBLE and it's very tangbile and it's only one novel. | George Simenon |
| 2:18 | I think yet again I've turned. I meant in the act of writing, the creation, the artist has totally to commit himself. You cannot be a good artist without that attachment | Andrew Lytle |
| 2:32 | Well, I wouldn't. You have to stand you write good and bad under heat. You have to stand back and look at it when it's cold. And I think, given two artists of equal talent, that the one who can stand back and has a critical mind to be able to diminish and enlarge and direct is the one that's going to succeed. Without that critical sense without that detachment, I believe the artist inevitably fails | Andrew Lytle |
| 2:56 | Now, as to comedy and tragedy, I agree. I didn't mean that you'd have to be totally committed to comedy, to write comedies, you wouldn't write tragedy on that. I-- | Andrew Lytle |
| 3:12 | I think that-- I'm talking about the man who has to involve himself INAUDIBLE , that you can't-- I think that most of the-- that most of your energy goes into making it possible to write. You've got to eat, you've got children crying for bread, and you've got-- it all-- you've got to put the world away so that you can involve yourself in this imaginative world you create. And that's where your energy goes. A great part of it. | Andrew Lytle |
| 3:38 | When I was writing my first novel-- in fact, excuse me for this. By the way, before I get on that, what I-- a little while-- I agree with what you say on that. I'll admit to saying that it-- it was more surely-- the images were made where the seasons turn. I'm not-- and I'm not-- I was thinking really in a double way, that I was thinking in terms of the criticism more or less. Not so much when the man is not himself. But when you're on your feet talking fast, you can't do that so INAUDIBLE | Andrew Lytle |
| 4:11 | But it-- here-- here was the problem. I was living in the country, trying to write. All right? I would spend-- I had a horse and a dog and a hundred turkeys that I was trying to raise for a little cash money. I discovered then the vanity of all possession if you're going to be an artist. If you've got a horse you've got to ride it, and if you've got a dog you've got to hunt it. | Andrew Lytle |
| 4:35 | And when I had these turkeys to raise, I'd ? put them in a tenant house and built me an oven. And I put in a stick at night and one at 4:00 in the morning. And I would take him walking every day. But you'd be surprised how much time those three things can take. The coup de grace came when the time came to teach him to roost. I put him on a roosting pole and he wouldn't go up. They had no mother. So I had get up and INAUDIBLE | Andrew Lytle |
| 21:26 | I hope you didn't think that I meant it funny. I-- | Andrew Lytle |
| 22:23 | Well let me say something about that. INAUDIBLE Samson Agonistes isn't a comedy say. I mean, we talked about-- | Andrew Lytle |
| 22:30 | That's what we're trying to get out INAUDIBLE | Andrew Lytle |
| 2:13 | Mr. Lytle, will you speak to Mr. INAUDIBLE? | Carvel Collins |
| 5:07 | This merely demonstrates-- | Carvel Collins |
| 5:17 | This demonstrates how Thoreau was able to write Walden. Because at his place he was only searching for a hound, a gray horse, and a turtle dove. So he had none of these things to fend for, leaving him time to write. Well, are there other questions from the audience? Anyone? Yes, please. | Carvel Collins |
| 6:09 | INAUDIBLE Mr. Simenon You're an admirer of Mr. Thurber and is Mr. Thurber a representative of the comic spirit in some way? | Carvel Collins |
| 6:57 | Mr. Thurber, whom you admire-- is he a comic writer and is-- | Carvel Collins |
| 7:03 | It's not-- | Carvel Collins |
| 7:11 | But there's an inward eye. He's often speaking of himself, isn't he? | Carvel Collins |
| 7:16 | And one is even psychological aberration-- not always cruel to himself. He is in a way defending himself, isn't he INAUDIBLE? | Carvel Collins |
| 7:25 | He's defending himself from cruelty. | Carvel Collins |
| 7:29 | And he thought maybe there's a big opening here for the comic now. | Carvel Collins |
| 7:52 | Mr. West, please. | Carvel Collins |
| 9:42 | And this connection I think has been overlooked in this discussion-- the possibility that one of the ways to read Kafka's book is not whether-- I'm not discussing whether or not it's an allegory or a novel. But one way to read it may be as extremely hilarious in just this situation that you speak of, the man and his particular small country driven to an extreme. This is one form of therapy which the reader might be able to share in. Mr. Ellison? | Carvel Collins |
| 10:49 | He's hilarious, and Quentin has a certain humor about himself-- | Carvel Collins |
| 12:33 | In this, Faulkner represents the return to the 19th century that has been asked for. And at that time, decaying corpses in the period of Mark Twain were the very peak of humor, whereas our contemporary jokes about homosexual-- homosexuality would have horrified Twain. Lots of things are fashioned in Faulkner in this regard, maybe attempting to turn back the clock, which is one of the things that the conference has suggested the modern novelists might do. Mr. Holthusen, would you speak on any of these subjects? | Carvel Collins |
| 16:14 | Mr. O'Connor? | Carvel Collins |
| 19:49 | As for being a funny book, no, this is the kind of comedy which does grow out for me-- it seems to me, as Mr. West says, out of being at the end of the string and this is the thing that is left. This is a comedy of strength and of the kind of laughter that I remember, and of smiling that I remember, having the first experience of when having been sent away from the house because of the approaching death of one of my grandparents, and being asked for a number of reasons to sleep at a relative's house. And coming back in the morning to have been told when I was wakened that the grandparent had died. | Carvel Collins |
| 20:26 | And I come back to find my father and mother who were-- had normal affection but were products of the 19th century-- find my mother sitting on my father's lap. And some other people there, and they're having a rather smiling time. Rather-- they were not at the end of despair. But this mixture of the two, the idea that to a child of-- I've forgotten what tender years-- that the time of death it wasn't entirely long-faced, or that one of the ways to avoid the long face or deal with the causes of long faces was have a short face, or whatever laughing is. | Carvel Collins |
| 21:01 | It seems to me that The Trial does this. And then The Castle, when the man lay-- when the bureau or big secretary furniture is laid down and they're jumping up and down to get the papers into the thing-- it's only a tiny episode of thousands. This seems to me comic on the way to the dealing with the monstrous situation of being arrested under three different governments by same policeman. And-- and none of these books is funny. | Carvel Collins |
| 21:33 | Mr. Hill? | Carvel Collins |
| 23:18 | Mr. Sloane | Carvel Collins |
| 4:33 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 5:01 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 5:04 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 5:12 | SIDE CONVERSATION | Audience |
| 6:34 | Compassion? | Audience |
| 13:20 | Oh, no. | Audience |
| 21:29 | No, I don't even-- are you? I moved over to your INAUDIBLE | Audience |
| 22:06 | INTERPOSING VOICES | Audience |
| 22:10 | No | Audience |
| 22:16 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 23:23 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 26:33 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 30:29 | A Rage to Live. | Audience |
| 30:30 | A Rage to-- | Audience |
| 31:15 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 23:20 | Perhaps I am, in an odd sort of way, in charge of this bureau. | William Sloane |
| 23:56 | First of all, I've been trying to think what would entitle me to say anything to you at all. I've come to the conclusion that I enjoy a unique distinction in this room. Unquestionably I have read more bad novels than anyone else in this room. As much as any two of you have ever read. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. | William Sloane |
| 24:19 | I hear the same series of rather small vocabulary words repeated last night, today, over and over again. A limited number of names of writers-- a very limited number, a limited number of words. And I'd like to comment on a few of the words. First of all, the words art and artist. | William Sloane |
| 24:38 | Now in my office, or any office that I've run for the last 15 years, there are two or three absolutely fixed rules. One of these rules, which is sent by me in memorandum form to all the members of my staff at least once a year, is that the word "art" is not to be employed in any piece of writing put out by my house. Neither is the word "great," nor the phrase "work of art," nor anything which suggests this matter or is a circumlocution to convey the same effect. | William Sloane |
| 25:08 | INAUDIBLE the test with Mr. O'Connor. INAUDIBLE the test of a novel which is a work of art is-- it's its readership. It is the reader that makes a novel a work of art. Otherwise it is nothing but a series of black marks on a piece of white paper existing in a virgin wilderness, possibly crawled over by an ant or buried by a burier beetle. But it is in the reader that the greatness of a work either takes place or it doesn't. And there is no other locus, and it has no abstract existence that I have been able to detect. | William Sloane |
| 25:47 | Therefore, when we say-- if we were to say in our jacket copy that we believe that such and such a book would be a work of art, we would run up against the second of Sloanees great prohibitions, which is the moral imperative. "This is a book which everybody ought to read." There's one aspect of the reader that I don't think Mr. O'Connor has expressed enough, but if you try to make a living off readers the way I do and my writers do, you'll notice that every reader possesses a very rare privilege. He can just take a book INAUDIBLE like this, and do that. And no work of art can survive that gesture. | William Sloane |
| 26:41 | Why do I go on publishing novels in view of the two things that I have heard now for 24 hours around here? First that there are very few novelists, and they're open to serious question. Maybe some of them are allegorists and others are satirists in a concealed form. There are hardly any novelists, perhaps 10, whose names we can mention at all out of the 20th century. | William Sloane |
| 27:03 | And second, that even with this corporal's guard of the past to lean on the future, according to our variables Nabokov's Diabolik is going to be even more impoverished. Well, from the publisher's point of view, the justification for publishing fiction today is that people read fiction. They read novels. Between the efforts of a publisher of my type-- the publisher Ms. Livingston's-- fiction is being read in absolutely unprecedented quantities as far as the United States is concerned, and the demand for even competent fiction is insatiable. | William Sloane |
| 27:42 | 25 years ago when I went into the book business, the average sale of a first novel was 2,500 to 3,000 copies. That was the average sale. Painfully enough at that time, 3,000 copies enabled the publishers to make a small but perceptible profit-- a couple hundred dollars maybe-- off the operation. | William Sloane |
| 28:04 | Today, the average sale of a novel without benefit of reprints or anything else is probably in the neighborhood of 5,500 or 6,000 copies. And it is an unprofitable figure, but nevertheless the population of the United States has not doubled in the 25 years since I went into this business. So then I would say that there was a substantial percentage-wise increase in this moribund art of the novel. | William Sloane |
| 28:32 | And I hear a lot about this question of plot this afternoon, and since I'm an editor and I'm supposed to tell novelists who come to me what the hell is wrong with the 385 pages of double-spaced typing that they submit to me, this question of plot keeps coming up. It's almost a term of reproach apparently in modern criticism. The only justification for a plot in perhaps to Simenon's sense is the readers like it. They are of course wrong, no doubt. But they do like it. | William Sloane |
| 29:08 | However, the essence of a novel is not plot, and I should be sorry to have this word stand for what the actual truth of the matter is. What a novel has is structure, and this structure has been best defined by Robert Frost, at least for my purposes. In talking about poems he said, "a poem, like a lump of ice on the top of a hot stove, precedes by its own melting. And the structure of a novel can be very simply described. A novel begins at the moment when the action which takes place within it becomes inevitable, and it ends when the materials of which it's composed have been consumed, melted, or anything else | William Sloane |
| 29:54 | This is not plot, but this is structure. And you can have plot on top of it, but I don't think that this is any arcane matter. I don't think that this is a question of schools of criticism. I think this is simply observable fact and will apply to any successful work of fiction. And one of the proofs of it is that from time to time, writers are aware of the fact that they have violated this Sloanee's law of the nature of the novel, and they put after pieces in there. | William Sloane |
| 30:23 | All of you remember the last long novel of John O'Hara's about Harrisburg, whatever the name of it was. | William Sloane |
| 30:30 | Hmm? | William Sloane |
| 30:31 | A Rage to Live, yeah. Well Mr. O'Hara was compelled in great embarrassment to write three or four pages at the end of his novel saying what became of the characters, and how some of the golf balls that he had teed up in the course of this story finally came to rest. And this is a demonstration of the fact that if you do not consume the material of your own book, your book is without a central structure and is unsatisfactory to the reader. Unsatisfactory to the point where even the author was compelled to try to satisfy the reader by an overt and ridiculous gesture. | William Sloane |
| 31:03 | But what is all this question about the problem of reality? This is another thing. This is the great "Serbonian bog where armies whole have sunk," to quote your favorite poet. And-- | William Sloane |
| 31:19 | --from the point of view of the writer, it seems to me that it is unwise to become a Bishop Berkeley about it in one sense, saying there is no reality and it all exists in the eye of the beholder, or to become a Samuel Johnson and the other, much better than Samuel Johnson. "Sir, I refute it thus." Stamping his foot on the paving stones in London. All reality, if you want to take a Chinese approach toward this, is a business of flesh And if you want to get metaphysical about it, it's motion. And specifically it's human beings in motion, because this is the only thing a novelist ever writes about anyhow. | William Sloane |
| 31:58 | So if the writer is able to persuade the reader that the reader is vicariously experiencing the fate of human beings in motion, through some form of time-- biologic or temporal or some other kind of time-- he has succeeded. And that is as much reality as can be created in a work of fiction. That's what I look for in a manuscript. That kind of conviction and nothing else. And you know, 99% of all the books I have ever turned down I turned down because they were dull. | William Sloane |
| 16:16 | Well, I don't really want to add to the sufferings of the audience in this thing. When I say Kafka is an allegory, I don't mean that I don't like allegories. And in particular I don't mean that I don't like Kafka, whose work I know very well and admire enormously. I do feel all the time that when people start discussing things like the novel and the short story, they ought merely for the purpose of discussion to define the term precisely. It doesn't matter whether they're defining it accurately or not. | Frank O'Connor |
| 16:52 | It does mean that we should all be speaking about the same thing. I've complained before about Mr. Foster's definition of the novel as any piece of fiction of more than 50,000 words in length, which as I say implies any prose translation of The Iliad or The Odyssey, implies all the sagas-- the Icelandic ones that Mr. West was talking about, and the Irish sagas, and which finally leads him to the absurdity of trying to criticize Zuleika Dobson in the same way as he's criticizing Thomas Hardy. | Frank O'Connor |
| 17:29 | You can't do it. Criticism just goes to pieces the moment you take 50 different forms and lump them all in together and try to make general rules for them. It's much better to take the allegory by itself, try to make rules for that if you can, try to criticize that properly. Kafka, I still maintain, is an allegory, a story like The Trial. I treat with contempt the German suggestion that it's a funny book. | Frank O'Connor |
| 17:58 | The Trial is really, as far as I can see it, the same thing that you get in Finnegans Wake. It is the question of a fall. What is man being tried for? And it's not being treated in specific terms. The mere idea itself precludes its treatment as a novel. It's being treated in general terms exactly as Bunyan treated the problems that he was treating in general terms. That's the reason he talks about a character called Christian. It's the same thing as Cain. | Frank O'Connor |
| 18:33 | If you try to dig in Pilgrim's Progress, into a history of the novel, you're going to get into hopeless confusion. And I merely try to narrow this definition down for my own convenience, and certainly with no idea of suggesting that merely because a novel-- a long work of fiction-- is an allegory, that it isn't a very, very important work. Obviously Pilgrim's Progress is, obviously The Castle above all of Kafka's. | Frank O'Connor |
| 19:08 | As for funny and comic, it doesn't seem to me that The Trial or-- neither The Trial nor The Castle is a funny book. Nor do I think that As I Lay Dying is a funny book, nor do I think that Don Quixote is a funny book. But I think that one of their ways to making an-- for my money a serious comment on significant things is by way of comedy. I think that there is a vast amount of comedy in Don Quixote, and I agree there's a great deal of comedy in As I Lay Dying. And I treat with real resentment any suggestion that The Trial and The Castle do not have enormous comic elements as it goes along. | Frank O'Connor |
| 22:07 | --Agonistes is a poem. You don't. | Frank O'Connor |
| 13:03 | INAUDIBLE on Kafka if I may. If I understood you, if I understood you right way, you show a sort of repulsive rejection against Kafka's allegoric style. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 13:21 | And you make-- you made a sort of difference between a novel and an allegory. Why don't you accept the allegorical form of a novel? I think it's based on very concrete experiences and it is more realistic than-- than certain novels of the so-called realistic manner. You-- one must not forget that he lived in the ghetto of Prague, and that all his novels are sort of a transfiguration of the conditions in a ghetto, of the jungle of a ghetto. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 14:09 | And I think that some of his allegories and parables which he had written in 1910-- as early as 1910-- are a concrete and precise prophecy of what has happened 30 years later all over Europe. And therefore I mean that-- I know a writer in Germany, a very well-known writer who, for example, was three times arrested under each government once. And each time by the same policeman. And that is-- that is his sort of diabolically-- diabolical paradox which is expressed in Kafka. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 14:55 | So therefore I think it's very concrete, and if you read it in German you'll see. It's absolutely non-extract-- abstract. Absolute concrete, and the language is full of flesh and flowers and blooms, like-- like flowers on the field. A very sound prose, not modern prose. Very conservative prose, prose which has been influenced-- very much influenced by the best dark bread writers as INAUDIBLE Grimm and INAUDIBLE , and Heber The most solid and-- and conservative. And-- and therefore I felt a little uneasy when you said-- when you said allegoric-- allegorical. | Hans Egon Holthusen |
| 15:53 | And for the last point, I think that this is a real progress, this Kafkan style, and a symbol for a certain changing of the-- changement of the novel at all. Of the task of the novel and of the form of the novel. A step forward. | Hans Egon Holthusen |