Annotations for "August 4 Session Discussion"

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Item	Time	Annotation	Layer
August 4, Afternoon Part One	0:05	First of all, I wonder if the people in the back would fill up seats to the front. This makes a better operation all the way around. In the very first row, I wonder if the members of the conference or other members of ? parliament. ?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	0:42	A word about the microphone system, which is always a problem for everyone, has been solved very well here, I believe. That is, you're not supposed to walk to the microphone when you are making a statement from the audience. I'm told that if you merely look directly at the microphone from anywhere you are, the way they are scattered around is such that it will pick up the sound for this particular room. So instead of spending the afternoon stumbling over each other's feet, just speak from where you are at at that point.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	1:13	The function of these afternoon sessions is to add new material to the subject of the conference and give further opportunity to work over things that have been stated previously. We're fortunate to have today as a speaker, who will talk for approximately half an hour or so, a man who will give us new material and, I think, be dealing also with the essential subjects that were raised last night and will, I assume, be raised throughout the rest of the meeting.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	0:00 - 1:13	August 4 Session Discussion	Program
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	4:30	I would say, why not just use imagination makes images? That said, in this instance, I would think that the beginning of criticism is that which the writer himself uses when he steps back and looks at his work.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	4:52	And I would say that any kind of dramatic treatment of fiction-- that is, where the fiction is dramatic rather than the memoir type of novel-- that if you have some such image at the post as a kind of a controlling factor-- as I think War and Peace, for example, has and many others-- that you get out of this ambiguity.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	5:17	By moral, of course, it is an aesthetic point. But it seems to me the mere fact of an image-- that is, an imagination makes pictures and images, and that is controlled through some dramatic action. And I believe-- I mean, I'm objecting also in terms of that to the word organization. I don't believe that's the way it grows.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	5:36	I think it is a kind of growth that's controlled, that you use a craft, which is a concrete thing upon the invisible content of the mind. So some way in there, you get the creative act that nobody quite knows how it's done. It is finely mysterious. And it seems to me that in a matter of organization, the moment you organize a thing, you kill it, moment.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	6:00	And so that is not actually the process. I know I've been speaking about two different things here. Since it is a general discussion, I propose then that you use just for imagination since it seems to me that is a thing that the artist himself uses directly. And by controlling it by craft, he reaches or may reach what he sets out to reach. But by organization, you will kill the creative act.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	9:18	Just a moment here, and then I won't get up any more. I believe I said that you put the image, which might be a symbol, even, at the post of observation. I must say that here I defend not the formless, but those people who use form. Formalism and the formalist-- again, I don't want to be quibbling-- but not quite the word.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	9:40	But if you do Suppose you do take a position. Well, don't you get a dichotomy there? That is, if you look only into your own imagination, into yourself, your ego, you get a narcissistic kind of thing. And if you look only over here into the world, you get lost into the discrete objects of the world.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	9:59	But if you get kind of an insight into yourself and insight into the world and focus that all through this image here, this controlling image at the point of view, then the matter of the moral issue will be behind in your mind. That's what I'm at. I didn't mean to defend immorality here.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	10:17	But that's the kind of thing I mean. It seems to me that is a sort of function that the artist may undertake. In other words, I'm saying the thing of organization-- to come to the other part-- is that it superimposes on the raw matter of the subject before you really know what it is, before you've dealt with it enough, a kind of arbitrary ordering, which might inhibit the creative act.	Andrew Lytle
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	26:03	I'd like to intrude something this, and that is that it seems to me that we're heading towards-- from one side to another-- that the pie in the sky will regenerate to the INAUDIBLE , that type of thing. In the world, there is both order and there is disorder, and it is our responsibility-- each man's responsibility, as well as the artist's responsibility-- to repair, to order, to proceed.	Anthony West
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	26:35	And the aesthetic experience is something that is above the disorder of the moment. And I think, therefore, that is an argument for the moral responsibility of the writer.	Anthony West
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	1:15	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	10:15	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:00	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:51	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:04	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:09	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:17	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:31	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	14:03	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:32	Well--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:34	Lots of them.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:38	All of them? Well, one--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:46	One question I had for Mr. Frohock was in relation to the moral imagination. I think Mr. Ellison answered very well. But I would like to ask him how he considers-- He made a statement about it not being a moral act to be disgusted with a pigsty or a slum. It seems to me that--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	18:23	Well, the question is whether or not it is more of a moral act to be annoyed or disgusted or want to change a slum, or is it more of another kind of act? It seems to me that when you have an imagination without some kind of morality involved, what you get is Celine and not Mr. Ellison or Richard Wright, a writing of that kind.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:00	This is the thing that is lacking in much of literature and that is needed. I think when you abstract-- if you want to go away from the formalist critics but you want something new, what it winds up with is an investigation of the technique that Mr. Ellison uses in this section of the novel that you mentioned, which seemed--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:25	I'd like an answer that question, by the way, whether that was apropos. It seemed to me that section of the novel-- this is another question--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:34	Second one.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:54	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:58	Wasn't the technique in that section more straightforward and more naturalistic?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:04	Yes. I thought you were referring particularly to that section in the hospital.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:09	Well, what would you posit-- continue the question-- as an activity for the critic in terms of the novel rather than the consideration of the moral imagination?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:43	I'm sorry. It wasn't. The main question that I have is whether or not you consider the moral imagination-- with emphasis on the moral-- to be the quintessence of the novelist job and activity.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:46	You seem to be throwing out--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:07	Yeah.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:09	And what would you put?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:49	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	24:46	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	24:56	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:03	INAUDIBLE it seems like it's awfully--	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:18	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:53	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	26:59	I had a question.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	27:00	Fine. Thank you. It seemed to me when Mr. Frohock was speaking-- I'd like to get Mr. Frohock off the hook, but I don't see my way to advise since he apparently has insight into wanting the stuff that I don't have. The idea about manners in the novel and any relevance to this discussion.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	27:19	It seems to me we're drifting clean off into Plutonic orbits in this morality, beauty business. You seem to feel that Mr. Trilling doesn't want to abandon the moral imagination, and yet we have some difficulty in not doing so.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	27:41	And I wondered whether this idea of memories of in the novel is the kind of medial point that Trilling sought that is an invasion or perhaps a solution. In other words, what does Trilling mean by manners and knowledge? Or if you don't know the answer, perhaps someone here does.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	28:50	Now, do you think he means by manners anything like what Eliot means by a way of life when he speaks of that and the idea of political society particularly	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	29:32	I know that from something Mr. Frohock said, that he felt that if we had another sort of criticism or a different sort of criticism, a criticism of some kind, a novelist like Sinclair Lewis would be more highly regarded. I wish he would tell me what I can't see. I feel that Sinclair Lewis to many readers today is just dull.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	29:54	I don't see how any kind of criticism can make them change their minds about it being being dull. But if they don't change their minds, why are they going to be interested, and why are they going to read it? I'd like some hint about what this kind of criticism could be and how it would operate.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	30:09	So I think this is quite different from the kind of criticism that enables some people to understand what they previously didn't understand so to find something interesting simply because they're given a wider web, which I don't think would be at all the case about the type of criticism you would have to have, and it's possible, here.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	30:29	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:18	Do you feel then the critic should explain why so many readers do find Lewis dull?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:32	No. Are you?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:33	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:34	Not in this day INAUDIBLE	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:36	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	32:22	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	32:51	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	1:29	I think today we should feel that we have the luxury of having time for discussion. Usually, after speeches, there's a great desire for the audience and participants in general to talk. Yet, there isn't enough time. Today, I think we should feel secure and in having at least until about 4:15. Therefore, I think everyone should feel he can say what he wants to say.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	1:59	I should like to ask if there's any comment from any of the members of the conference. Mr. Hyman? Excuse me. If every speaker would just rise where he is, I believe that these microphones are not speaking to the audience, merely putting the proceedings on tape, and you will be picked up from wherever you are if you look at the microphone. Thank you.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	3:55	Mr. Frohock, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	4:29	Mr. Lytle?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	10:49	Mr. O'Connor?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:07	Mr. Frohock?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:08	Yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	15:01	Mr. Ellison, would you speak to this subject? I'm not at this moment sure what the subject is, but would you speak to it nevertheless?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:22	Mr. West? Do you have anything to say, got anything to say? Your hand was up a moment ago, sir. Has your question been answered, or would you like to ask it now?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:33	Or a new one?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:36	All right. Any of them. All of them.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	17:41	Would you stand up please so that the audience can hear you more clearly? Thank you.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:56	Mr. Hyman?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	22:28	You're in agreement.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	22:29	Mr. O'Connor?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:31	Mr. Humes	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:34	Would you stand up?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:57	Mr. Simenon? Will you?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	26:01	Yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	26:53	All right. Mr. INAUDIBLE ? Will you speak to any aspect of this or introduce a new aspect?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	29:30	Yes, yes.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	10:52	I don't think I've got very much to say, Mr. Chairman. I just feel that this is no place for a simple-minded Irishman.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:04	I gathered from Professor Frohock that he was against the criticism of form, and I also gathered that he was against criticism based on the social consciousness. And I also gather that he was against criticism based on ethical consciousness.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:28	We were apparently starting a new school of criticism to be called the transformists. And the only principle of the transformist school of criticism is if I translate Baudelaire correctly to transform voluptuousness into information.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:51	--and I wish somebody would clarify it for me. As a mere artist, I feel that I'm being imposed upon, that I'm being asked to do a great number of things which I haven't the faintest intention of doing for anybody.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	22:32	All I feel about this, Mr. Chairman, is that we are getting involved in this business of a moralist. I think there are certain novelists who are moralists. For instance, Jane Austen is one. Chekhov is a moralist.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	22:46	Their main task is in relating society as they see it to their vision of a good man and a good woman. Trollope is not a moralist. Trollope is quite content to take the ordinary conventions of a society. He's got a wider range than either of these.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:08	He hasn't got their intensity. I think we should distinguish-- we should admit that there are certain writers who are fundamentally moralists, and there are others who are not. And I entirely fail to understand this general agreement that morality is a form of aesthetics. It isn't.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:35	There's half a dozen different meanings for the word moral. I'm wondering whether perhaps I'd like to ask Mr. Frohock what-- he doesn't mean that the passionate imagination or the compassionate imagination, the sympathetic imagination, or even the indignant imagination-- but moral imagination, as far as I can see, it seems to me to be a very useless tool.	Harold Humes
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:58	If the aim-- if you accepted the hypothesis that the creation of beauty is a fundamental useless act or not utilitarian in the sense that serves no usable purpose-- that's not its fundamental aim. Someone may get satisfaction out of it incidental to the creation of piece of beauty.	Harold Humes
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	24:17	But if you inject the notion of moral in the philosophical sense into the use of the imagination as a creative factor in the construction of a thing of beauty, it seems to me that we're no longer talking about art. We're talking about the styling of a new ford It doesn't seem to me to be consistent with the idea of creation. I know I'm being very incoherent about this thing, and I'm glad.	Harold Humes
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	24:58	Sink or swim.	Harold Humes
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:32	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:43	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:56	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:55	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	23:32	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:58	INAUDIBLE	Panelists
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	0:01 - 32:51	August 4 Session Discussion	Program
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	15:09	I'm afraid I'm in very much the same position. I would say this, that I rather agree with Mr. Hyman that despite our intentions, the novelist does perform a moral role. And the imagination is moral simply because it creates value.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	15:40	Now, you can find in this ethics. You can find in it many other things. But it's implicit, and any form which is so obsessed with time, change, and the mysteries of society-- of course, of human experience.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	15:59	I see no way of avoiding the fact that in the very business of selection and ordering, of giving a form of pattern, we do perform a moral operation-- not necessarily in the religious ethical sense, but it's a matter of choice. It's a matter of accepting and rejecting certain aspects of a given experience.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	16:31	Incidentally, the novel always looks backward. I guess that was said last night. It's concerned with what has been and through what has been. Through extracting the meaning of what has been, we create values of the day.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	16:47	Now, the other thing, which I would say to enforce it, is that the novel means to communicate. It is first of all a medium of communication. I don't care if it's restricted to a small group of existentialists-- you name it. There must be a shared experience in between the process of the novel-- the process which is a novel and the audience which received.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	2:20	Well, since I spoke last night of the moral imagination in a favorable tone, I imagine that I'm tarred with Mr. Frohock's brush. And I just want to put in one reservation that I think he's using the term in too limited a fashion to reduce the moral imagination to some kind of ethical concern, as perhaps Mr. Trilling, who is not entirely my favorite critic, does seems to me to be making too little of what I think, as I claimed last night, is a central phenomenon in all fictional or all imaginative writing.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	2:55	I would insist, that is, that the moral imagination is not an ethical matter only but is the organization of experience into significance, that is, can be equated with form, can be equated with the craft of art. Insofar as this experience is made meaningful is organized, that is an exercise of the moral imagination.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	3:16	These facts are related, are structured meaningfully in relation to human life. And I would add, too, along those lines, to Mr. Frohock's slogan from Baudelaire, one that I think I think is significant there. Freud's slogan, that we must colonize ed with ego. That spreading of the rational, the idea that Freud said was the principle of his work and that is probably the principle of ours, too.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	3:41	The idea that somehow we have to drain these irrational marshes is the operation of the artist and, of course, is the operation of the moral imagination in infection and should probably be the critics' concern, too.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	4:00	Oh, I would, surely.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	7:54	Well, I won't fight for organization, but I'm afraid I have to fight for moral. Organization is perhaps a bad word in that it does suggest this kind of mechanical operation. I'd be glad to move on to any other more satisfactory one. But just seeing this thing in terms of the imagination seems to me, again, to lack enough distinction.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	8:15	I suspect that a boy pulling the wings off flies is exercising the imagination so that some other operation is involved in art. And I think probably I liked organization because of that idea of the ordering. There's a poem of Wallace Stevens called "A Jar in Tennessee," I think, about placing a jar on a bare hilltop in Tennessee, and all the wilderness around it comes into shape because of that jar.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	8:41	That it seems to me is a little fable of the artist's role. That is, this organization of that wilderness by that jar is, I would insist, a moral act, is an act of the moral imagination, is the creation of art.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:56	Well, I think we had Mr. Frohock agreeing before if we had a concept of the moral large enough to include the creation of beauty as a moral act, and I thought that he was willing to join on those terms, which it seems to me any deep and meaningful use of moral would include so that if the impulse of some artists is nothing more or less than to make a beautiful thing-- whether it be a pigsty or not-- we would certainly regard that as one of the possible moral activities.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	0:01	The mind revolts. Reality buzzes and booms at him. The exterior world explodes at him, beats him up, shuts him up in a box. Experience shoots at him and throws spears. The hero's mind posits an objective, verifiable reality outside itself and assumes it to be where it should be.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	0:26	But the continuous shock makes him perceive it as if it were hallucination. The impact of so violent a world keeps him on the ragged line that separates fantasy from waking, from waking and stably conscious life. This is the effect that Celine aims at in Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan without ever quite bringing it off.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	0:56	How Ralph Ellison brings it off demands the attention of the kind of critic we so badly need. Criticism of the kind I've been asking for may be slow in coming, but we must have it, and it's not inconceivable that we shall.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	3:57	Under moral, would you include aesthetic?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	4:01	Well, then I'm right with you all the way. I don't think that Mr. Trilling does. In fact, I can put my hand on the Bible and say that he doesn't because we have discussed it. I think, then, probably that we're tied up in the ambiguity of a word that we may have to throw overboard.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	6:29	Well, Mr. Lytle, part of our difference there may be regional. I'm probably too much of a swamp Yankee to want to appear as the enemy of the word moral. But on the other hand, for the purposes that we're working at, which is to find a label, I would have no-- I think probably a good old word that has been batted around as much as imagination has is as useful as any.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	7:01	If Mr. Hyman has a special reason for retaining the word moral, I'd rather he were the one to defend it. As for organization, the letter killeth I think by the word organization, we mean, really, simply ordering some activity of the mind, and we're pretty vague about the psychology of it.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	7:30	The French use the object very frequently to the word organization as a barbarism and instead say, put order in. SPEAKING IN FRENCH such and such a thing, which really suggests-- unless it suggests the straitjacket-- suggests some sort of process. And I think that's all we're at. Am I wrong?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	9:00	With that poem is an illustration, though. The poem goes on to point out that the wilderness also makes the jar somewhat-- this overly organized jar-- somewhat tawdry, so that I believe that the poem by Wallace Stevens doesn't answer this question. It's just in the middle of both sides of the discussion.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	9:17	INAUDIBLE	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	11:48	Now, I find that awfully difficult to follow--	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:07	Can I ask--	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:14	How would you like to be in my place?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:20	First of all, I'm not the Irishman, and therefore, shouldn't be expected to be against everything. And I--	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:38	And I'm a little bit alarmed to discover that I've been understood to reject at least two forms of critical activity, which I thought I was recommending but calling incomplete.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	12:55	And I'd like to correct myself, if I did seem to reject them, and insist that I was saying that each one by itself did an incomplete job and that because of their incompleteness they were more or less at liberty to walk around like those people in the inferno who are punished by having their heads twisted around in the other direction.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	13:26	That, I hoped, was my point. As for transformism, dear, I associate that with biology, somehow, and I'm a little bit lost. But the main point is that Baudelaire wasn't asking the artist to do it. Baudelaire was asking the critic to do it.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	13:49	The onus isn't on you, sir, except that, as you do so well once in a while, put on the wolf's clothing. You are under some obligation now and then.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	14:06	Baudelaire was talking about Tannhauser of all things. And the music delighted him, and he discovered that other people underwent or experienced, rather, a very similar delight. And nobody had tried to say why, and that carried him from what I would call an intuitive experience-- almost a shock on the nerves, if you like-- into some sort of mental activity.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	14:37	And he tries to figure out why it is that Tannhauser delights him, which seems to me one of the necessary operations of all criticism. In any case, although I recommend that attitude, I didn't invent it.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	18:14	The word was exclusively moral act-- explicitly moral. And I think the root of the question-- I see what's coming.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:33	--is involved with this one.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:36	That section of the novel was merely where the protagonist was taken to a hospital after his experience in the paint company. Is that the one you--	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	19:44	Well no, I would also include the place where old Rass is up on the horse throwing spears wearing God knows what kind of costume. You must remember the place, Mr. Ellison.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:03	And not hallucinated?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:07	No, I wasn't.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	20:25	I am a victim of my own inability, I think, to attend to any one set of words. Or maybe you let me off there a little bit. One of us is tying me in knots. Anyway, would you put the main question again?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:06	Can I answer?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:08	No.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:11	I won't accept a the exclusive definition there of the moral of this job. There's motive there-- may be moral in Mr. Hyman's sense of the word or Mr. Trilling's sense of the word. Moral-- I don't see any reason in the world why it can't be purely aesthetic.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	21:35	Or I don't see why it has to be exclusively one or the other as in my most unfortunate metaphor-- and I wish to God I hadn't said anything-- about the pigsty and the slum. If I had just stopped with the pigsty, I'd have been well off.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	22:26	Well, I did mean that.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	24:50	Am I in the position now of having to defend the word moral whether I wanted or not?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:01	Well, how did I ever get there?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:06	I blamed it on somebody else. As a matter of fact, I told Stanley Edgar Hyman before this group met that I never wanted him to say again that he hadn't been stooged for.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:22	I have done everything but get down on the floor and squirm about that word moral. As for compassionate imagination, sympathetic imagination, I'm awfully worried if I get very far into that that I will end up-- I seem to be doing things that I don't mean to do here-- end up proclaiming that my favorite novelist is John Steinbeck because he has more compassion than brains.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	25:55	I don't want to do it.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	28:00	I recommend a good chapter in the liberal imagination on the subject, which is the transcript of a speech that he made originally at Kenyon College, I believe. I can't answer your question. I don't have that much insight into Mr. Trilling.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	28:18	But it sounds to me when I read him as though he wanted to restrict the meaning of the word novel to the kind of fiction which made its capital of manners, ways of living in groups, and so forth where those were rather strictly ruled by recognized conventions. Bad word. I can't imagine a convention that was unrecognized.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	29:03	I suspect so. I read Eliot's book I don't know how long ago and remember only my resentment of it at the time. But I suspect that there is a slight joining of minds in that direction. It's only a suspicion, and I could be easily refuted by anyone who has Eliot and INAUDIBLE at his fingertips.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	30:27	Well, once again, why do I sit down?	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	30:31	Would anybody else like to talk? My point would be-- my point was-- that Sinclair Lewis does not, if I'm right, have the lowest state that he has on the critical ladder because of his dullness. And the question of his dullness hasn't been in most criticism of issue.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:00	The issue has been that as far as literary form was concerned, his novels were, if you like, uninteresting to the critic. Now, maybe that's wrong. That is, maybe I've misunderstood the critic.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:24	I think that would be a good thing if somebody did it. I wouldn't mind at all, but you're not under the impression that a novelist's dullness keeps him from being read.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	31:38	And I would say the same for certain pages of, say, Albertine in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I happened to spend a year of my life making sure that a piece of coral rock out in the Pacific Ocean would not move. The Japanese didn't want to move it, but we couldn't go away.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	32:09	It was one of the rarest opportunities I've ever had for reading, and I had the Random House two volume Proust out of the chaplain's library.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Two	32:25	That's why you get books. It's the only place you can get books, so that's where it came from. And I kept it for a long, long time, and I read myself assiduously to sleep with it every night. And it was some time before a pair of my fellow defenders of that country admitted to me that they had been taking my bookmark night after night and putting it back in the text INAUDIBLE.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	0:00	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	0:40	Why is it it varies from book to book and from reader to reader. But I do think that there are very many people today who simply can't read Sinclair Lewis. They just find him intolerably stupid.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:03	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:26	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	4:31	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	5:46	Some kind of person come down to Earth. I dare ask a question. A very distinguished professor emeritus of Harvard has said that, "William Faulkner writes for morons," unquote. May we have some expert comment on that?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:05	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:16	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:18	CLAPPING	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:41	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:46	I think Professor--Mr.--Frohock said it.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	7:27	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	18:22	CHUCKLING	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	22:20	CHUCKLING	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:48	CHUCKLING	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	25:59	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	27:53	CHUCKLING	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	27:54	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	28:22	Seems to me that the most-- the very generalized discussion, which brought down INAUDIBLE , it was Ellison who said that the novel is a form of communication. And going from that, this question is directed to Mr. O'Connor, who has confused me considerably. I feel every time I stand up, there's a great chasm opening. And into this chasm disappear too many of my heroes.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	28:50	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	28:52	Mr. O'Connor, spoke INAUDIBLE of the novel of 1970-- '50 as emphasize middle-class values. And I think I got a pattern in my mind. This has been carried on.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	29:07	In the '30s, we had the proletariat semi-political novels of Dos Passos and Steinbeck in dubious battle, which communicated the values of proletariat. And since the war, it seems to me we have a great many novelists who were in the war who are trying to communicate now the great uncertainty of the orgy of violence without reason that they were engulfed in. And I wonder if, Mr. O'Connor, do you think this is a valid thing for novels to communicate?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	29:42	I know it's subjective. And is very personal to an individual. The novel has certainly become that, as you pointed out last night.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	29:52	Yet isn't this all part of a pattern of communication, starting with the novel's forebearers?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	30:01	Mr. O'Connor?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	5:45	Yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:00	Is there anyone who can speak to this?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:07	Well he writes about morons. Well, he doesn't specifically aim at professors emeritus of Harvard University, obviously.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:20	And therefore, he may not attract their favorable attention. This is a big subject. We've been having big subject. Do you mean-- are you asking, essentially, whether or not William Faulkner has a moral imagination?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:50	I will say that I haven't made a living by, but I've supplemented my income by, giving a little talk around entitled-- just because of this problem-- entitled William Faulkner moralist, you see. To prove-- and any author who is a moralist-- the fact that I say is unproven-- but any author who is a moralist, we assume is not writing for morons because I think we assume that morons, at least the courts do, assume that they are neither eligible for officers candidate school nor are exempt in time of war and are not--	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	7:30	--and are not to be held totally responsible. They are frequently wards of the court or ward-- they are assigned people to take care of them as wards. No. William Faulkner, I think-- I'm naturally in a prejudiced position, here, because if I said I like him, this place would be in a category that you brought up. And I don't want to place myself there. The rest is up to you. But I think that without any doubt, whatever the Faulkner is an issue here.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	8:00	He is not the newest breed of novelist. He wrote in an earlier period. But I think one of the reasons for his present popularity, for the enormous attention that he is receiving, is that the times have changed-- as Mr. Ellison suggested and he somehow seems, to more readers, to be speaking to them. And I think one of the reasons that he has been accused of writing for morons-- though I really don't take that very seriously.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	8:30	I think he's been accused of writing for people who want to read filth. And this doesn't limit itself to morons. -- I think that William Faulkner has very-- fortunately for us at the moment, he wrote a kind of thing that wasn't extremely comprehensible at first glance to readers trained in another tradition. So that I find that the people who are his strongest supporters now are-- among his strongest supporters-- are the students who are, we hope, from whom the writers of the future will come.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	9:08	They don't want to do just what he's doing. But they feel that among the older hands who have been making a living at this for some time, here is the man who's doing closer to what they are trying to do than other writers have been doing. And I believe that his revival is close to the center of what we've been discussing earlier today. And that is the question of reality, and organization, and whether or not-- and the question of last night-- whether or not the novel is popular, and should reach a large audience, and all the rest.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	9:36	Now Dos Passos's USA was a very popular book when it came out. And this rose from the middle classes though he is not middle class. And it was read by the middle classes. And it seemed to me-- speaking to Mr O'Connor's point of last evening-- it seems to me that Dos Passos fitted in with a time period and had a great boom. To me-- and I like Dos Passos. I remember once I didn't like him-- past tense. I remember once when Big Money, the third of the trilogy, came out, I went to a bookstore in the morning, rented it-- this was in the depression, which the book was about.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	10:11	And I thought I'd just glance at it that morning and found that I had finished it before I ate again. And this last summer, I tried to look over another volume of the trilogy thinking to assign it to some students. And over a period of a week of desperate struggle, I was unable to get more than halfway through it. Now, this has been presumed. Maybe it's just a solipsistic thing. Maybe just I have changed. But I don't think so. I think the times have changed. And I think that kind of thing is not of such interest.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	10:40	Now there was a thing in one sense less organized-- if you can ever say that what we recognize as art is not organized-- but certainly much more loosely organized. It had presented no difficulties to the reader except problems of endurance, which have increased, as I say. Whereas Faulkner, writing in approximately the same period-- a little bit earlier than that third volume-- Faulkner wrote a thing like The Sound and the Fury, which immediately brings up a problem that Mr. O'Connor dealt with last night.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	11:12	That is the question of external systems and so forth. Mr. O'Connor was speaking of great deal about Joyce, and very effectively about Joyce. And though I think I-- incidentally, I think I should resume my role as moderator this evening. But in the brief time remaining, I take it this is not comment vomit. It seems to me that it's quite right now to look at Joyce with a little less awe and almost approach Mr O'Connor's position because the trouble with Joyce is that these external systems-- The Odyssey or chart of human anatomy and so forth-- are presented in what has now begun to seem to a number of readers as in a sort of niggling fashion with an ulterior purpose.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	11:53	These ulterior structures have an ulterior purpose, which is in great part to show what an extremely learned man Joyce was, it seems to me. And also, they're a part of an extreme mania that he has, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out, for association, which would lead him to absurd extremes. Now for a man to present a technique as a pioneer is a different thing from seeing his followers take it up and adapt it, fit it to a slightly later time, and also, fit it to the lack of being a pioneer.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	12:27	A pioneer seems to me to perspire and be ungraceful, whereas the follower, settling a few waves behind the first wave of pioneering, can use these things, take them more as they come, fit them in, mesh the thing together, melt it down, and not use it so obviously. And in connection with these ulterior systems, I think Sound and Fury-- since you bring up Faulkner-- is a good example. The thing has at least three elaborately worked out ulterior external systems, which no critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:04	And yet, readers have liked-- some readers have liked it. And I think a growing number have liked it. Many of the students and would-be, hopeful writers that we speak of-- that wave of the future, if that phrase isn't hasn't a bad connotation. These people have got a lot of out of The Sound and the Fury. And they're what we would have to accept as so-called good writers-- good readers, I mean-- adequate readers.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:30	They're not people who are just overjoyed solely with Forever Amber. And they are able to go away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling somewhat good, feeling they've got some their money's worth in part-- a good many of them are. Now, Mr. O'Connor has asked that authors be less self conscious and less intellectual. Joyce seems to him overly intellectual. And this would seem-- he seems so to me.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:54	But, at the same time, Mr. O'Connor asks that the reader be extremely intellectual, and that if the novel has in it systems and things which are not subject to the reader's immediate conscious and intellectual examination, that the novel is a failure. And I'm of the opinion that there's a middle ground here where the author shouldn't be so self-conscious and intellectual and planned and smelling of the lamp as Joyce, a lamp with a reflector to show how much he's a poor figure, but a lamp which he wants to smell up to show he's spent the time near it. The author can do a little less of that.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	14:34	And I think though the reader these days is likely to be a little intellectual, after all, he's been able to read James's prefaces and other things, as Mr. Frohock has pointed out, still, I think it's possible for a reader, whom we might call a good reader, one we accept as who knows any more than Arnold's suggestion that the best people in literary matters-- if this reader goes away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling good, feeling that something's come from this, if he doesn't know all the intellectual systems on which it's organized, who cares?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:04	The novel, for example, has several-- involves four days. These are the days of Holy Week. It has Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:16	And throughout these-- the days-- the events assigned to these days, the symbolic and traditional operations of those days recur but so melted into the realism that Mr. O'Connor asks for that the readers have not been aware that on the Thursday, the boy does a lot of washing of his hands and so forth, though feet is done in the Bible. This is the way the author changes it. And there's harrowing of Hell and other things that go through this thing. But they're not sticking their heads up too far.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:44	And then the title, following Joyce-- this, I believe, is an author who went to school with Joyce. And as Walt Whitman said something about the breadth of my students' shoulders only tests, I think, the breadth of my own shoulders, Faulkner, I think, has maybe taken Joyce's thing-- this is blasphemy to say-- and maybe done it better. The other pattern is as with Joyce, who took the-- who gave a title to his book to steer the reader to The Odyssey, so Faulkner takes a title from the fifth act of Macbeth, famous speech by Macbeth, and then organizes the book around this speech so that one of the monologues deals a great deal with "out, out brief candle."	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	16:24	The second monologue involves a great deal of life being a walking shadow. Quentin Compson, before he found himself up somewhere near the Brighton abattoir here in Charles River, walks his shadow around a great deal. And in the third monologue, the poor player struts and frets upon the stage. And in the end, where the peak of sound with Jason, or with the Idiot, and the fury with Jason, where they reach their peak, the novel ends with showing that it signifies nothing for these people, who fit into the novel as one of the big-- a novel that deals with one of the big subjects of our time, which is love or the lack of love in its broadest sense. And the novel has made very clear throughout that these children are being-- are suffering, or as the novel says two times, "poisoned" by the lack of affection from the parents, lack of support and lift from the hypochondriac mother and the cynical and alcoholic father.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	17:25	And this novel is a moralistic novel saying that that ain't right. And one of the ways it shows this is that the three interior monologues are also organized, as Joyce organized parts around the Chart of Human Anatomy. In this, they're organized around the Chart of Human Personality but as laid out by Freud so that the idiot's speech, so-called, the one assigned to the idiot, draws very carefully on Freud's definition of the id.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	17:51	The second monologue is very carefully based on Freud's definition as available to Faulkner in translation. And he did read a lot of Freud then, and he has this kind of mind. Based on the ego, Jason, the one who wants to repress all pleasure, who's the only one who cares what the community thinks, who in their three brothers' concentration on their sister is the one who hates her and who is against all voluptuousness, whether it leads to information or not.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	18:23	This-- Jason is strictly based on the superego. And such details as the idiot's trying to break out of the fence through the gate, and as a result, being brought in and by Jason being castrated, this is how the textbook, too, that famous portal that Freud set up in his spatial figure when he was moving from his hydraulic images to the geographical ones, this is the kind of episode which means something on the realistic level. Anybody with an idiot in the family, 33 years old with a mind of a 3-year-old, is going to be interested, as Jason is, in keeping him back of the house, inside the fence, not out presumably, or probably not actually molesting schoolgirls.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	19:05	But still, the thing has a life at another level. And I see no real harm in this. If the novel is able to live since 1929 with all kinds of people treading over it and dealing with it in every way, and these systems are so completely buried that all they've done is guide the author maybe and guide the reader perhaps subtly, or at least give him a feeling there's some unity here, I see no objection in doing this because the author has in two ways not paraded this learning. He has not made it stick out in the novel to such an extent as Joyce did. And he has not slyly said to an equivalent of Mr. Gilbert, yes, if you look farther, you'll see really something here.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	19:49	The analogy here, I think, is possibly that between the horse and horseman. The-- though I don't want the reader to be in every way equated to the horse because though readers are sharply different from authors, there are some readers who can approach being-- approach some authors. But I think that just as a horse not knowing where he and the horseman are going, as anyone who rides at all knows, is a little more happy, subtle things are conveyed by the hands, knees, and seat of the pants. And the horse somehow senses that the author, the horseman, is-- he'll change in a minute at the next jump.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	20:31	The horseman is aware of where he's going and knows the technique for getting the horse to go there. And the horse has a happier day. He had-- the ride he enjoys more.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	20:43	And I think that if an author, in dealing with this rapid flux that passes and giving it some kind of shape, has something that makes him-- I hope he has an internal smile, not a kind of leer or sneer. But if he's happily smiling to himself that he's got a gimmick now that will work, and if he doesn't intrude it too much, I think art works in subtle ways and that somehow, some readers, and apparently in growing numbers, have begun to sense that maybe something's going on here. Now if-- I do not believe that they buy this book and read it so that they can end up with a kind of mystery of the sort of the lady or the tiger. So when they get through, they say, well, what happened in this book?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:25	They may not know all these things happened. And because I say they happened doesn't prove they do. They may not happen there at all.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:31	But I do think that because the author has had this kind of plan and has been able to use it and adapt it, as Mr. Ellison said last night in the roundtable, taking these new techniques and the novels looking backward but not trying to move there, it seems to me that here is a possible place where some of this adaptation has been made.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:51	And if the reader does not know when he gets through everything that has happened, that's all right. But on the other hand, to return to your professor emeritus of Harvard, it is quite true that if the reader approaches this expecting a straight-out naturalistic with a capital N chronological order of the kind that Faulkner has in As I Lay Dying, which for many years was his most admired book because the woman died. The family tried to take her to a burying ground, and in the end they got there.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	22:22	This novel had a crystal, linear clarity, if there's such a thing, which made many readers say, Faulkner can't write a novel, but he wrote one here. Well, Faulkner's-- measured by those devices, these other novels are certainly chaotic. It doesn't even run Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it has another kind of order.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	22:43	To take another example, Malcolm Cowley, who's in great part responsible for much of Faulkner's-- well, for part of Faulkner's boom in this country, or at least making the books available through the Viking Portable, has felt that Faulkner so abandoned the naturalistic novel that he needed to be rewritten. The canute thing operated with Mr. Cowley. So Mr. Cowley and the Viking Portable Faulkner has written the only good Faulkner novel.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:12	It has a chronological order. We start with Indians. We get early settlers. These are snippets from various places. And we come up to the very present.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:20	Now this has a beauty all its own, which has been imposed by Mr. Cowley. On the assumption that William Faulkner in his individual works had no aesthetic plan whatever, as in The Sound and the Fury, and that the important thing is he's dealt with one county to a considerable extent, but that it's so hard for the readers to find this out that now in this one volume they can do it. And so the important thing is the history of the county, which you can get from some-- also from some volumes prepared by the WPA.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:52	Mr. Cowley's also said that William Faulkner never wrote a unified novel. In other words, he writes for morons. And he cites the-- as Light in August, in which the two main protagonists, the main woman and the main man, never meet.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:07	Now this is a Procrustean bed that I don't propose to make the novel take for its lodging this night or any other. The novel has a theme which requires that these two characters never meet, a theme that has to do with time. One of the characters is embedded in the past. One is morbidly fixed on the future.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:26	And-- no, excuse me. The one doesn't meet. There are three characters here. The man we just spoke of frozen in the past, and the woman I just spoke of, the major one, eternally in the present, using figures from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:40	This is an author who may write for morons. But he's read the poems which are popular with professors emeritus in general. And he knows them rather well.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:52	And the Ode on a Grecian Urn sets up this girl as running through eternal present. And then another woman, who is killed by the man, is frozen in the future. Now this-- and to mention strictly parenthetically a thing that Mr. Frohock referred to in The Inferno, where some characters there have their heads turned backward, it's not really in connection. But to give you an idea of how really moronic this author is and how many schemes he uses which are not intellectually available to the reader without-- I've been reading them over and over again for money, you see? This is different.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	25:28	In this novel, when the man who is embedded in the past kills the woman who is fixed on the future, he cuts her throat in a scene which rather horrified some people. And when her body is carried out of this building, which is burning naturally, and this openly-- blanket in which it's been brought out is open in the yard, we see that her head is turned backward on the body. And there are some readers of a squeamish sort who asked whether or not this twist was necessary.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:00	And the point is that the people in The Inferno passage that Mr. Frohock spoke of were Cassandra, Tiresias, and others, whose sin was they looked too far in the future. So this woman who looked too far in the future, when her throat is cut and she's brought out, her head is turned backward on her body. Now this is maybe morbidly the author having games with himself.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:27	There is an element in all of this of the author's being the kind of person who could satisfactorily own a stolen Mona Lisa, in which he knows that everyone is looking for it. Those so-and-sos out there, and I'm the man who knows where it is. He can't tell his wife. He can't tell anybody else. But he's-- he knows it, and this is fine.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:43	There is this element, and it's a big risk. But when these external systems, this metaphor, so that this woman doesn't have a choice as to which way her body will lie as Bloom, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out last night, doesn't have a choice as to whether he'll go upstairs or out in the yard, this woman doesn't have the choice in the novel of whether her head will, when murdered, will be forward or aft. A metaphor requires that it be turned. But I don't mind that if the author doesn't force me to feel terribly unhappy if I don't get the point.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	27:16	But as soon as the theme of time appears, thousands of these details fit in. And I don't favor crossword puzzles. I never worked one in my life, even on a-- in a day coach. And I don't want to work them here.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	27:27	But I think that somehow the author-- maybe realism of an extraordinarily flat variety has come to its end for the moment. And I think for an author to deal with these things in a way which maybe has a new meaning, I mean, for him to deal in this way may have a new meaning and may convey it to some readers. But by the all standards set up of an earlier time, you're quite right. Your professor's quite right. He writes for morons.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	28:09	That was not a moderate-- moderator's speech. I'm sorry. If there are other questions for any of the-- Mr. Frohock or any members of the panel-- yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	30:03	I'm afraid that question is really too difficult for me. I don't know that I've got it quite clearly. I agree with Mr. Ellison's point about the novel is a communication. But it's obviously a great deal more than communication.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	30:23	The novel is also a work of art. And that we're rather inclined to forget. That is, whether we like the term or we don't like the term, it's organized. And it's organized according to a certain system.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	30:37	Now I don't think these particular proletarian novels are works of art. Undoubtedly, they're communication. They were going on all through the 19th century. They're not regarded as great 19th-century novels.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	30:51	You've got novels describing the appalling conditions in the Lancashire mill towns. And they are a merely communication. Their principal object is not the creation of a work of art. It's not the creation of a work of beauty.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	31:11	It is to express the writer's views upon industrial conditions or some other sort of conditions, conditions of the war. We got a great mass of these after the First World War. And they've all, as far as I know, disappeared because they weren't works of art. They merely were works of communication.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	0:00 - 31:11	August 4 Session Discussion	Program
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	3:29	May I say something which will go a little bit beyond Sinclair Lewis? In the first place, we don't expect novels-- even great novels-- to stay fashionable constantly from year to year. They are encounters with experience, after all. And they are like-- and all novels, I think-- demand that we bring something to them.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	4:01	What I'm trying to get at is there was a time when Sinclair Lewis did quite a bit for our awareness of ourselves as Americans, as members of society. I don't think that they are great art. We had the need at that time to have these things formulated for us. Babbitt is still a term, even though its meaning it's changed from the malignant over to the benign INAUDIBLE .	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	4:34	But nevertheless, he performed that function. And now, the emotion which we brought to it, and the lives of our own imagination which we brought to his words has receded. We are looking to place him elsewhere. There will be a time when-- I suspect-- when people will be reading Sinclair Lewis again and saying, this man is a classic. This is wonderful writing. And you'll have your Lewis cults just as we have our Fitzgerald cults.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	5:14	I think it works that way. I think it's because the novel does communicate, because it must be fired-- like any work of art-- by the emotions, ideas, feelings of an audience. Thus, we have works which come up. They come into being and called into being through certain needs on the part of the viewer, the reader, listener. And after that need recedes, after the time changes-- and they must exist in time and can only exist in time-- they go into the veil.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:01	This seems to be the carom question.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:07	Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown--	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:27	--that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	1:56	And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	2:26	That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	2:51	And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him.	Stanley Hyman
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	0:02	And I admit I have been reading Cruz with just as much enthusiasm as usual. I don't think that dullness bothers a certain kind of reader. It should. It's a commentary on the man who isn't bothered. To get back to the question that you asked, and which I was perhaps a bit frivolous about, I wonder if Sinclair Lewis's dullness-- which I can't find for myself in the thing like The Man Who Knew Coolidge--	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	0:50	But I would like to ask Mr. Hyman-- this is partly the cut off my own feet-- whether that isn't because some of the books are what you would call pseudo fictions.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:03	Well, Mr. Collins, you are right on your feet.	W.M. Frohock
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	5:04	I don't think so. INAUDIBLE	Alan Campbell
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	5:08	Oh, we again want all the speakers to be on the stage at the table if you will. Thank you.	Alan Campbell
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	0:08	Well, I was thinking particularly of the novel since the war. The novel that you seem to think has become so subjective -- too subjective, too much within --	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	1:06	I don't hold with that, but he says the bourgeois comes home to his wife, and his wife says, "Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." And the businessman says, "oui, Faulkner SPEAKING FRENCH ." But he's never read Faulkner. Or if he tried to read Faulkner he's always stopped in the middle because it was too difficult. And Ayme is arguing that this is intellectual suicide. It is the suicide of the bourgeoisie. And I think Ayme himself, and a number of young writers in England, are trying to get away from that. They're trying to get towards a new objectivity.	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:36	Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability or to repair that society, as someone in here said today?	Audience
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:07	Yes?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:27	Mr. Lytle?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:28	Well, I didn't get that. Will you repeat this question? Would you stand please? It's very hard to hear you without standing.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:47	Well, I will-- go ahead Mr. Ellison. Yes.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	4:48	I think that the proper thing to do is stop now and bring up these questions again at the meeting tomorrow. Mr. Campbell, are there any announcements that I have forgotten to make at the moment?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	0:01	I don't know if that's answering the question, but then as I said, I'm not quite clear about the significance of the question.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	0:16	I wasn't aware that that was what I was saying. I don't feel-- I feel that, on the contrary, the novel since the war-- since the last war in Europe-- has become more and more objective. There is more and more a throwing over of the Joycean, Lawrence Gide, and indeed the Faulkner type of novel.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	0:40	In that book which I was referring to last night, SPEAKING FRENCH, he describes the middle classes of Europe committing suicide. And he describes them in terms of a French bourgeois who comes home at night to his wife and children-- wife and daughters. Ayme thinks all the bad literature of our time derives from the fact that it's all written for women.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	1:38	Now that doesn't mean just going back to the 19th century novel. Obviously you can't do that. You can't go back to a form of society which no longer exists. It does mean, as Mr. Lytle said earlier-- the one statement with which I found myself heartily in agreement-- that it's the relationship between the internal man, between the god within you and the reality outside you.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:08	This is a return to morality INAUDIBLE . Is the writer's obligation to interpret his society with a negative capability, or to repair it that somebody said earlier	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	0:00 - 5:08	August 4 Session Discussion	Program
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:50	Yes. I think that that-- that's the writer's business. And oh, if his business was to write and to describe reality with as much truth and-- god, here I go-- beauty, he's writing works as he's possible to achieve. And he-- if he has any other role to play, it-- it is to reveal the mystery and possibility inherent in given reality.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	3:27	But beyond that, you have politicians, experts on social organization and a whole apparatus who function in their own way. But I don't-- for the life of me, I don't see how-- how a writer can do anything more than write. It's a terrifically difficult thing, this business of trying to decide what is real, what is valuable, what is-- is reality.	Ralph Ellison
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	3:55	People who want to-- I mean, you see him again, you-- you-- well this will lead to asking the writer to get out with-- on the picket line. Which is all right with me, but it isn't writing. And I don't think the two functions should be confused. I think that-- that there is enough pain, there's enough psychological misery involved in really grappling with reality in terms of art. And that the sheer job of mastering art, especially in a time like ours when the corpus of the novel and then the technique of the novel, the ideologies of the novel is so bad.	Ralph Ellison