Annotations for "August 5 Session Discussion"

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Item	Time	Annotation	Layer
August 5, Afternoon Part One	26:58	Mr. O'Connor.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part One	27:05	I've taken so many notes in the last 20 minutes that I don't know whether I'll be able to follow them. The last speaker referred to the fact that the novel doesn't flourish in Germany today. All I would say is what I've already said to my class. It never has flourished in Germany.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	27:35	The novel has never been a German art in spite of Thomas Mann. And even in Thomas Mann, you get the work of a man who is really a philosopher and essayist rather than a novelist, who just does not have the plastic imagination of a novelist, the thing which first and foremost makes the novelist.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	27:56	I was horrified at his picture of a German reader slinking away with a copy of Proust or INAUDIBLE, speaking of bad functions about reading a novel. But that also is not a very new thing. You get a wonderful description in Pride and Prejudice of Mr. Collins, who agrees to read to the company, until he realizes that what they want to hear is a novel and then he respectfully declines as a novel is something that no serious man will read.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	28:38	I don't really believe a statement that there are no further significant relationships in life. How can we live in with such a belief? How can we believe that our relationships with our friends and with the people we love are not significant relationships?	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	28:57	Tomorrow I have to speak of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's great novel about his own relationship to his mother. Is anybody going to tell me that is not a significant relationship or that relationship does not continue and will not continue all through history? I don't believe it.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	29:17	The whole description we got of the imaginative position of the poet, the difficulties he had, the relations of his work to the essayist, reminded me of that wonderful poem of Yeats. He was exasperated by a passage in Thomas Mann. It really maddened him. Thomas Mann says, in our time, the destiny of man is reflected in politics.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	29:47	And Yeats got very cross with them as you would expect Yeats to go. And then he wrote that wonderful poem which begins, "How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fixed on Russian, or on Chinese, or on Spanish politics," the one that ends up, "And there is a man who knows the truth of war, and war's alarms, but oh that I were young again and held her in my arms." Not, of course, a significant relationship.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	30:24	Now also I don't really believe that our forefathers had a naive form of consciousness. I don't like the idea of those simple-minded people Aristotle and Plato dismissed in this lofty way. I still think they have something to say. And I still think the historical tradition of literature has a great deal to say. I don't believe there is anything really in common between the poem and the essay. And if modern poetry has reached the point where it's difficult, according to the speaker, to see what the two have in common, all I can say is they never had anything in common.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	31:05	Poetry is still what it always was. It's a song more than anything else. The speaker, having told us the staggering news, that existentialism was the death blow of the novel, then asked a rhetorical question who is Benn, to, which I only want to reply, what is existentialism? What is existentialism to say that we should say it's the death blow of the novel?	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	31:38	Also, this feeling that the only reality is the work of art has already been dealt with by Proust. And it's part of the objective quality of our time that Proust really could believe that there is no objective reality. The only reality that exists is the work of art. And I don't believe that either. I still think that naive and Euclidean man Aristotle has quite a lot to say on the subject. And I think it ought to be listened to.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	32:15	One of our difficulties in this discussion from the very beginning has been the fact that we never have done what any decent Aristotelian would have done straight away to define our terms. We've been talking about things which have absolutely nothing in common. We listen to a discussion of the novels of Kafka.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	32:36	I've already pointed out that the novels of Kafka are not novels. We've been told that the characters in this novel are simply described as Mr. K, or Surveyor so-and-so, but that sort of thing was done long ago by the man whom Kafka most resembles, John INAUDIBLE.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part One	26:57 - 32:36	August 5 Session Discussion	Program
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:47	Please?	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:51	Well, I have nothing further to say to this subject, but I might if momentarily discuss it if I may, deliberately and consciously so. We haven't necessarily defined our terms. And I'm certainly not going to at this late date set about it, but I would like to make one or two distinctions, and I would like to distinguish between the storytelling habit in me which is continuous and universal, and the story as a novel. And I would like to, in consideration, say these two things.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	7:37	First, it is-- you've got to learn to master a certain kind of technique. And I will specify. And I think we got this deliberately from Flaubert, that he used for the first time the five senses as a medium by which you could enter the human consciousness. It had always been done more or less, but from him we learned to do that consciously. And that's a great gain.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	8:08	I think with-- not the formalist of art but for those who consider form as the final meaning of art, that you have got to have and fix finally somewhere before you get down your point of view, finally, because everything is related through that. And then I'm not going to bore you with various other things, such as the sea and when to use panorama. But I want to say this, that when you start out, if you have beforehand a thorough plotted direction, or rather a blueprint before the thing has begun, that you're going to get the best melodrama.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	8:51	That the creative act is a growth and not an organization, because thing that is organized-- you organize something that is already done, as INAUDIBLE. And that finally it is a growth, and that you try to control that growth towards some end. And in that process, you commit your life. That is, that you commit what in you is extremely, to the fullest extent, as James says, if I may be allowed to quote him too, that a man--	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	9:25	--that our nation has to undertake the most difficult thing possible to be done. And that's why the artist and the priest and the soldier die every day. It is at full and complete commitment of yourself. And you take the risk of failure, which to a man is the risk of emasculation. And that's what I mean by that total commitment.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	9:46	And if you don't believe me, what is a hack writer, a shyster lawyer? What is the other one? They are men who don't take themselves seriously. They don't make that full commitment, and therefore they're a comic figure. And of course-- and that is finally a man's definition of his being. With a woman, it's love. That's why INAUDIBLE is the-- describes the fall of the state of woman, is she's so with a man.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	10:18	Now if I might-- I mean, I think that I consider myself an artist, I consider in the end that I think we've talked too much about-- well I don't know. I got the feeling that the people of the moment who are making and losing readers in large numbers-- I think that's a mistake. I think that art is in the end aristocratic. And I don't mean in-- to use that in political terms.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	10:50	And I was thinking that the South perhaps has something to offer in this-- in the heart of this concern. And I was thinking that, as we were saying yesterday, that Sinclair Lewis was boring and died before his time, which must have been a terrifying thing for him. But I was thinking if he had only been born in the South, perhaps he would not look so-- INAUDIBLE because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat because the South has been defeated. Therefore, the South knows the nature of the world, that in the end it is always defeat.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	11:33	And what have you got for the artist that can forfend that thing, that thief of work? And it is style. It is mannerisms, which now, as I believe Yeats said again, is in the right of style. And he doesn't have to be manly always in life, but he necessarily does in his work.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	12:03	And I think the South has that firm man's grip. That's the reason you have so many good writers who've been writing for 30 years, but with modest readers-- modest group of readers. It's because they know that thing, that you have got to have something when you have pushed back against the wall to contain the core of your being so that you can come again.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	12:27	I would furthermore say this, that the Eastern part of the country now is almost entirely metropolitan, and that the word has become shopworn. That the thing makes the word alive is an image, and that you have to live in some country society where the seasons turn and all country people and all seamen speak in terms of images. And that is a thing with the deliberate shaping and twisting and distorting of words to get something fresh, because there's nothing new under the sun. We know that.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	13:08	You have the shock in the country, or in a country society, of each day being different from the next. Did you ever hear a farmer who showed any kind of optimism about his crops? No. He doesn't dare, because he'll be tricked by the mysterious powers that rule his field. He's always a pessimist. That means that he also is a religious man, and without some kind of spiritual quality to work-- I mean spiritual quality to an art, it becomes sterile. And it may be very beautiful and glittering, but it has none of that human passion and compassion of which art is made fine.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	14:01	Now to give you a case in point, I had a tenant. I ran a cotton farm once in my youth, and it was after the First World War. And we at this time were discussing the war debt, which you would think that that was so complicated that certainly nobody would have trained economists to discuss it. And he said this, and notice everything is an image. He said, "Great Britain has got two vaults of our gold and sat down on it and said, now come get it if you can." But I think that that point is to be made.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	14:35	And so I'm saying that in a society where you think in images, and art if it's anything it's concretely human. And that's why I take absolutely your position on this allegorical business. It leaves out the circumstantiality and the accident that surrounds life, and you get-- and, of course, in its worst form, it's propaganda. Which leads not to the end of an art, which should be-- any art should be defined in its own terms and have its own experience and not to improve the condition of the middle-Western or the far-Western farmer. That's residual, meaning that it's a political matter.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	15:19	And so I am pleading for an art that is aristocratic, which I think is its nature. And that it should be approached with great humility, else you'll destroy it. And that it must always be concrete, and that there is a great extension.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	15:46	INAUDIBLE . Now, of course, that we have inherited from people like Flaubert and James, in spite of the fact you don't like him, has given us a great heel. And I confess that there are moments there when I can't read James. I mean, it's too tenuous. Somebody has got to kiss somebody somewhere.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	16:10	Nevertheless, he has given us a great many technical health. And it takes a long time to master that, and you commit your total and whole being to it, and-- which is the risk of failure. And let me see if I've got anything else to say. Well, I think really that's about all.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:26	I suppose one of the disintegrated factors that blow the novel apart is supposed to be the new consciousness of personality you get from Freud. And it impresses me enormously how much this is not so. I suppose the most naive area of the European cultural zone is Iceland, and the saga of Grettir the Strong is, I suppose, an early modern European piece of literature as there is around. And the opening situation of that is the conflict between Grettir and his father.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	4:03	Grettir hates his father very much, and he has good reason to. His father won't give him a sword, and he resents that very bitterly. And his mother provides him-- secretly provides him with the sword. INAUDIBLE makes up the poem. And, after all, the mother is a friend of the man. And this uses an entirely Freudian symbol in an entirely conscious way. It seems to me to show how old that consciousness is of the personality which we treat with such great novelty.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	4:33	And the end of Grettir the Strong is Grettir is killed by the sword which he's lived by. His brother has to avenge him. It's the social countant that demands this. The blood price is that he should kill the man who killed his brother. It's a social situation that pushes him into carrying a burden of guilt. He has to become a murderer. The only way he can fulfill his social destiny is by taking this burden of guilt on.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	5:03	Then he is taken up by the community, which is outraged. And the people who condemn him, they say quite simply-- they think they're being very humane and very liberal. We only ask one price for a man's life, and that is a man's life. The INAUDIBLE, who has avenged his brother, is then taken to-- put in a prison and put in a prison cell. And the penalty is not exactly-- it's very violent form. All he has to do is wait till the time he dies. And there is a man there who is in the same position, who is waiting for death too.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	5:47	Thorstein and the man-- it's a cold and filthy place with no escape from it. And this man is very downcast. Thorstein is a poet, his function is to sing the story of what brought them into the prison cell to make the prison cell tolerable. And to sing until the end comes. It seems exactly the same consciousness of the human destiny which we have now. The inescapable trap, the burden of guilt becomes removed from ourselves. We have to live with it. There is nothing new about this. Why should it disintegrate a very satisfactory and good art form? I cannot see it.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:02	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:16	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:10	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:27	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	9:24	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	16:03	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	16:38	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	20:23	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	21:52	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	23:26	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:58	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:06	Mr. Holthusen, would you speak to Mr. O'Connor's--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:19	Mr. West, do you have any comment on this subject?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:32	Any other members of the panel who want to speak to this subject? Mr. Simenon, will you say anything?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:39	Mr. Ellison? Mr. Frohock?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:44	Mr. Lytle, please.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:47	Yes. Pretty please.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	16:44	Mr. Ellison?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	22:29	I'm reminded of a class which read Light in August by Faulkner and rather liked it. But finally, when they were asked-- it was not my class. They were asked what can we-- what bothers you about this, if anything? This was a class in New York City and all of them city students. They said, well, there's only one thing that bothers us. That's on the first page. It's an extremely hot day-- extremely hot day. And this girl, barefooted and very poor, is-- and pregnant is-- and friendless in a way, except that everyone befriends her, is walking along the road in this steaming Mississippi sun and she keeps talking about furs.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	23:13	And the teacher didn't understand what this was and looked at the text. And the girl keeps saying as she trudges along through this dust-- she keeps almost morbidly repeating it's a fur piece.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	24:06	Or would you like to define the term?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:25	Mr. Frohock?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:28	Anyone? Any questions from the-- yes, Mr. Simenon.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	23:30	The-- I don't know whether it was just through lapse or through desire to communicate more fully that later-- when she says this later in the novel, she spells it differently. Spells it conventionally. This may be only a problem in connection with literature being aristocratic. Mr. O'Connor, would you speak to Mr. Lytle's point, briefly or at length, that literature should be aristocratic? Because it's not my understanding, it's just my guess, that you don't think it should be or is.	Carver Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	0:01 - 0:00	Christian is the same thing as Mr. K, and it's perfectly obvious that The Trial and The Castle are not novels. They are allegories, and you have to read them as allegories. Otherwise you're not reading them at all.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	0:17	There are a number of other things which INAUDIBLE got me excited about. One of these days when somebody talks about the youthfulness of American civilization, I'm going to fling something. I mean, this is really, I think, completely untrue. This country we're in is a very old country with a very old tradition. And anybody who approaches American literature under the assumption that it's naive and unsophisticated ought to turn and read some of the New England writers. And should change, shall I say, from paying too much attention to Mr. T.S. Eliot and read a little Robert Frost to see what a simple American mind is like.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	2:52	I don't think, by the way, that Germany is completely ungifted to write novels. I think of INAUDIBLE , for example. INAUDIBLE. And I think of Stifter and Fontane, and perhaps Thomas Mann. But there are--	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:15	I'm entirely disarmed.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	24:05	Well--	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	24:10	Very briefly. I don't want to go into this. I very much like when the discussion is thrown open, that we should also take into consideration the German speech yesterday, which for me has been a high point of the conference. He knows that's not mere flattery. And it raised a number of issues which are also being raised, I think, by Mr. Lytle.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	24:37	The question about literature being aristocratic-- at the moment the thing, the issue isn't there, because it seems to me still, referring back to the German speech yesterday, that we don't seem at all to have decided whether or not we want a reader. And first of all, I want to know what the reader's place in the novel is. I try to follow very carefully the Germans' distinction between the difficulty I found in Ulysses and the difficulty I ought to find in Light in August.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	25:20	And as I said before, it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. And somewhere or other, we've dropped the reader. And it seems to me the reader is an essential part of the novel. I'm quite prepared to say, very well, you write a novel for 50 million people, you write a novel for a million people, you write a novel a novel for 5,000 people. All I want to know is who is the audience? And the audience necessarily, if it's going to be limited, is going to be aristocratic.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	25:57	I see no particular reason why it should be as limited as Mr. Lytle seems to imply. When we're talking about the popularity of the 19th century Victorian novel, we don't mean everybody read it. We mean that you had a highly educated middle class, all of whom were prepared to read novels. And you've got an entirely new public. I want to know where you draw the line. When you cut out this new public, what is the public you're addressing? Then I think it would be time to talk about writing for an aristocracy.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	26:34	First of all, I want to see the audience defined. Again, I'm in precisely the same position in referring to Mr. Lytle's remarks on style. I fancy that he and I are all along the line in complete agreement, but that problem of style is one that's been worrying me. Obviously the style of certain modern novels is not the style of the 19th century novel, which you all think I lament too much.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	27:06	But again, the question of the reader comes into the problem of style. The question is this as I see it. Is style a relationship as it used to be understood between the writer and the reader? In the work of Joyce and Faulkner, it seems to me that it's a relationship between the author and the object. And I feel once you do that, you start excluding the reader.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	27:42	I gave a couple of examples of it in class today. The fact that when Stephen Dedalus comes back home after having decided to repent-- when he opens the door there is this wild outburst of meaningless words which represents the upsurge of what Joyce would call the subconscious or the unconscious. Now that's all very well, but this is a relationship between Joyce and the event. It's not a relationship between him and the reader.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	28:14	The whole problem of the style of Ulysses is contained in this. It's getting closer and closer and closer to the object. We discussed last night Mr. Ellison's novel and the question of if you're describing a hallucinatory state, do you describe it in a hallucinatory prose as Joyce does? The moment you do, you seem to me to be transferring the emphasis of style. To me, style is manner, and manner implies the existence of an audience, the existence of a reader.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	28:51	It's in literature what manners is in real life. It is the point at which the individual comes out and talks to his neighbor and presents himself to his neighbor in whatever aspect suits him. We know it's not a complete man. It's a pose, if you like, and it seems to me that we've lost this pose. I'd very much like to hear somebody discuss that problem which he also raised, and in which I think again he and I are very much in agreement. That is the relationship between metropolitan and rural art.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	29:36	One of the things that most has impressed me in modern art is the modern French film. And in the novels of people like Marcel Ayme-- and again, I'm not speaking from flatterer in those novels of Monsieur Simenon which I admire so much-- it seems to me that there is something that's disappeared everywhere else in literature. That is the recognition of the other fellow, the thing that Magre has all the time. The recognition that there's the other man out there.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	30:12	And it's characteristic of the French film that you get this-- this admiration for somebody who is doing a small, perhaps unimportant job, the delight in him as a character. It's in those two writers principally that I find the continuation of the attitude of respect for life which I find in 19th century literature. And I think that the real reason is that France has still remained a rural country-- very largely a rural country.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	30:50	And in effect, if you're writing about your own village, you can't get too dirty about the villagers. Because ultimately you have to live with them, and you have to recognize that they're going to come to your funeral anyhow. It's very important that you should have a good funeral. And I think that has been lost in metropolitan art. That sense-- what I call realism-- that the writer is the same sort of person as the person he's writing about.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:38	INAUDIBLE	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:31	INAUDIBLE. It's very short.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:34	I think that the conclusion may be that it's no American novel, nor the the French novel or German novels, nor 18th century, 19th century novels. But maybe it's two kind of novels-- only the good and the bad. I think that is the only conclusion after all the discussion.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:12	I only can say that I agree. I agree with you on the-- all the line, you know?	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:18	Yeah, you are-- you don't forget that I played a dialectical role. And I know that what you mean, and I'm convinced that the position of men is always the crossroads of the immutability and the mutability of men. But in this case, if you had given this lecture-- I had said the same thing as you said, you see. In this case I wanted to stress certain shocks of consciousness which has-- which have occurred between say-- let's say 1900 and today.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:57	And I think that there are certain-- certain mutations in consciousness, and that men can be interpreted as a modern man, as a creature which-- which confronts a completely new situation. I am not-- I'm not an existentialist, and in Germany I always fight existentialism, you see. And all that you say is just to write a complement to what I wanted to say. And I'm not quite convinced that the novel is finished. And I am convinced that if there is a genius who-- who comes-- who is given to us, he will write a new novel. And they write novels, you know. There are men-- there are men who write novels. But it is only to make clear one point and from this corner-- this German corner.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:13	Yes.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	0:00 - 31:58	August 5 Session Discussion	Program
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	6:43	They'll pass.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	16:45	Well, I would just-- really in agreement with Mr. Lytle. It's just-- I'd just like to say this. As I am a Southwesterner and-- this is beginning to sound like an old-fashioned parent meeting or something. But just a word about language, imagery, and the present moment. I find that as I go around and listen-- and my life is pretty much divided between the races around New York-- I find that so much imagery, what you would expect would be limited to the South and to farm regions, is very much alive within the metropolitan area. It's full of glitter and it takes on new dimensions.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	17:57	And secondly-- this again ties in I think-- you have in this country such a mixture. Not only of national groupings, racial groupings, dialects, lingoes, terminologies-- technical and scientific-- that we can't help if we are sensitive to it to bring a new life to prose fiction. I think that's one of the things that Faulkner has shown us so much and so well.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	18:36	Someone asked me the other night why I chose to write in the first person. And they said, well, isn't it because you wanted this to be every man? And I said, yes, but there's a much simpler motive behind it. And that was to be able to move in upon the speech patterns that I find around me. I wanted to exploit the rhetoric, I wanted to exploit the scientific terminology. I wanted to exploit the sermons and-- and the hollers and the slang.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	19:11	Because I think that in its-- that finding it in a formal pattern gives the reader pleasure. And it certainly gives me some of the pleasure that Mr. O'Connor has been talking about. After all, and this hasn't been said-- I think he's implied it. That the delight that the-- that you get from trying to write a novel comes from the delight in putting up a good yarn, a good lie. I'm a professional liar, and I can't get away from it.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	19:43	The other thing is this, just-- which I think ties up with this mixture of regional speech. I had a situation in my novel where I wanted to-- to personalize the chaotic flux. And I wanted to create a character, and I said what shall I call this man? And somehow a bell rang in my head, and I remembered a blues which was sung by Jimmy Rushing. And Jimmy Rushing used to sing this thing, and there was a refrain which went something like this. "Reinhart, Reinhart. It's so lonesome up here on Beacon Hill."	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	20:30	Now I was simply trying to exploit my own folk background. I don't think that this blues was a product of any folk line. I think it was a product of this mixture that we have in the country right now. But I was very surprised and very-- to discover that the gentleman was dead. But recently I picked up a copy of Time magazine and I discovered that there had actually been a Mr. Reinhart, a former student here at Harvard, and that his tradition was built around him. And it was exactly the call to chaos. "Come out, let's go on a rampage. Let's sail our phonograph records. Let's ride."	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	21:14	And it's exactly-- it was so fitting. I don't know what-- I don't want to be mystical about it, but I just-- I think that not only does speech and does imagery operate here and there, drifting back and forth through social layers, through region, and so forth, but the tendency of the human mind to adopt and find significance in the same symbols is very-- very much a part of this kind of unity. Flux and flow, this bobbing, weaving. This fluidity of American life.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	21:59	Just briefly and parenthetically, Mr. West objected last evening to discussion of the American reality. One of the things being almost touched on today is this question of regionalism, and certainly no one wants the regional novel, but-- of any kind. But in America, this flux and flow is so great that one can try to draw all these languages and dialects and levels together. But it makes for difficulty of communication sometimes.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	31:26	Sorry.	W.M. Frohock
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	2:18	I think yet again I've turned. I meant in the act of writing, the creation, the artist has totally to commit himself. You cannot be a good artist without that attachment	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	2:32	Well, I wouldn't. You have to stand you write good and bad under heat. You have to stand back and look at it when it's cold. And I think, given two artists of equal talent, that the one who can stand back and has a critical mind to be able to diminish and enlarge and direct is the one that's going to succeed. Without that critical sense without that detachment, I believe the artist inevitably fails	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	2:56	Now, as to comedy and tragedy, I agree. I didn't mean that you'd have to be totally committed to comedy, to write comedies, you wouldn't write tragedy on that. I--	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	3:12	I think that-- I'm talking about the man who has to involve himself INAUDIBLE , that you can't-- I think that most of the-- that most of your energy goes into making it possible to write. You've got to eat, you've got children crying for bread, and you've got-- it all-- you've got to put the world away so that you can involve yourself in this imaginative world you create. And that's where your energy goes. A great part of it.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	3:38	When I was writing my first novel-- in fact, excuse me for this. By the way, before I get on that, what I-- a little while-- I agree with what you say on that. I'll admit to saying that it-- it was more surely-- the images were made where the seasons turn. I'm not-- and I'm not-- I was thinking really in a double way, that I was thinking in terms of the criticism more or less. Not so much when the man is not himself. But when you're on your feet talking fast, you can't do that so INAUDIBLE	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	4:11	But it-- here-- here was the problem. I was living in the country, trying to write. All right? I would spend-- I had a horse and a dog and a hundred turkeys that I was trying to raise for a little cash money. I discovered then the vanity of all possession if you're going to be an artist. If you've got a horse you've got to ride it, and if you've got a dog you've got to hunt it.	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	4:35	And when I had these turkeys to raise, I'd ? put them in a tenant house and built me an oven. And I put in a stick at night and one at 4:00 in the morning. And I would take him walking every day. But you'd be surprised how much time those three things can take. The coup de grace came when the time came to teach him to roost. I put him on a roosting pole and he wouldn't go up. They had no mother. So I had get up and INAUDIBLE	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	21:26	I hope you didn't think that I meant it funny. I--	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:23	Well let me say something about that. INAUDIBLE Samson Agonistes isn't a comedy say. I mean, we talked about--	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:30	That's what we're trying to get out INAUDIBLE	Andrew Lytle
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	0:01	The main thing is, someone ought to suggest that Mr. Lytle's theory of total commitment needs, I would say, a good many qualifications. And I detect in this, as in almost everything else I have heard him say, what seems to me to be a bias towards romantic thinking that I personally am bothered by.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	0:24	Now surely it would be possible to assemble a good deal of evidence to show that the artist, to whatever extent he commits himself totally to the work of art and the creative process, must go beyond that and must not merely commit himself totally. Or that if he does, he produces something that is romantic in quality. And surely this is true of great comedy.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	0:49	If you think of something like-- some of you will not admit this to be a comedy, but I could prove my point If I had the time to do it. Surely if you think of a play like Ibsen's Wild Duck or of the comedy of Meredith or probably of the Way of the World, you have in those masterpieces a quality of detachment that certainly is above and beyond and something apart from total commitment. And that-- the wonderful thing that is there I don't believe could ever be achieved by an artist who was simply concerned with committing himself totally. I don't know what it is.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	1:30	And I think that the academic profession in America has misled students in general by maintaining that the tragic experience is the one that matters, omitting to point out what is undeniably true-- that the aesthetic experience of great comedy is just as wonderful in its way as the aesthetic experience of great tragedy, that in general, professors do not admit this to their classes. And if they know this, they don't talk about it.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	1:56	And surely in getting at that, it is not total commitment on the part of the artist, or probably on the part of the reader or the spectator. There is something else, an element of detachment that comes in that's highly important and certainly is of crucial significance in the achievement of the artist.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	2:31	Well, I would deny that.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	3:09	Well I think-- I know that amounts to a difference about definition of INAUDIBLE.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:54	I thought there was an outstanding comic novel here very recently in France That seems to me an ideal example of the thing which produces comedy. It's really the first novel, I think, which is kind of first which is absolutely, ruthlessly true about the bad behavior of a great many French people at the lowest point in their history. They have had the worst thing of all the Europeans. They were the one state which knew complete defeat and was taken over whole, the official government. There was no rest, it was completely overwhelmed.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	8:27	And this is the most horrible and shameful experience. But after the war you had that great period when every Frenchman you talked to hand began to talk about the Francais and so on. There was this great bellyache. And the first comic novel it produced was INAUDIBLE book, which is a political farce of extreme cruelty, 18th century cruelty like INAUDIBLE . Is another INAUDIBLE ? thing ? at the same time.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	8:57	When-- when you've got the pain which is really unendurable, there's no other way of treating it. You've got the great comic novel, with a great element of humor. And Dickens is really all the painfulness, the horrible thing which happened to me, the ugliness and beastliness of this new culture which is swamping through the whole farming culture which I was brought up in. These are the things which produce comedy, and it's-- it's not a cruelty so much as you've come to the raw end of the nerve, and the only way you can deal with it is by writing a very, very funny book.	Anthony West
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	4:33	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:01	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:04	APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:12	SIDE CONVERSATION	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:34	Compassion?	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	13:20	Oh, no.	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	21:29	No, I don't even-- are you? I moved over to your INAUDIBLE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:06	INTERPOSING VOICES	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:10	No	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:16	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	23:23	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	26:33	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	30:29	A Rage to Live.	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	30:30	A Rage to--	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	31:15	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	2:13	Mr. Lytle, will you speak to Mr. INAUDIBLE?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:07	This merely demonstrates--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:17	This demonstrates how Thoreau was able to write Walden. Because at his place he was only searching for a hound, a gray horse, and a turtle dove. So he had none of these things to fend for, leaving him time to write. Well, are there other questions from the audience? Anyone? Yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:09	INAUDIBLE Mr. Simenon You're an admirer of Mr. Thurber and is Mr. Thurber a representative of the comic spirit in some way?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:57	Mr. Thurber, whom you admire-- is he a comic writer and is--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:03	It's not--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:11	But there's an inward eye. He's often speaking of himself, isn't he?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:16	And one is even psychological aberration-- not always cruel to himself. He is in a way defending himself, isn't he INAUDIBLE?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:25	He's defending himself from cruelty.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:29	And he thought maybe there's a big opening here for the comic now.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:52	Mr. West, please.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	9:42	And this connection I think has been overlooked in this discussion-- the possibility that one of the ways to read Kafka's book is not whether-- I'm not discussing whether or not it's an allegory or a novel. But one way to read it may be as extremely hilarious in just this situation that you speak of, the man and his particular small country driven to an extreme. This is one form of therapy which the reader might be able to share in. Mr. Ellison?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	10:49	He's hilarious, and Quentin has a certain humor about himself--	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	12:33	In this, Faulkner represents the return to the 19th century that has been asked for. And at that time, decaying corpses in the period of Mark Twain were the very peak of humor, whereas our contemporary jokes about homosexual-- homosexuality would have horrified Twain. Lots of things are fashioned in Faulkner in this regard, maybe attempting to turn back the clock, which is one of the things that the conference has suggested the modern novelists might do. Mr. Holthusen, would you speak on any of these subjects?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	16:14	Mr. O'Connor?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	19:49	As for being a funny book, no, this is the kind of comedy which does grow out for me-- it seems to me, as Mr. West says, out of being at the end of the string and this is the thing that is left. This is a comedy of strength and of the kind of laughter that I remember, and of smiling that I remember, having the first experience of when having been sent away from the house because of the approaching death of one of my grandparents, and being asked for a number of reasons to sleep at a relative's house. And coming back in the morning to have been told when I was wakened that the grandparent had died.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	20:26	And I come back to find my father and mother who were-- had normal affection but were products of the 19th century-- find my mother sitting on my father's lap. And some other people there, and they're having a rather smiling time. Rather-- they were not at the end of despair. But this mixture of the two, the idea that to a child of-- I've forgotten what tender years-- that the time of death it wasn't entirely long-faced, or that one of the ways to avoid the long face or deal with the causes of long faces was have a short face, or whatever laughing is.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	21:01	It seems to me that The Trial does this. And then The Castle, when the man lay-- when the bureau or big secretary furniture is laid down and they're jumping up and down to get the papers into the thing-- it's only a tiny episode of thousands. This seems to me comic on the way to the dealing with the monstrous situation of being arrested under three different governments by same policeman. And-- and none of these books is funny.	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	21:33	Mr. Hill?	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	23:18	Mr. Sloane	Carvel Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	5:38	Just to perhaps search for a link between this question of comedy and tragedy and the future of the novel, nobody has had anything very helpful to say about the comic novel and its future, if any. I was just wondering if most of the speakers feel that the nature of our times has sort of cast a blight over the comic spirit in general so that it's really pretty difficult for art to flourish.	Fletcher
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	12:04	As I Lay Dying, for example. It's high ironic comedy.	Fletcher
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	16:16	Well, I don't really want to add to the sufferings of the audience in this thing. When I say Kafka is an allegory, I don't mean that I don't like allegories. And in particular I don't mean that I don't like Kafka, whose work I know very well and admire enormously. I do feel all the time that when people start discussing things like the novel and the short story, they ought merely for the purpose of discussion to define the term precisely. It doesn't matter whether they're defining it accurately or not.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	16:52	It does mean that we should all be speaking about the same thing. I've complained before about Mr. Foster's definition of the novel as any piece of fiction of more than 50,000 words in length, which as I say implies any prose translation of The Iliad or The Odyssey, implies all the sagas-- the Icelandic ones that Mr. West was talking about, and the Irish sagas, and which finally leads him to the absurdity of trying to criticize Zuleika Dobson in the same way as he's criticizing Thomas Hardy.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	17:29	You can't do it. Criticism just goes to pieces the moment you take 50 different forms and lump them all in together and try to make general rules for them. It's much better to take the allegory by itself, try to make rules for that if you can, try to criticize that properly. Kafka, I still maintain, is an allegory, a story like The Trial. I treat with contempt the German suggestion that it's a funny book.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	17:58	The Trial is really, as far as I can see it, the same thing that you get in Finnegans Wake. It is the question of a fall. What is man being tried for? And it's not being treated in specific terms. The mere idea itself precludes its treatment as a novel. It's being treated in general terms exactly as Bunyan treated the problems that he was treating in general terms. That's the reason he talks about a character called Christian. It's the same thing as Cain.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	18:33	If you try to dig in Pilgrim's Progress, into a history of the novel, you're going to get into hopeless confusion. And I merely try to narrow this definition down for my own convenience, and certainly with no idea of suggesting that merely because a novel-- a long work of fiction-- is an allegory, that it isn't a very, very important work. Obviously Pilgrim's Progress is, obviously The Castle above all of Kafka's.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	19:08	As for funny and comic, it doesn't seem to me that The Trial or-- neither The Trial nor The Castle is a funny book. Nor do I think that As I Lay Dying is a funny book, nor do I think that Don Quixote is a funny book. But I think that one of their ways to making an-- for my money a serious comment on significant things is by way of comedy. I think that there is a vast amount of comedy in Don Quixote, and I agree there's a great deal of comedy in As I Lay Dying. And I treat with real resentment any suggestion that The Trial and The Castle do not have enormous comic elements as it goes along.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:07	--Agonistes is a poem. You don't.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:15	INAUDIBLE , We have a few comic novels, and in literature there are very, very few. And I think that the comic-- the bed is of comic is cruelty. And we are no more cruel in everything. We see the man who has too much sympathy-- too much sympathy? No, it's not the word.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	6:34	Yes, compassion to be comics-- to be still comics. The comics is always bad. It's done something cruel. Look, remember Charlie Chaplin? Why do you love Charlie Chaplin? Because before-- because each time he tried to do something, he do it the wrong way. It's the basis of every comic. After all INAUDIBLE you already saying.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:02	Certainly liberties INAUDIBLE --	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:04	--awfully cruel, or is it? Certainly he looked the man with a very, very cruel eye.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:15	Yeah, INAUDIBLE.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:24	Yes, certainly.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:27	Yes. But look how many--	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	7:32	I am looking at how many comics out there we had in three centuries. There are very, very few. Less than-- and it's the same on the screen, it's the same for the stage. We have very, very few good comics. I think it's not difficult and it needs very little compassion from man. That's what I say.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:17	INAUDIBLE and it's very tangbile and it's only one novel.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	13:03	INAUDIBLE on Kafka if I may. If I understood you, if I understood you right way, you show a sort of repulsive rejection against Kafka's allegoric style.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	13:21	And you make-- you made a sort of difference between a novel and an allegory. Why don't you accept the allegorical form of a novel? I think it's based on very concrete experiences and it is more realistic than-- than certain novels of the so-called realistic manner. You-- one must not forget that he lived in the ghetto of Prague, and that all his novels are sort of a transfiguration of the conditions in a ghetto, of the jungle of a ghetto.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	14:09	And I think that some of his allegories and parables which he had written in 1910-- as early as 1910-- are a concrete and precise prophecy of what has happened 30 years later all over Europe. And therefore I mean that-- I know a writer in Germany, a very well-known writer who, for example, was three times arrested under each government once. And each time by the same policeman. And that is-- that is his sort of diabolically-- diabolical paradox which is expressed in Kafka.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	14:55	So therefore I think it's very concrete, and if you read it in German you'll see. It's absolutely non-extract-- abstract. Absolute concrete, and the language is full of flesh and flowers and blooms, like-- like flowers on the field. A very sound prose, not modern prose. Very conservative prose, prose which has been influenced-- very much influenced by the best dark bread writers as INAUDIBLE Grimm and INAUDIBLE , and Heber The most solid and-- and conservative. And-- and therefore I felt a little uneasy when you said-- when you said allegoric-- allegorical.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	15:53	And for the last point, I think that this is a real progress, this Kafkan style, and a symbol for a certain changing of the-- changement of the novel at all. Of the task of the novel and of the form of the novel. A step forward.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	21:34	I should like to ask, the ruling out of The Trial as a novel because it's an allegory-- it seems to me to be something wrong somewhere here. Because it's so would you rule Samson Agonistes out as a poem because it's an allegory? It seems to me allegory is a technique which is a vital part of the novel's baggage, and I don't see why you say that The Trial is not a novel. It--	Hill
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:10	Mr. O'Connor, you're in Hyde Park country. But I see your point more clearly now.	Hill
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	22:32	Well, The Trial-- The Trial is not-- is not a romantic novel either. I thought Mr. Simenon sort of laid that ghost last night with the quotation from Robert Desnos who had a monstrous collection of various types of novels. It seems to me that in trying to define the form, there's a danger of rarefying it to such an extent that several novelists that I know that are working in good faith are just about to close their notebook and go home and go back to selling shoes or something of that sort. Because there are a great many people who are absolutely convinced that they're writing novels, and I'm only glad, Mr. O'Connor, that you're not in charge of the jury which determines whether or not INAUDIBLE you got the job.	Hill
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	0:00 - 31:58	August 5 Session Discussion	Program
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	10:11	Only that much of Faulkner is terrifically funny and comic. The Sound and the Fury-- a great part of it is-- is just outrageously funny. Not only is Benjy funny, the-- the jokes which go all through that section, and luster, and these other surrogates of luster, the people who lived earllier as slaves. All of that stuff is funny, and especially is Jason comic. It seems to me he's a terrific--	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	10:52	Sure.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	10:54	The whole business that's going around here and Cambridge-- they fight with the fellow Freed, or whatever his name is. All of that is common. I think it's corrective, and I think that comedy is one of the unifying moves of American society and turns up in the best of our fiction. The only thing about it is that we are so damn solemn these days that half the time we don't recognize comedy.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	11:27	Part of it was a loss of-- well, it's exactly, Mr. Fletcher. I think the loss of the tragic view of life, the willingness to look at these ambiguous situations and feel them and then transcend them through saying, well hey, this is just so impossible I might as well laugh about it. And I think that that's where the-- the awareness of defeat, which in a sense is the awareness of the absurd, comes into-- to certain writing and gives it that tone which it has.	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	12:07	That's just as funny They do everything. They go through fire and water and God knows what else. They-- they take so long that the woman is smelling all over the place, and when they finally get her in the ground he goes immediately and he comes back with a woman is who is described as being built like a duck, and he says, meet my new wife. Which--	Ralph Ellison
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	23:20	Perhaps I am, in an odd sort of way, in charge of this bureau.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	23:56	First of all, I've been trying to think what would entitle me to say anything to you at all. I've come to the conclusion that I enjoy a unique distinction in this room. Unquestionably I have read more bad novels than anyone else in this room. As much as any two of you have ever read. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	24:19	I hear the same series of rather small vocabulary words repeated last night, today, over and over again. A limited number of names of writers-- a very limited number, a limited number of words. And I'd like to comment on a few of the words. First of all, the words art and artist.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	24:38	Now in my office, or any office that I've run for the last 15 years, there are two or three absolutely fixed rules. One of these rules, which is sent by me in memorandum form to all the members of my staff at least once a year, is that the word "art" is not to be employed in any piece of writing put out by my house. Neither is the word "great," nor the phrase "work of art," nor anything which suggests this matter or is a circumlocution to convey the same effect.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	25:08	INAUDIBLE the test with Mr. O'Connor. INAUDIBLE the test of a novel which is a work of art is-- it's its readership. It is the reader that makes a novel a work of art. Otherwise it is nothing but a series of black marks on a piece of white paper existing in a virgin wilderness, possibly crawled over by an ant or buried by a burier beetle. But it is in the reader that the greatness of a work either takes place or it doesn't. And there is no other locus, and it has no abstract existence that I have been able to detect.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	25:47	Therefore, when we say-- if we were to say in our jacket copy that we believe that such and such a book would be a work of art, we would run up against the second of Sloanees great prohibitions, which is the moral imperative. "This is a book which everybody ought to read." There's one aspect of the reader that I don't think Mr. O'Connor has expressed enough, but if you try to make a living off readers the way I do and my writers do, you'll notice that every reader possesses a very rare privilege. He can just take a book INAUDIBLE like this, and do that. And no work of art can survive that gesture.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	26:41	Why do I go on publishing novels in view of the two things that I have heard now for 24 hours around here? First that there are very few novelists, and they're open to serious question. Maybe some of them are allegorists and others are satirists in a concealed form. There are hardly any novelists, perhaps 10, whose names we can mention at all out of the 20th century.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	27:03	And second, that even with this corporal's guard of the past to lean on the future, according to our variables Nabokov's Diabolik is going to be even more impoverished. Well, from the publisher's point of view, the justification for publishing fiction today is that people read fiction. They read novels. Between the efforts of a publisher of my type-- the publisher Ms. Livingston's-- fiction is being read in absolutely unprecedented quantities as far as the United States is concerned, and the demand for even competent fiction is insatiable.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	27:42	25 years ago when I went into the book business, the average sale of a first novel was 2,500 to 3,000 copies. That was the average sale. Painfully enough at that time, 3,000 copies enabled the publishers to make a small but perceptible profit-- a couple hundred dollars maybe-- off the operation.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	28:04	Today, the average sale of a novel without benefit of reprints or anything else is probably in the neighborhood of 5,500 or 6,000 copies. And it is an unprofitable figure, but nevertheless the population of the United States has not doubled in the 25 years since I went into this business. So then I would say that there was a substantial percentage-wise increase in this moribund art of the novel.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	28:32	And I hear a lot about this question of plot this afternoon, and since I'm an editor and I'm supposed to tell novelists who come to me what the hell is wrong with the 385 pages of double-spaced typing that they submit to me, this question of plot keeps coming up. It's almost a term of reproach apparently in modern criticism. The only justification for a plot in perhaps to Simenon's sense is the readers like it. They are of course wrong, no doubt. But they do like it.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	29:08	However, the essence of a novel is not plot, and I should be sorry to have this word stand for what the actual truth of the matter is. What a novel has is structure, and this structure has been best defined by Robert Frost, at least for my purposes. In talking about poems he said, "a poem, like a lump of ice on the top of a hot stove, precedes by its own melting. And the structure of a novel can be very simply described. A novel begins at the moment when the action which takes place within it becomes inevitable, and it ends when the materials of which it's composed have been consumed, melted, or anything else	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	29:54	This is not plot, but this is structure. And you can have plot on top of it, but I don't think that this is any arcane matter. I don't think that this is a question of schools of criticism. I think this is simply observable fact and will apply to any successful work of fiction. And one of the proofs of it is that from time to time, writers are aware of the fact that they have violated this Sloanee's law of the nature of the novel, and they put after pieces in there.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	30:23	All of you remember the last long novel of John O'Hara's about Harrisburg, whatever the name of it was.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	30:30	Hmm?	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	30:31	A Rage to Live, yeah. Well Mr. O'Hara was compelled in great embarrassment to write three or four pages at the end of his novel saying what became of the characters, and how some of the golf balls that he had teed up in the course of this story finally came to rest. And this is a demonstration of the fact that if you do not consume the material of your own book, your book is without a central structure and is unsatisfactory to the reader. Unsatisfactory to the point where even the author was compelled to try to satisfy the reader by an overt and ridiculous gesture.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	31:03	But what is all this question about the problem of reality? This is another thing. This is the great "Serbonian bog where armies whole have sunk," to quote your favorite poet. And--	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	31:19	--from the point of view of the writer, it seems to me that it is unwise to become a Bishop Berkeley about it in one sense, saying there is no reality and it all exists in the eye of the beholder, or to become a Samuel Johnson and the other, much better than Samuel Johnson. "Sir, I refute it thus." Stamping his foot on the paving stones in London. All reality, if you want to take a Chinese approach toward this, is a business of flesh And if you want to get metaphysical about it, it's motion. And specifically it's human beings in motion, because this is the only thing a novelist ever writes about anyhow.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	31:58	So if the writer is able to persuade the reader that the reader is vicariously experiencing the fate of human beings in motion, through some form of time-- biologic or temporal or some other kind of time-- he has succeeded. And that is as much reality as can be created in a work of fiction. That's what I look for in a manuscript. That kind of conviction and nothing else. And you know, 99% of all the books I have ever turned down I turned down because they were dull.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	23:27	Mr. Ellison and I have been sitting here feeling our commercial instincts losing more and more strongly to the force of our entire physiques. And perhaps a few words from the people who have to back the actual work of writers, and back it with their money, with their hearts, with their time, with their work, with their face, wouldn't be out of place here.	William Yandell Elliott
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	1:27	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	2:18	LAUGHTER APPLAUSE	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	5:07	LAUGHTER	Audience
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	2:26	Before we close this session, I like to note that I seemed to-- previously to note an objection in part to Mr. Simenon and Mr. Holthusen when Mr. Sloanee said that if the novel is closed and put aside by the reader, that the novel does not become art.	Carver Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:57	Bill?	Carver Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	4:37	If this gesture continues--	Carver Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	5:11	Well, it's rather late, and 8:00 the panel-- people on the panel I think have found is closer to this hour than it had seemed earlier. So I think we better adjourn today. Meet again at 8:00 tonight in Sander's Theatre.	Carver Collins
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	4:36	No, no.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	4:39	--clearly the writers can get overlooked. And that this does not diminish one whit the number or the quality of the words they've written. But in the end, I have never found a neglected masterpiece in my life. And believe me, if any of you really have hold of one, I would be very happy to give you my telephone number and office address. Because the second time around, as Mr. Simenon says quite a lot of money might be made off INAUDIBLE.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	2:47	Because a lot of novels were not read for years and years, and then they are now-- now by everybody. The point of view of the publisher is the immediate point of view. He looks at the people who will read a novel the next week or the next three months. But maybe a novel that will have five readers in the next three months will be a very large, well-known novel INAUDIBLE years later.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:12	In the case of Flaubert that we spoke yesterday-- at the time of Flaubert he would certainly not have the publish problem because at this time nobody thinks that people will read it. Madame Bovary looked like something very boring for the people at this time, and now everybody knows it. So it's very naive, this point of view, because the man who will today throw the book is maybe the same one who in 20 years will read avidly-- avidly this book when scholars would explain to him what is in it. You know what I mean?	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:45	INAUDIBLE that Mr. Sloanee was really trying to justify the publication of a novel at that point I think. The publishing of it, not the reading or the writing of it.	George Simenon
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	4:38	INTERPOSING VOICES	Panelists
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	0:00 - 5:11	August 5 Session Discussion	Program
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	0:01	And by dull, I mean that I was not interested in them and they didn't convince me. And by being uninterested and unconvinced, I simply mean that they conveyed no impression of reality to me. And I think from the writer's point of view, it would be foolish to go any farther. The business of technical, critical dissection is another matter. But I have great faith that writers will never wholly turn into metaphysicians, and that somehow or other, the novel will survive this period of introspection, analysis, and dissection.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	0:31	Those writers who are not quite as disturbed about it as this have extraordinary audiences in this country, as I'm sure Ms. Livingston will affirm either tonight or right now if she wants to. There is a fundamental human drive in all of us and it is to communicate with each other. And if every novel is an act of communication, then Mr. O'Connor is right. Unless this act of communication is existing, the novel has no existence. It is the reader who-- who makes the novel, and without that there is nothing. Art doesn't exist in the abstract. As far as we're concerned, there is no art on the planet Venus.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	1:15	I felt a little, during the course of this earlier discussion, like a man in the haberdashery business who has been paid an evangelical call by a convinced nudist.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	1:30	I assure you, the people of the United States do read novels, and I think that there is a great danger in claiming that the emperor hasn't any clothes on all the time. There really is such a thing as a novel, and people really do read them and they really are hungry for them. And the core of it, in my opinion, is what Mr. O'Connor has said in one way and what I'm trying to say in the other.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	1:52	And I can also point out that it requires an extremely trained and sophisticated taste to get any kind of genuine entertainment out of a Kafka novel. And you could submit-- you could go right over to Boston and corral 2,000 people and give them each a copy of a Kafka book. And I would be astonished to learn that four of them actually liked it. This is a very specialized taste, but as long as you are all reading Kafka, Kafka by my standards is an existing novelist.	William Sloane
August 5, Afternoon Part Four	3:59	Well, this is a hard point to answer because actually, we don't know of any great works of fiction which haven't been read. I have to say, when this act occurred I simply pointed out that the reason why Flaubert remains great and alive in Mr. Simenon's mind, and to a lesser extent mine and I have no doubt Mr. O'Connor's and all of you, is simply the fact that we have read him and do read him. I never said that this had to take place the week of publication or even the month or the year of INAUDIBLE . I'm not trying to--	William Sloane