Annotations for "Frank O'Connor"

Play All

Item	Time	Annotation	Layer
August 3, Evening Part One	41:47	Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chairman, I don't know, really, why I am speaking here tonight. The only qualification I can offer you is rather like the qualification of certain students in the East who describe themselves as failed BA. All I can describe myself is as an ex-modern novelist. I gave up the plan a long time ago.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	42:24	In those days, I used to think I'd like to be a modern novelist. And I even plotted a modern novel, an awfully nice modern novel. Instead of the usual things of the ancient classical novel, this modern novel began in the womb. And it described all the doubts and anguish of the embryo before the embryo became an individual.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	42:59	And then, I gradually lost courage. By that time, Mr. William Faulkner had anticipated me. He'd written a novel in which the principal character was an idiot-- which was much better.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	43:23	And before that, James Joyce had actually described the world as seen through a woman's character. But the woman's character wasn't enough for him. The woman also represented the physical body of a woman. And when you carried it a little further, she represented the Earth spinning through space.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	43:49	Well, at my age, I'm too modest to attempt to compete with these two great examples. And anyway, I don't want to. I haven't the least desire to write about an idiot, but if I ever do write about an idiot, he's going to be a real idiot, and he's not going to be a symbol for a timeless world, or for the instincts, or anything else of the kind.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	44:22	And as some of you know, I have a mania for writing about women, but they're always women. They never represent the Earth spinning through space at all. There, you really touch the difference between the novelist, the writer of the 19th century, the old-fashioned writer like myself, and the really up-to-date writer.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	44:51	There was a famous Russian symbolist poet-- I've forgotten his name now-- but he carried on a long, and very passionate, and very unhappy love affair all through his life with a lake in Finland. And the lake didn't requite his love, a really bad case. And he grew unhappier and unhappier, and wrote more and more poems to the lake. I have no doubt that Finnish lakes are rather like that-- slightly frigid.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	45:28	Now, I don't want to add to the difficulties of the summer school authorities. And I don't want to add any word of bitterness at all to the relations between our powers and Russia. But I still do think that in the matter of lovemaking, you can't beat women.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	45:57	One of the difficulties I've been faced with tonight in listening to Mr. Hyman's address is that I have been conditioned. For the second time, the summer school authorities have asked me back. And I find that after five or six weeks, what began as a mere assumption, what began as the sort of idea you throw out to a friend, becomes fact.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	46:29	I suppose it simply is the fact that one can't be almighty God for five days of the week and an ordinary human being for the other two days. But one is frightfully shocked, I notice, after a spell of teaching by error. And I'm afraid instead of the nice, cheerful discussion that I should normally have had with Mr. Hyman, I just feel that Mr Hyman has fallen into error.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	47:04	Now, another difficulty about teaching is that one repeats oneself. And I can only apologize to any students of mine who are here tonight, and who hear me saying the same things over and over again. I just can't stop them. Like the old lady who went to confession and confessed the one passionate sin of her youth, I like talking about it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	47:36	Now, I feel that I've seen two periods of literary taste, and I'm just on the edge of seeing a third. I saw the first by accident because I grew up in an Irish provincial town. And in that Irish provincial town, we didn't have much in the way of modern literature.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	48:03	And I've met other Irishmen who have grown up in the same way, and who grew up feeling that the 19th century novel was a contemporary novel. I used to have one old friend who said to another old friend of mine, "It's no use talking to me about literature. To me, literature means three names, all of them Russian." And when I first heard the story, what really interested me was that I didn't laugh for a split second. What really flashed through my mind was, which three?	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	48:47	So I grew up feeling that the 19th century novel was the novel, and there wasn't any other sort of art possible. And that 19th century novel, I still think, was the greatest art since the Greek theater, the greatest popular art, the only one which compares, for instance, with the Elizabethan theater. It was an art of the whole people, an art in which there was a correspondence between the writer and his audience.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	49:20	Kuprin, the Russian short-story writer, has a wonderful short story, which moved me terribly when I read it first of all, describes an old deacon of the Orthodox Church who was given instructions to prepare to chant in an excommunication service against somebody whose name he's never heard of. And the deacon is a bass. And like all basses, he's just crazy with vanity, and he's delighted with the chance.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	49:50	And he goes away and he practices the anathema service with great enthusiasm. And then gradually, the name of the man the service is being held against comes into his head. It's Tolstoy.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	50:05	And he remembers that once upon a time, he read a book by Tolstoy called The Cossacks. And then scenes from The Cossacks begin to come back into his head. And finally, at a great moment of the service, when he's got to burst into these colossal curses of the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, he bursts instead into an exultant Mnogaja leta ad multos annos.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	50:33	And that was a story that was understood by the audience that read it because they felt about Tolstoy exactly as Kuprin felt about him, exactly as the deacon felt about him. Again, a friend of mine in Ireland describes an old woman who he knew who, every night, added to her night prayers a special prayer for Charles Dickens. And it's no use telling me that that's not criticism, but I know perfectly well it's not criticism and I don't give a damn.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	51:08	I maintain that that describes the 19th century novel to you. All I will say is that there isn't a parish priest in the world who wouldn't be delighted to join in an excommunication service against any modern novelist.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	51:27	And I doubt very much if there is an old woman in the world who adds a prayer for Mr. Faulkner to her night prayers.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	51:38	Now, that was the 19th century novel. And there's no question at all about where the 19th century novel came from. The 19th century novel was the great art of the middle classes, who'd been released by the French Revolution from their subjection to the aristocracy, and were at last doing what they'd always wanted to do, what they tried to do in Elizabethan times, what they did in the Elizabethan middle class plays.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	52:11	And these plays are obscured for us today by the fact that Shakespeare's genius just wiped them out. But there they were, a whole art in themselves. Many of them have disappeared, and it's only from the work of somebody like Professor Sisson that we realize what they were really like-- that they all contained libel actions. In fact, they were all dealing with a man around the corner and with the contemporary scandal because they all became subjects for legal actions.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	52:50	And as a result, professor Sisson has been able to resurrect plays which otherwise would have disappeared from the world, have disappeared from the world so far as their texts go. The next time the middle classes really got to work was in the Netherlands. And there, you get a 19th century novel expressed as Dutch painting. And you get all the standards of the middle classes expressed in Dutch painting, with the exception of the moral standards, which the novel adds to middle class art.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part One	40:51 - 52:50	“The Modern Novel,” Frank O’Connor	Program
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00 - 0:00	All you've got to do is look at a Dutch interior to realize what the 19th century novel was going to be when it came. First of all, the old fanciful conception, the old genealogical conception, had been wiped out. And in its place, you got something which we can vaguely call realism. And everybody today tells me you can't define realism.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	0:27	And I don't mind whether you can define realism or not, it's there in Dutch painting. And it's there in the 19th century novel. And in the Dutch paintings, you get the poetry of everyday life expressed for the first time in the history of the human race.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	0:48	And when you come to the 19th century novel, that is really what you get. It was only today that a friend of mine referred me to an essay which I've never read, and which I'm quoting to you on trust, an essay by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade, in which he defines what the 19th century novel is going to be. And in this essay, he says, the novel-- as soon as the novelists have learned to deal with the new reading public-- will deal with the differences between professions.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:26	It will deal with the differences between races. It will educate the new middle class about what ordinary life is like. And the amazing thing is that the Marquis de Sade never listened to his own advice.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:42	There's a complete change in the values established by the 19th century novel. Instead of honor, the feudal conception, you get the conception of honesty. Trollope can write a masterpiece about an old clergyman who can't explain what he's done with a check for 25 pounds-- $75. And a whole novel is built upon this theme.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	2:13	And for the first time, again, you feel that certain subjects are being dealt with as they should be dealt with. When I read Tolstoy's description of Sebastopol, I feel that war, for the first time in the history of the human race, is being dealt with, with the gravity that it demands.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	2:36	And this thing was not confined to the novelists. It was part of the whole middle class conception of life. Because again, I'm repeating myself, and I'm quite prepared to go on repeating myself-- at the other side of the lines from Tolstoy, there was a young English woman called Florence Nightingale. And Florence Nightingale was trying to prove to the English government that women could make nurses.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	3:06	And she describes in her journals how these English boys who were dying of exposure and starvation outside Scutari, were being brought down to her. And she was haunted by the face of these English boys. And in her journals, she uses phrases like this-- "Oh, my poor men, I have been a bad mother to you. To go away and leave you in your Crimean graves. 76% in eight regiments in six months."	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	3:48	And there you have the whole middle class conception of life which is also expressed in Sebastopol. For the first time, you've got that Shakespearean cry of emotion-- "My poor men, I have been a bad mother to you." But it's also expressed in percentages.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	4:09	For the first time, you get statistical diagnosis. And it's been practiced by a woman.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	4:20	And then, we move to the modern novel, and we find the whole picture is entirely different. I moved in this way simply because I lived in a provincial town, and nobody had told me that there was any gap. Nobody had told me that a classical novel had ended in 1880, and had begun again in 1910, with people like Forster, and Gide and Proust, and Joyce, and Lawrence. But it had, and it was an entirely different thing.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	4:55	To begin with, in Joyce's work, when I read it-- and I admired it extravagantly, because it was dealing with the sort of life I knew-- you got a type of realism which I didn't understand. And I didn't understand it until I turned to the work of Flaubert. And I realized that it wasn't realism-- it was naturalism.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	5:19	It was the man standing outside the situation he was describing, saying, "this has got nothing at all to do with me." In the realistic novel, the writer said, I'm just a man like these men. And I feel with them. And I don't mind weeping over them, and I don't mind laughing at them.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	5:37	But Flaubert said, you can't get involved in these things. And Joyce takes it up. And in stories like the stories in Dubliners, you get something which was entirely new to me-- you get naturalism, as opposed to realism. And after a time, it began to weary me enormously.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	6:01	As well as that, you get another thing in Dubliners-- which goes on through Portrait, and goes on through all Joyce's work, and goes on through the whole of modern literature, and that is the use of metaphor. You realize when you read a story like "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," or "The Dead," that the characters that Joyce is describing are not free. They are characters who are representing something else, and every action they perform, and every word they say is related to something else, which is a symbol, which is a metaphor.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	6:47	For instance, in "The Dead," not one single sentence is uttered which is not related to Joyce's idea of death. And that, again, was new to me. You get the same thing in the Portrait, except that it grows in complexity all the way through. And finally, you get it in Ulysses.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	7:12	In Ulysses, you get a character, Mr. Bloom, who is also the hero of The Odyssey. His wife at one time is Calypso, at another time, she's Penelope.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	7:29	And the unfortunate man whose funeral he's attending, a gentleman called Dignam, happens to be somebody called El Pinar in The Odyssey. And as El Pinar is a Semitic word which means drunk. Mr. Dignam has to be too fond of drink. That's what really kills him, eventually.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	7:52	There, you get something, again, entirely new in fiction. You get the character controlled from the word, "go." Mr. Bloom just is not allowed to say or do anything which is not relevant to the theme.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	8:10	I have to apologize for introducing all the scurrilous details, but today I found myself having to explain to my class why it is that Mr. Bloom, after breakfast, having occasion to go apart, shall we say, has the choice between going upstairs and going out to the yard. And the subject of the chapter is metempsychosis-- Mr. Bloom, in fact, is Ulysses, and he's following out the program of Ulysses in The Odyssey.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	9:00	Now, his freedom of action is considerably restricted, because Joyce is using the ordinary processes of life-- the growth of grass, crops, and so on, cattle feeding on them, the human beings finally feeding on the cattle, and the byproducts being returned to the Earth, and coming up again as grass-- he's using this as an analogy to illustrate the process of metempsychosis. Consequently, Mr. Bloom cannot go upstairs.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	9:42	The one thing a metaphor cannot do is let its author down. And the Almighty, at least, gave us two choices, but Joyce only gives us one. And all I can say is that I have no respect at all for a character who allows himself to be dictated to in this way, particularly in such intimate matters by an author.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	10:14	And of course, finally, in Finnegans Wake, you reach the position where what is in the unconscious in Ulysses just comes on top-- everything is a metaphor. Humanity, itself, is a metaphor. Every movement we make is a metaphor. It's all dictated, it's all determined-- we've got nothing at all to say to it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	10:38	Then, I turn to Proust who is one of my earliest heroes, and I think will be until the day I die, and I notice again peculiar things which I don't notice in the classical novel. For instance, in Du coté de chez Swann you get a character called Swann who is in love with a woman called Odette. And that love story represents the pattern of all the love episodes through Proust. Every single love episode is based on that.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	11:14	And it describes the pattern is the pattern of a very rich, and a very cultured man, who falls in love with a woman definitely of the lower classes, who is completely uneducated, and who is entirely venal. And the theme that Proust is hammering home in every single one of these love stories is that, in effect, when we fall in love with a woman, we create the woman.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	11:47	There is no woman there. We create her. We fall out of love with her, she ceases to exist.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	11:56	And it's only after I had read Proust very carefully that I began to discover that this affected everything that Proust wrote. That in fact, the whole theory of Proust's work depends upon this one idea that in love, there is no reciprocity. Once you fall in love, you fall in love with an idea in your own mind, not with something in the external world.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	12:23	Accordingly, you get Proust laying down the law about it-- you get him saying that nothing but inaccurate observation will permit you to say that there is any truth in an object. All truth is in the mind.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	12:43	Now, I can make no distinction between what Joyce is saying and what Proust is saying. What they are saying is that the old objective world of the classical novel doesn't exist. There is nothing outside me as Coquelin and Yeats's last great play says, "I make the truth."	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	13:05	And what I really want to know is, how does that differ from the statements of people like Mussolini and Hitler? Don't they say, "I make the truth?" What else is this, except literary fascism?	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	13:22	And there, you come back to the intellectual background of the modern novel. You come back to the fact that, behind all this work, there is an intellectual background, which is entirely subjective.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	13:36	You come back to a psychological background-- of Freud and Jung-- which simply says, a certain pattern has been created for our lives, and we follow that pattern out. We don't control it-- it goes on in spite of us.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	13:54	What Proust is really saying is what Bergson says-- there, you get a subjective philosophy, which, in fact, refuses to distinguish between the subject and the object. Refuses to distinguish between me and the external world.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	14:13	Its part is one of these anti-rational philosophies which have been springing up all the time during the past 50 years. And as well as that, particularly in Joyce, particularly in Ulysses, and in Finnegans Wake, you get this subjective conception of history which begins with Flinders Petrie, and goes on through Spengler, and ends up in our own time with Toynbee, which says, that history is merely a pattern and we've got to fall into the pattern. We can't affect the pattern. There it is, dictated for us. And that is precisely what Joyce is saying, and precisely what the other writers are saying.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	15:01	Now, all that comes from, very curiously, the only critic I know who has traced this-- is a modern French novelist, whom I admire enormously, Marcel Ayme. And Marcel Ayme has written a brilliant book called, Le Confort Intellectual-- just enjoying yourself intellectually, if you like, in which he attacks the whole conception of modern literature, and maintains that modern literature has been going wrong since Baudelaire. And makes an awfully good case for it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	15:46	The only way in which Ayme goes wrong is that he doesn't realize that Baudelaire is picking up something else which goes back to the romantic revival-- that is going back to Byronism, to sadism, to precisely what the Marquis de Sade was doing. That this thing ran underground right through the 19th century. That it came up in two people-- Baudelaire in poetry, and Flaubert in prose.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	16:19	In Flaubert, you get the naturalistic novel-- the novel which intends to be realistic, but all the time at its side, you get these wildly romantic writing. Things like the Temptation of Saint Anthony and Salammbo, in which all the perversions dealt with by Sade at last come to light.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	16:48	These continue along until 1880, the death of the classical novel. Mario Praz has dealt with this very brilliantly and very wickedly in his book, Romantic Agony. The interesting thing is that I've been saying for a great many years, since the classical novel died in 1880, and Mario Praz says, the extraordinary thing is, the full revival, a full romantic revival only comes with the year 1880. When the classical novel dies, the romantic revival books start coming out, you get Wilde, and all the rest of it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	17:32	And in fact, what has happened, as far as I can see it, is that this literature of the romantic revival, approved by Freud, approved by Spengler, approved by Bergson, has become modern literature. That is the modern novel-- it is romantic revival literature with all the characteristics of the romantic revival about it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	18:01	The unnatural triangle that you find in Swan, Odette and INAUDIBLE , and in Bloom and Blazes Boylan, and Marion Bloom, that you find all over the work of Lawrence, that you find in the work of Mr. Faulkner, Popeye's relationship with Temple Drake, that you find in Hemmingway's, The Sun Also Rises-- it is the old romantic sadistic conception.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	18:36	Now, I have very little time left, and all I want to say is, as I told you before, I found myself living through two periods of literary taste, and I have a feeling that I'm going to live to see the beginning of a third. Already all over Europe, I think there is a change, that is a difference in attitude, and it's very easy to see where that difference in attitude comes from.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	19:09	When you read Marcel Ayme's book on Le Confort Intellectual, you see that the thing that really impressed him was the horrors of the liberation-- the tens of thousands of Frenchmen who were massacred all over the place on no ground whatever, for no reason whatever. You get this fantasy of malice expressing itself.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	19:34	And as well as that, on the other hand, as he says, when the Allied troops burst into the concentration camps, what they found before them was a poem by Baudelaire. And it's Buchenwald, and Belsen, and the horrors of the liberation through Europe-- which I believe have wakened up the younger writers, have made them realize that you can't any longer live in a subject of world. That somehow or other, you've got to face the fact that objective reality exists, and you've got to come to terms with it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	20:11	I believe there are signs of that in the work of Marcel Ayme, who was a much finer novelist than he's given credit for being. In the work of my friend, C. P. Snow. In the work of Joyce Kerry in England. And in particular, in the work of some followers of C. P. Snow, who believes as he does, that this period is over and done with, that you can never go back to what we call the modern novel.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	20:40	And I don't know what the answers are to the questions I've been raising tonight. All through history, you get this conflict between the inner man and the outer man, between the thing you feel to be true and the truth which is outside you.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	21:06	And the only light I've got on the subject is in that passage in the Gospels, which I keep on quoting whenever I'm asked about it, the passage in which Christ is asked by the doctor of the laws, which is the most important of the commandments. And Christ knew that if he said the first commandment, he was admitting that reality was subjective. If he said, the second commandment, he was saying that reality was objective.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	21:38	He simply quotes the first two commandments and says, there is no commandment more important than these. I've always felt that what he meant by that was reality is neither within us nor without us-- it's both within us and without us. And it's inapprehensible, except in moments when the two strike together, when they strike a spark from one another, and there is no truth more important than that.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00:27	Well, I'm in the--	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00:30	I'm in the unfortunate position that I can't quarrel with anybody, either. I'd love to do it. The nearest thing I can get to a quarrel is with Mr. West on the subject of Kafka. I entirely agree that this thing needs discussion, whether we have time to discuss it or not is another matter.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00:55	The point is The Trial, Kafka's Trial has nothing at all to do with life under the Austro-Hungarian empire.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:01:08	Kafka's two great novels, The Castle and The Trial are the modern equivalent of the Pilgrim's Progress-- they're allegories. And they're allegories written in Freudian terms. I don't particularly like Freud, and I don't particularly admire this as a technique, but there it is, on they're two wonderful books. And we ought to realize that they are dealing with man's destiny. And just man in face of eternity.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:01:40	And beyond that, I haven't much to quarrel with. I think I gathered a reference to Mr. James Gould Cozzens novel, after which I picked up the words joyful, expansive, moving. Was I dreaming?	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:01:59	Now, as well as that, Mr. West thinks I've exaggerated the subjective element in Proust's work. Actually, I minimized it all along the line of Proust's theory that the reality is in the subject, not in the object, is derived from the Bergsonian philosophy. And you get it all over the book.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:02:32	And he devotes a whole novel, Le Temps Retrouve, to proving that a objective reality doesn't exist. The only reality which is apprehensive is whatever happens to remain in the unconscious mind after an event has occurred, which is, in itself, inapprehensible and indescribable.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:03:01	I don't know that there's very much one can say about this question. But the general attack on Bergson is on that level, that he makes no distinction between the subject and the object. And it's not very easy to say with Proust whether he really says, there is an objective reality or not. You can quote occasional passages from Proust which seemed to suggest that he admitted the existence of a reality, though he maintained you could make no statement of value about it.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:03:34	On the other hand, you can quote innumerable passages from Proust which go to show that there is no reality in the object, whatever.	Frank O'Connor
August 3, Evening Part Two	0:00 - 22:13	Frank O'Connor, "The Modern Novel"	Program
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 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 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, Evening Part Three	15:44	I'm afraid I've got very little to say, ladies and gentlemen, except that in case that in the portion of the audience which remains, there is a young writer who wants to write novels or short stories. Do let me explain to him that it's not as serious as all that.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Evening Part Three	16:12	When I hear all these ponderous words pouring forth-- and I know they mean so much and all the rest of it-- I think of the village idiot in an Irish village who was seen after he had left school, hurling his three schoolbooks into the stream. With the first one he said, whereas. And then, he said, in as much. And then, he hurled the third book in and said, in so far.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Evening Part Three	16:46	Well, I had a feeling, listening to these two masters of literature, Mr. Simenon, Mr. Ellison, tonight, that I was listening to the story of INAUDIBLE, who was suffering in the interests of the community. And again, I felt all the time like that man that Boswell describes, who said to Dr. Johnson that he himself was very interested in philosophy at one time. But cheerfulness would keep breaking through.	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Evening Part Three	22:16	I think--	Frank O'Connor
August 4, Evening Part Three	22:17	INAUDIBLE to Mr. Ellison is, why should the devil have all the tunes?	Frank O'Connor
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 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 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 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, Evening Part Two	3:32	I don't know that I have very much to say. And I'm very much afraid of saying what I have to say because it puts me into a state of permanent opposition. And that's a state I don't want to get into, particularly as my relations with publishers and agents have always been remarkably good.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	3:57	And in fact, the only advice I ever give young writers is, find a good publisher and find a good agent and stick to them for the Lord sake. Don't go wandering around. I think I was frightfully alarmed by Miss Livingstone's speech.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	4:19	I know it all sounds wonderful. Here is Faulkner by the 6 million. You're spreading the lies on a scale in which the light has never been spread before. Now, I'm a great believer, as you've gathered, in getting an audience for literature and in showing respect for one's audience.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	4:46	The moment you begin to talk to me about an audience of 6 million, I want to run. Remember, I realize perfectly well that Miss Livingstone is full of almost a starry-eyed idealism about this. But there are a number of wicked people in the world who will not have her idealism.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	5:10	And that sort of attitude towards literature is not entirely new because in fact, it was the gospel of somebody who was anything but a starry-eyed idealist. And that was Lord Northcliffe, who valorized the English press out of existence.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	5:32	Remember the moment money comes into business on that scale, art begins to go out. I can hear Monsieur Simenon side beside me. I know he doesn't agree with me. But I've had some experience of this in the theater. And the thing which Mr. Sloane said is the real secret of it, that publishing in the 19th century was a smaller operation.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	6:05	And you realize that when you've worked in a theater, real theater like the Abay, that a problem of capitalisation becomes a very serious one. I realized that I could produce any play for 100 pounds, $300. And consequently, every young writer got a chance.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	6:33	And I'm quite certain, speaking as a man who has been director of a theater, that William Shakespeare's Henry V cost his company about $300, the most, $500 to produce. And the famous Hamlet that we saw cost $3 million to produce.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	7:00	Now the difference between the screen Hamlet and the theater Hamlet was that Shakespeare didn't have to worry about what he said. That beautiful scene in which the French officers speak, tell dirty stories, has just disappeared. So much capital has gone in. And I've worked on films as well as working in the theater. And I realized that the more capital you put into anything, the more people come along and say, oh, you can't say this. There's too much money involved in this.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	7:33	And I much prefer the smaller operation. Also when you get over-capitalization, don't forget that the squeeze is put on from other directions in the cinema. The squeeze is being put on by the workers as well. The industry has to pay out huge salaries. And the writers have to produce for the huge salaries.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	8:01	They've got to produce happy endings. It's just too bad. But happy endings are necessary. And the pressure gets more and more extreme. I firmly believe that you cannot have an art if publishing is going to be over-capitalized. I want to see books produced in reasonable editions. And I want them to see them produced as cheaply as possible.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	8:26	I do not want to have to cater for a public of 200,000 or 500,000, not because I don't respect them as much as I respect my own public of 3,000 or 4,000. I respect them every bit as much. But I know that if I attempt to reach them, I'm going to be destroyed as a writer.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	8:54	Also another thing I'm very much afraid of about these Pocket Books, I've seen it happen in England. Miss Livingstone described the work of the reprint editor, the reprint editor, with these figures in his head, is going to choose, perhaps in a most idealistic way, perhaps in a not very idealistic way, but it's already beginning to create an awful amount of mischief in England because you get the general idea, if this book is any good, it's going to appear in a pocket edition within a year.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	9:34	The fact that an author, and here, I am not speaking-- I shouldn't be speaking really at all because I'm involved in the matter. You get the feeling that any author who doesn't get into the Pocket Books can't be a really good author. And it's creating a new vulgarity, I think, in literature, a new snobbishness of sales.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	10:00	We're beginning to lose the old respect for the job as a job, whether it sells or whether it doesn't sell. And all I'll say is I know perfectly well Mr. Sloane and Ms Livingstone share my views on this. And would prefer a fine book which only sold 1,000 copies to a really bad book that sold 200,000. At least they would be, at the same time, earning their living and doing what they were put into the world to do. Still I just put that forward as a point of view that I am rather afraid of it.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	12:27	I want a representative audience. I mean, there is an enormous distinction between autocracy and any form of elective democracy. I think democracy was functioning in the 19th century, although the franchise was exceedingly limited. And in some ways in England, you got a superior type of politician when the franchise was so limited, merely because he didn't have to have the same demagogic appeal.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	13:03	All I'm afraid of is that somehow or other, we are going to reach the point where the value of a book disappears altogether. I am really talking about over capitalization, not that I don't want the 600,000 people to read the book. I do.	Frank O'Connor
August 5, Evening Part Two	18:02	I don't think there's anything--	Frank O'Connor