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August 3, Evening Part Two
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22:13
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APPLAUSE
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Audience |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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0:00
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22:13
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Frank O'Connor, "The Modern Novel"
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Program |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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1:00
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0:00
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All you've got to do is look at a Dutch interior to realize what the 19th century novel was going to be when it came. First of all, the old fanciful conception, the old genealogical conception, had been wiped out. And in its place, you got something which we can vaguely call realism. And everybody today tells me you can't define realism.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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0:27
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And I don't mind whether you can define realism or not, it's there in Dutch painting. And it's there in the 19th century novel. And in the Dutch paintings, you get the poetry of everyday life expressed for the first time in the history of the human race.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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0:48
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And when you come to the 19th century novel, that is really what you get. It was only today that a friend of mine referred me to an essay which I've never read, and which I'm quoting to you on trust, an essay by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade, in which he defines what the 19th century novel is going to be. And in this essay, he says, the novel-- as soon as the novelists have learned to deal with the new reading public-- will deal with the differences between professions.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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1:26
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It will deal with the differences between races. It will educate the new middle class about what ordinary life is like. And the amazing thing is that the Marquis de Sade never listened to his own advice.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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1:42
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There's a complete change in the values established by the 19th century novel. Instead of honor, the feudal conception, you get the conception of honesty. Trollope can write a masterpiece about an old clergyman who can't explain what he's done with a check for 25 pounds-- $75. And a whole novel is built upon this theme.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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2:13
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And for the first time, again, you feel that certain subjects are being dealt with as they should be dealt with. When I read Tolstoy's description of Sebastopol, I feel that war, for the first time in the history of the human race, is being dealt with, with the gravity that it demands.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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2:36
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And this thing was not confined to the novelists. It was part of the whole middle class conception of life. Because again, I'm repeating myself, and I'm quite prepared to go on repeating myself-- at the other side of the lines from Tolstoy, there was a young English woman called Florence Nightingale. And Florence Nightingale was trying to prove to the English government that women could make nurses.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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3:06
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And she describes in her journals how these English boys who were dying of exposure and starvation outside Scutari, were being brought down to her. And she was haunted by the face of these English boys. And in her journals, she uses phrases like this-- "Oh, my poor men, I have been a bad mother to you. To go away and leave you in your Crimean graves. 76% in eight regiments in six months."
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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3:48
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And there you have the whole middle class conception of life which is also expressed in Sebastopol. For the first time, you've got that Shakespearean cry of emotion-- "My poor men, I have been a bad mother to you." But it's also expressed in percentages.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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4:09
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For the first time, you get statistical diagnosis. And it's been practiced by a woman.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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4:20
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And then, we move to the modern novel, and we find the whole picture is entirely different. I moved in this way simply because I lived in a provincial town, and nobody had told me that there was any gap. Nobody had told me that a classical novel had ended in 1880, and had begun again in 1910, with people like Forster, and Gide and Proust, and Joyce, and Lawrence. But it had, and it was an entirely different thing.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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4:55
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To begin with, in Joyce's work, when I read it-- and I admired it extravagantly, because it was dealing with the sort of life I knew-- you got a type of realism which I didn't understand. And I didn't understand it until I turned to the work of Flaubert. And I realized that it wasn't realism-- it was naturalism.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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5:19
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It was the man standing outside the situation he was describing, saying, "this has got nothing at all to do with me." In the realistic novel, the writer said, I'm just a man like these men. And I feel with them. And I don't mind weeping over them, and I don't mind laughing at them.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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5:37
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But Flaubert said, you can't get involved in these things. And Joyce takes it up. And in stories like the stories in Dubliners, you get something which was entirely new to me-- you get naturalism, as opposed to realism. And after a time, it began to weary me enormously.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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6:01
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As well as that, you get another thing in Dubliners-- which goes on through Portrait, and goes on through all Joyce's work, and goes on through the whole of modern literature, and that is the use of metaphor. You realize when you read a story like "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," or "The Dead," that the characters that Joyce is describing are not free. They are characters who are representing something else, and every action they perform, and every word they say is related to something else, which is a symbol, which is a metaphor.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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6:47
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For instance, in "The Dead," not one single sentence is uttered which is not related to Joyce's idea of death. And that, again, was new to me. You get the same thing in the Portrait, except that it grows in complexity all the way through. And finally, you get it in Ulysses.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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7:12
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In Ulysses, you get a character, Mr. Bloom, who is also the hero of The Odyssey. His wife at one time is Calypso, at another time, she's Penelope.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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7:29
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And the unfortunate man whose funeral he's attending, a gentleman called Dignam, happens to be somebody called El Pinar in The Odyssey. And as El Pinar is a Semitic word which means drunk. Mr. Dignam has to be too fond of drink. That's what really kills him, eventually.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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7:52
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There, you get something, again, entirely new in fiction. You get the character controlled from the word, "go." Mr. Bloom just is not allowed to say or do anything which is not relevant to the theme.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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8:10
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I have to apologize for introducing all the scurrilous details, but today I found myself having to explain to my class why it is that Mr. Bloom, after breakfast, having occasion to go apart, shall we say, has the choice between going upstairs and going out to the yard. And the subject of the chapter is metempsychosis-- Mr. Bloom, in fact, is Ulysses, and he's following out the program of Ulysses in The Odyssey.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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9:00
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Now, his freedom of action is considerably restricted, because Joyce is using the ordinary processes of life-- the growth of grass, crops, and so on, cattle feeding on them, the human beings finally feeding on the cattle, and the byproducts being returned to the Earth, and coming up again as grass-- he's using this as an analogy to illustrate the process of metempsychosis. Consequently, Mr. Bloom cannot go upstairs.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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9:42
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The one thing a metaphor cannot do is let its author down. And the Almighty, at least, gave us two choices, but Joyce only gives us one. And all I can say is that I have no respect at all for a character who allows himself to be dictated to in this way, particularly in such intimate matters by an author.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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10:14
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And of course, finally, in Finnegans Wake, you reach the position where what is in the unconscious in Ulysses just comes on top-- everything is a metaphor. Humanity, itself, is a metaphor. Every movement we make is a metaphor. It's all dictated, it's all determined-- we've got nothing at all to say to it.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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10:38
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Then, I turn to Proust who is one of my earliest heroes, and I think will be until the day I die, and I notice again peculiar things which I don't notice in the classical novel. For instance, in Du coté de chez Swann you get a character called Swann who is in love with a woman called Odette. And that love story represents the pattern of all the love episodes through Proust. Every single love episode is based on that.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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11:14
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And it describes the pattern is the pattern of a very rich, and a very cultured man, who falls in love with a woman definitely of the lower classes, who is completely uneducated, and who is entirely venal. And the theme that Proust is hammering home in every single one of these love stories is that, in effect, when we fall in love with a woman, we create the woman.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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11:47
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There is no woman there. We create her. We fall out of love with her, she ceases to exist.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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11:56
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And it's only after I had read Proust very carefully that I began to discover that this affected everything that Proust wrote. That in fact, the whole theory of Proust's work depends upon this one idea that in love, there is no reciprocity. Once you fall in love, you fall in love with an idea in your own mind, not with something in the external world.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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12:23
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Accordingly, you get Proust laying down the law about it-- you get him saying that nothing but inaccurate observation will permit you to say that there is any truth in an object. All truth is in the mind.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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12:43
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Now, I can make no distinction between what Joyce is saying and what Proust is saying. What they are saying is that the old objective world of the classical novel doesn't exist. There is nothing outside me as Coquelin and Yeats's last great play says, "I make the truth."
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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13:05
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And what I really want to know is, how does that differ from the statements of people like Mussolini and Hitler? Don't they say, "I make the truth?" What else is this, except literary fascism?
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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13:22
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And there, you come back to the intellectual background of the modern novel. You come back to the fact that, behind all this work, there is an intellectual background, which is entirely subjective.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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13:36
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You come back to a psychological background-- of Freud and Jung-- which simply says, a certain pattern has been created for our lives, and we follow that pattern out. We don't control it-- it goes on in spite of us.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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13:54
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What Proust is really saying is what Bergson says-- there, you get a subjective philosophy, which, in fact, refuses to distinguish between the subject and the object. Refuses to distinguish between me and the external world.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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14:13
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Its part is one of these anti-rational philosophies which have been springing up all the time during the past 50 years. And as well as that, particularly in Joyce, particularly in Ulysses, and in Finnegans Wake, you get this subjective conception of history which begins with Flinders Petrie, and goes on through Spengler, and ends up in our own time with Toynbee, which says, that history is merely a pattern and we've got to fall into the pattern. We can't affect the pattern. There it is, dictated for us. And that is precisely what Joyce is saying, and precisely what the other writers are saying.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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15:01
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Now, all that comes from, very curiously, the only critic I know who has traced this-- is a modern French novelist, whom I admire enormously, Marcel Ayme. And Marcel Ayme has written a brilliant book called, Le Confort Intellectual-- just enjoying yourself intellectually, if you like, in which he attacks the whole conception of modern literature, and maintains that modern literature has been going wrong since Baudelaire. And makes an awfully good case for it.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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15:46
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The only way in which Ayme goes wrong is that he doesn't realize that Baudelaire is picking up something else which goes back to the romantic revival-- that is going back to Byronism, to sadism, to precisely what the Marquis de Sade was doing. That this thing ran underground right through the 19th century. That it came up in two people-- Baudelaire in poetry, and Flaubert in prose.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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16:19
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In Flaubert, you get the naturalistic novel-- the novel which intends to be realistic, but all the time at its side, you get these wildly romantic writing. Things like the Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salammbo, in which all the perversions dealt with by Sade at last come to light.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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16:48
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These continue along until 1880, the death of the classical novel. Mario Praz has dealt with this very brilliantly and very wickedly in his book, Romantic Agony. The interesting thing is that I've been saying for a great many years, since the classical novel died in 1880, and Mario Praz says, the extraordinary thing is, the full revival, a full romantic revival only comes with the year 1880. When the classical novel dies, the romantic revival books start coming out, you get Wilde, and all the rest of it.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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17:32
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And in fact, what has happened, as far as I can see it, is that this literature of the romantic revival, approved by Freud, approved by Spengler, approved by Bergson, has become modern literature. That is the modern novel-- it is romantic revival literature with all the characteristics of the romantic revival about it.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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18:01
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The unnatural triangle that you find in Swan, Odette and INAUDIBLE , and in Bloom and Blazes Boylan, and Marion Bloom, that you find all over the work of Lawrence, that you find in the work of Mr. Faulkner, Popeye's relationship with Temple Drake, that you find in Hemmingway's, The Sun Also Rises-- it is the old romantic sadistic conception.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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18:36
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Now, I have very little time left, and all I want to say is, as I told you before, I found myself living through two periods of literary taste, and I have a feeling that I'm going to live to see the beginning of a third. Already all over Europe, I think there is a change, that is a difference in attitude, and it's very easy to see where that difference in attitude comes from.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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19:09
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When you read Marcel Ayme's book on Le Confort Intellectual, you see that the thing that really impressed him was the horrors of the liberation-- the tens of thousands of Frenchmen who were massacred all over the place on no ground whatever, for no reason whatever. You get this fantasy of malice expressing itself.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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19:34
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And as well as that, on the other hand, as he says, when the Allied troops burst into the concentration camps, what they found before them was a poem by Baudelaire. And it's Buchenwald, and Belsen, and the horrors of the liberation through Europe-- which I believe have wakened up the younger writers, have made them realize that you can't any longer live in a subject of world. That somehow or other, you've got to face the fact that objective reality exists, and you've got to come to terms with it.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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20:11
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I believe there are signs of that in the work of Marcel Ayme, who was a much finer novelist than he's given credit for being. In the work of my friend, C. P. Snow. In the work of Joyce Kerry in England. And in particular, in the work of some followers of C. P. Snow, who believes as he does, that this period is over and done with, that you can never go back to what we call the modern novel.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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20:40
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And I don't know what the answers are to the questions I've been raising tonight. All through history, you get this conflict between the inner man and the outer man, between the thing you feel to be true and the truth which is outside you.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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21:06
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And the only light I've got on the subject is in that passage in the Gospels, which I keep on quoting whenever I'm asked about it, the passage in which Christ is asked by the doctor of the laws, which is the most important of the commandments. And Christ knew that if he said the first commandment, he was admitting that reality was subjective. If he said, the second commandment, he was saying that reality was objective.
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Frank O'Connor |
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August 3, Evening Part Two
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21:38
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He simply quotes the first two commandments and says, there is no commandment more important than these. I've always felt that what he meant by that was reality is neither within us nor without us-- it's both within us and without us. And it's inapprehensible, except in moments when the two strike together, when they strike a spark from one another, and there is no truth more important than that.
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Frank O'Connor |