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| 3:29 | --say something which will go a little bit beyond Sinclair Lewis. In the first place, we don't expect novels-- even great novels-- to stay fashionable constantly from year to year. They are encounters with experience, after all. And they are like-- and all novels, I think-- demand that we bring something to them. | Ralph Ellison |
| 4:01 | What I'm trying to get at is there was a time when Sinclair Lewis did quite a bit for our awareness of ourselves as Americans, as members of society. I don't think that they are great art. We had the need at that time to have these things formulated for us. Babbitt is still a term, even though its meaning it's changed from the malignant over to the benign INAUDIBLE . | Ralph Ellison |
| 4:34 | But nevertheless, he performed that function. And now, the emotion which we brought to it, and the lives of our own imagination which we brought to his words has receded. We are looking to place him elsewhere. There will be a time when-- I suspect-- when people will be reading Sinclair Lewis again and saying, this man is a classic. This is wonderful writing. And you'll have your Lewis cults just as we have our Fitzgerald cults. | Ralph Ellison |
| 5:14 | I think it works that way. I think it's because the novel does communicate, because it must be fired-- like any work of art-- by the emotions, ideas, feelings of an audience. Thus, we have works which come up. They come into being and called into being through certain needs on the part of the viewer, the reader, listener. And after that need recedes, after the time changes-- and they must exist in time and can only exist in time-- they go into the veil. | Ralph Ellison |
| 0:00 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 0:40 | Why is it it varies from book to book and from reader to reader. But I do think that there are very many people today who simply can't read Sinclair Lewis. They just find him intolerably stupid. | Audience |
| 1:03 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 1:26 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 4:31 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 5:46 | INAUDIBLE come down to Earth. I dare ask a question. A very distinguished professor emeritus of Harvard has said that, "William Faulkner writes for morons," unquote. May we have some expert comment on that? | Audience |
| 6:05 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 6:16 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 6:18 | CLAPPING | Audience |
| 6:41 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 6:46 | INAUDIBLE | Audience |
| 7:27 | LAUGHTER | Audience |
| 18:22 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 22:20 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 23:48 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 25:59 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 27:53 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 27:54 | APPLAUSE | Audience |
| 28:22 | Seems to me that the most-- the very generalized discussion, which brought down INAUDIBLE , it was Ellison who said that the novel is a form of communication. And going from that, this question is directed to Mr. O'Connor, who has confused me considerably. I feel every time I stand up, there's a great chasm opening. And into this chasm disappear too many of my heroes. | Audience |
| 28:50 | CHUCKLING | Audience |
| 28:52 | Mr. O'Connor, spoke INAUDIBLE of the novel of 1970-- '50 as emphasize middle-class values. And I think I got a pattern in my mind. This has been carried on. | Audience |
| 29:07 | In the '30s, we had the proletariat semi-political novels of Dos Passos and Steinbeck in dubious battle, which communicated the values of proletariat. And since the war, it seems to me we have a great many novelists who were in the war who are trying to communicate now the great uncertainty of the orgy of violence without reason that they were engulfed in. And I wonder if, Mr. O'Connor, do you think this is a valid thing for novels to communicate? | Audience |
| 29:42 | I know it's subjective. And is very personal to an individual. The novel has certainly become that, as you pointed out last night. | Audience |
| 29:52 | Yet isn't this all part of a pattern of communication, starting with the novel forebearers? | Audience |
| 30:01 | Mr. O'Connor? | Audience |
| 0:02 | And I admit I have been reading Cruz with just as much enthusiasm as usual. I don't think that dullness bothers a certain kind of reader. It should. It's a commentary on the man who isn't bothered. To get back to the question that you asked, and which I was perhaps a bit frivolous about, I wonder if Sinclair Lewis's dullness-- which I can't find for myself in the thing like The Man Who Knew Coolidge-- | W.M. Frohock |
| 0:50 | But I would like to ask Mr. Hyman-- this is partly the cut off my own feet-- whether that isn't because some of the books are what you would call pseudo fictions. | W.M. Frohock |
| 27:16 | But as soon as the theme of time appears, thousands of these details fit in. And I don't favor crossword puzzles. I never worked one in my life, even on a-- in a day coach. And I don't want to work them here. | W.M. Frohock |
| 27:27 | But I think that somehow the author-- maybe realism of an extraordinarily flat variety has come to its end for the moment. And I think for an author to deal with these things in a way which maybe has a new meaning, I mean, for him to deal in this way may have a new meaning and may convey it to some readers. But by the all standards set up of an earlier time, you're quite right. Your professor's quite right. He writes for morons. | W.M. Frohock |
| 5:45 | Yes, please. | Carvel Collins |
| 6:00 | Is there anyone who can speak to this? | Carvel Collins |
| 6:07 | Well he writes about morons. Well, he doesn't specifically aim at professors emeritus of Harvard University, obviously. | Carvel Collins |
| 6:20 | And therefore, he may not attract their favorable attention. This is a big subject. We've been having big subjects. Do you mean-- are you asking, essentially, whether or not William Faulkner has a moral imagination? | Carvel Collins |
| 6:50 | I will say that I haven't made a living by, but I've supplemented my income by, giving a little talk around entitled-- just because of this problem-- entitled William Faulkner moralist, you see. To prove-- and any author who is a moralist-- the fact that I say is unproven-- but any author who is a moralist, we assume is not writing for morons because I think we assume that morons, at least the courts do, assume that they are neither eligible for officers candidate school nor are exempt in time of war and are not-- | Carvel Collins |
| 7:30 | --and are not to be held totally responsible. They are frequently wards of the court or ward-- they are assigned people to take care of them as wards. No. William Faulkner, I think-- I'm naturally in a prejudiced position, here, because if I said I like him, this place would be in a category that you brought up. And I don't want to place myself there. The rest is up to you. But I think that without any doubt, whatever the Faulkner is an issue here. | Carvel Collins |
| 8:00 | He is not the newest breed of novelist. He wrote in an earlier period. But I think one of the reasons for his present popularity, for the enormous attention that he is receiving, is that the times have changed-- as Mr. Ellison suggested and he somehow seems, to more readers, to be speaking to them. And I think one of the reasons that he has been accused of writing for morons-- though I really don't take that very seriously. | Carvel Collins |
| 8:30 | I think he's been accused of writing for people who want to read filth. And this doesn't limit itself to morons. -- I think that William Faulkner has very-- fortunately for us at the moment, he wrote a kind of thing that wasn't extremely comprehensible at first glance to readers trained in another tradition. So that I find that the people who are his strongest supporters now are-- among his strongest supporters-- are the students who are, we hope, from whom the writers of the future will come. | Carvel Collins |
| 9:08 | They don't want to do just what he's doing. But they feel that among the older hands who have been making a living at this for some time, here is the man who's doing closer to what they are trying to do than and other writers have been doing. And I believe that his revival is close to the center of what we've been discussing earlier today. And that is the question of reality, and organization, and whether or not-- and the question of last night-- whether or not the novel is popular, and should reach a large audience, and all the rest. | Carvel Collins |
| 9:36 | Now Dos Passos's USA was a very popular book when it came out. And this rose from the middle classes though he is not middle class. And it was read by the middle classes. And it seemed to me-- speaking to Mr O'Connor's point of last evening-- it seems to me that Dos Passos fitted in with a time period and had a great boom. To me-- and I like Dos Passos. I remember once I didn't like him-- past tense. I remember once when Big Money, the third of the trilogy, came out, I went to a bookstore in the morning, rented it-- this was in the depression, which the book was about. | Carvel Collins |
| 10:11 | And I thought I'd just glance at it that morning and found that I had finished it before I ate again. And this last summer, I tried to look over another volume of the trilogy thinking to assign it to some students. And over a period of a week of desperate struggle, I was unable to get more than halfway through it. Now, this has been presumed. Maybe it's just a solipsistic thing. Maybe just I have changed. But I don't think so. I think the times have changed. And I think that kind of thing is not of such interest. | Carvel Collins |
| 10:40 | Now there was a thing in one sense less organized-- if you can ever say that what we recognize as art is not organized-- but certainly much more loosely organized. It had presented no difficulties to the reader except problems of endurance, which have increased, as I say. Whereas Faulkner, writing in approximately the same period-- a little bit earlier than that third volume-- Faulkner wrote a thing like The Sound and the Fury, which immediately brings up a problem that Mr. O'Connor dealt with last night. | Carvel Collins |
| 11:12 | That is the question of external systems and so forth. Mr. O'Connor was speaking of great deal about Joyce, and very effectively about Joyce. And though I think I-- incidentally, I think I should resume my role as moderator this evening. But in the brief time remaining, I take it this is not comment vomit. It seems to me that it's quite right now to look at Joyce with a little less awe and almost approach Mr O'Connor's position because the trouble with Joyce is that these external systems-- The Odyssey or chart of human anatomy and so forth-- are presented in what has now begun to seem to a number of readers as in a sort of niggling fashion with an ulterior purpose. | Carvel Collins |
| 11:53 | These ulterior structures have an ulterior purpose, which is in great part to show what an extremely learned man Joyce was, it seems to me. And also, they're a part of an extreme mania that he has, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out, for association, which would lead him to absurd extremes. Now for a man to present a technique as a pioneer is a different thing from seeing his followers take it up and adapt it, fit it to a slightly later time, and also, fit it to the lack of being a pioneer. | Carvel Collins |
| 12:27 | A pioneer seems to me to perspire and be ungraceful, whereas the follower, settling a few waves behind the first wave of pioneering, can use these things, take them more as they come, fit them in, mesh the thing together, melt it down, and not use it so obviously. And in connection with these ulterior systems, I think Sound and Fury-- since you bring up Faulkner-- is a good example. The thing has at least three elaborately worked out ulterior external systems, which no critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed. | Carvel Collins |
| 13:04 | And yet, readers have liked-- some readers have liked it. And I think a growing number have liked it. Many of the students and would-be, hopeful writers that we speak of-- that wave of the future, if that phrase isn't hasn't a bad connotation. These people have got a lot of out of The Sound and the Fury. And they're what we would have to accept as so-called good writers-- good readers, I mean-- adequate readers. | Carvel Collins |
| 13:30 | They're not people who are just overjoyed solely with Forever Amber. And they are able to go away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling somewhat good, feeling they've got some their money's worth in part-- a good many of them are. Now, Mr. O'Connor has asked that authors be less self conscious and less intellectual. Joyce seems to him overly intellectual. And this would seem-- he seems so to me. | Carvel Collins |
| 13:54 | But, at the same time, Mr. O'Connor asks that the reader be extremely intellectual, and that if the novel has in it systems and things which are not subject to the reader's immediate conscious and intellectual examination, that the novel is a failure. And I'm of the opinion that there's a middle ground here where the author shouldn't be so self-conscious and intellectual and planned and smelling of the lamp as Joyce, a lamp with a reflector to show how much he's a poor figure, but a lamp which he wants to smell up to show he's spent the time near it. The author can do a little less of that. | Carvel Collins |
| 14:34 | And I think though the reader these days is likely to be a little intellectual, after all, he's been able to read James's prefaces and other things, as Mr. Frohock has pointed out, still, I think it's possible for a reader, whom we might call a good reader, one we accept as who knows any more than Arnold's suggestion that the best people in literary matters-- if this reader goes away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling good, feeling that something's come from this, if he doesn't know all the intellectual systems on which it's organized, who cares? | Carvel Collins |
| 15:04 | The novel, for example, has several-- involves four days. These are the days of Holy Week. It has Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. | Carvel Collins |
| 15:16 | And throughout these-- the days-- the events assigned to these days, the symbolic and traditional operations of those days recur but so melted into the realism that Mr. O'Connor asks for that the readers have not been aware that on the Thursday, the boy does a lot of washing of his hands and so forth, though feet is done in the Bible. This is the way the author changes it. And there's harrowing of Hell and other things that go through this thing. But they're not sticking their heads up too far. | Carvel Collins |
| 15:44 | And then the title, following Joyce-- this, I believe, is an author who went to school with Joyce. And as Walt Whitman said something about the breadth of my students' shoulders only tests, I think, the breadth of my own shoulders, Faulkner, I think, has maybe taken Joyce's thing-- this is blasphemy to say-- and maybe done it better. The other pattern is as with Joyce, who took the-- who gave a title to his book to steer the reader to The Odyssey, so Faulkner takes a title from the fifth act of Macbeth, famous speech by Macbeth, and then organizes the book around this speech so that one of the monologues deals a great deal with "out, out brief candle." | Carvel Collins |
| 16:24 | The second monologue involves a great deal of life being a walking shadow. Quentin Compson, before he found himself up somewhere near the Brighton abattoir here in Charles River, walks his shadow around a great deal. And in the third monologue, the poor player struts and frets upon the stage. And in the end, where the peak of sound with Jason, or with the Idiot, and the fury with Jason, where they reach their peak, the novel ends with showing that it signifies nothing for these people, who fit into the novel as one of the big-- a novel that deals with one of the big subjects of our time, which is love or the lack of love in its broadest sense. And the novel has made very clear throughout that these children are being-- are suffering, or as the novel says two times, "poisoned" by the lack of affection from the parents, lack of support and lift from the hypochondriac mother and the cynical and alcoholic father. | Carvel Collins |
| 17:25 | And this novel is a moralistic novel saying that that ain't right. And one of the ways it shows this is that the three interior monologues are also organized, as Joyce organized parts around the Chart of Human Anatomy. In this, they're organized around the Chart of Human Personality but as laid out by Freud so that the idiot's speech, so-called, the one assigned to the idiot, draws very carefully on Freud's definition of the id. | Carvel Collins |
| 17:51 | The second monologue is very carefully based on Freud's definition as available to Faulkner in translation. And he did read a lot of Freud then, and he has this kind of mind. Based on the ego, Jason, the one who wants to repress all pleasure, who's the only one who cares what the community thinks, who in their three brothers' concentration on their sister is the one who hates her and who is against all voluptuousness, whether it leads to information or not. | Carvel Collins |
| 18:23 | This-- Jason is strictly based on the superego. And such details as the idiot's trying to break out of the fence through the gate, and as a result, being brought in and by Jason being castrated, this is how the textbook, too, that famous portal that Freud set up in his spatial figure when he was moving from his hydraulic images to the geographical ones, this is the kind of episode which means something on the realistic level. Anybody with an idiot in the family, 33 years old with a mind of a 3-year-old, is going to be interested, as Jason is, in keeping him back of the house, inside the fence, not out presumably, or probably not actually molesting schoolgirls. | Carvel Collins |
| 19:05 | But still, the thing has a life at another level. And I see no real harm in this. If the novel is able to live since 1929 with all kinds of people treading over it and dealing with it in every way, and these systems are so completely buried that all they've done is guide the author maybe and guide the reader perhaps subtly, or at least give him a feeling there's some unity here, I see no objection in doing this because the author has in two ways not paraded this learning. He has not made it stick out in the novel to such an extent as Joyce did. And he has not slyly said to an equivalent of Mr. Gilbert, yes, if you look farther, you'll see really something here. | Carvel Collins |
| 19:49 | The analogy here, I think, is possibly that between the horse and horseman. The-- though I don't want the reader to be in every way equated to the horse because though readers are sharply different from authors, there are some readers who can approach being-- approach some authors. But I think that just as a horse not knowing where he and the horseman are going, as anyone who rides at all knows, is a little more happy, subtle things are conveyed by the hands, knees, and seat of the pants. And the horse somehow senses that the author, the horseman, is-- he'll change in a minute at the next jump. | Carvel Collins |
| 20:31 | The horseman is aware of where he's going and knows the technique for getting the horse to go there. And the horse has a happier day. He had-- the ride he enjoys more. | Carvel Collins |
| 20:43 | And I think that if an author, in dealing with this rapid flux that passes and giving it some kind of shape, has something that makes him-- I hope he has an internal smile, not a kind of leer or sneer. But if he's happily smiling to himself that he's got a gimmick now that will work, and if he doesn't intrude it too much, I think art works in subtle ways and that somehow, some readers, and apparently in growing numbers, have begun to sense that maybe something's going on here. Now if-- I do not believe that they buy this book and read it so that they can end up with a kind of mystery of the sort of the lady or the tiger. So when they get through, they say, well, what happened in this book? | Carvel Collins |
| 21:25 | They may not know all these things happened. And because I say they happened doesn't prove they do. They may not happen there at all. | Carvel Collins |
| 21:31 | But I do think that because the author has had this kind of plan and has been able to use it and adapt it, as Mr. Ellison said last night in the roundtable, taking these new techniques and the novels looking backward but not trying to move there, it seems to me that here is a possible place where some of this adaptation has been made. | Carvel Collins |
| 21:51 | And if the reader does not know when he gets through everything that has happened, that's all right. But on the other hand, to return to your professor emeritus of Harvard, it is quite true that if the reader approaches this expecting a straight-out naturalistic with a capital N chronological order of the kind that Faulkner has in As I Lay Dying, which for many years was his most admired book because the woman died. The family tried to take her to a burying ground, and in the end they got there. | Carvel Collins |
| 22:22 | This novel had a crystal, linear clarity, if there's such a thing, which made many readers say, Faulkner can't write a novel, but he wrote one here. Well, Faulkner's-- measured by those devices, these other novels are certainly chaotic. It doesn't even run Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it has another kind of order. | Carvel Collins |
| 22:43 | To take another example, Malcolm Cowley, who's in great part responsible for much of Faulkner's-- well, for part of Faulkner's boom in this country, or at least making the books available through the Viking Portable, has felt that Faulkner so abandoned the naturalistic novel that he needed to be rewritten. The canute thing operated with Mr. Cowley. So Mr. Cowley and the Viking Portable Faulkner has written the only good Faulkner novel. | Carvel Collins |
| 23:12 | It has a chronological order. We start with Indians. We get early settlers. These are snippets from various places. And we come up to the very present. | Carvel Collins |
| 23:20 | Now this has a beauty all its own, which has been imposed by Mr. Cowley. On the assumption that William Faulkner in his individual works had no aesthetic plan whatever, as in The Sound and the Fury, and that the important thing is he's dealt with one county to a considerable extent, but that it's so hard for the readers to find this out that now in this one volume they can do it. And so the important thing is the history of the county, which you can get from some-- also from some volumes prepared by the WPA. | Carvel Collins |
| 23:52 | Mr. Cowley's also said that William Faulkner never wrote a unified novel. In other words, he writes for morons. And he cites the-- as Light in August, in which the two main protagonists, the main woman and the main man, never meet. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:07 | Now this is a Procrustean bed that I don't propose to make the novel take for its lodging this night or any other. The novel has a theme which requires that these two characters never meet, a theme that has to do with time. One of the characters is embedded in the past. One is morbidly fixed on the future. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:26 | And-- no, excuse me. The one doesn't meet. There are three characters here. The man we just spoke of frozen in the past, and the woman I just spoke of, the major one, eternally in the present, using figures from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:40 | This is an author who may write for morons. But he's read the poems which are popular with professors emeritus in general. And he knows them rather well. | Carvel Collins |
| 24:52 | And the Ode on a Grecian Urn sets up this girl as running through eternal present. And then another woman, who is killed by the man, is frozen in the future. Now this-- and to mention strictly parenthetically a thing that Mr. Frohock referred to in The Inferno, where some characters there have their heads turned backward, it's not really in connection. But to give you an idea of how really moronic this author is and how many schemes he uses which are not intellectually available to the reader without-- I've been reading them over and over again for money, you see? This is different. | Carvel Collins |
| 25:28 | In this novel, when the man who is embedded in the past kills the woman who is fixed on the future, he cuts her throat in a scene which rather horrified some people. And when her body is carried out of this building, which is burning naturally, and this openly-- blanket in which it's been brought out is open in the yard, we see that her head is turned backward on the body. And there are some readers of a squeamish sort who asked whether or not this twist was necessary. | Carvel Collins |
| 26:00 | And the point is that the people in The Inferno passage that Mr. Frohock spoke of were Cassandra, Tiresias, and others, whose sin was they looked too far in the future. So this woman who looked too far in the future, when her throat is cut and she's brought out, her head is turned backward on her body. Now this is maybe morbidly the author having games with himself. | Carvel Collins |
| 26:27 | There is an element in all of this of the author's being the kind of person who could satisfactorily own a stolen Mona Lisa, in which he knows that everyone is looking for it. Those so-and-sos out there, and I'm the man who knows where it is. He can't tell his wife. He can't tell anybody else. But he's-- he knows it, and this is fine. | Carvel Collins |
| 26:43 | There is this element, and it's a big risk. But when these external systems, this metaphor, so that this woman doesn't have a choice as to which way her body will lie as Bloom, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out last night, doesn't have a choice as to whether he'll go upstairs or out in the yard, this woman doesn't have the choice in the novel of whether her head will, when murdered, will be forward or aft. A metaphor requires that it be turned. But I don't mind that if the author doesn't force me to feel terribly unhappy if I don't get the point. | Carvel Collins |
| 28:09 | That was not a moderate-- moderator's speech. I'm sorry. If there are other questions for any of the-- Mr. Frohock or any members of the panel-- yes, please. | Carvel Collins |
| 1:01 | This seems to be the carom question. | Stanley Hyman |
| 1:07 | Mr. West reproved me a little for the term pseudo fiction last night. And then, he suggested that many traditional fictions would probably be called pseduo fiction. I think as I was using it in a limited sense, it means a bad book. That is, it means a book that doesn't come alive, that hasn't grown-- | Stanley Hyman |
| 1:27 | --that hasn't shaped its experience into any kind of effective, any kind of imagined-- the thing I hate to keep harping on those words. But I don't seem to have any others. About Sinclair Lewis, the truth of the matter is, I suppose, I'm a little of both parties in that I've never read much of him. And I probably wouldn't and would find him dull. But that I would agree that our criticism, every variety of it has its fashionable writers. | Stanley Hyman |
| 1:56 | And even if he were better, he would just not be one of its fashionable writers at the moment. That is, criticism carries along with it, as Mr. Frohock said, a certain number of writers who do what it thinks should be done. And I suspect that all of those criticisms are reductive, that all of our criticism-- certainly much of what we heard last night-- seemed to be saying that one kind of novel was it. And you can more or less throw the others out. | Stanley Hyman |
| 2:26 | That is we have an alarming tendency to prescribe for the novel rather than to report what it's doing. And I suspect that probably the silliest of all critical positions is that connote position of telling the writer to go and do something else. I suspect that Mr. O'Connor, who is in the curiously ambiguous position of being both critic and novelist, can carry that off better than most of us. | Stanley Hyman |
| 2:51 | And I think he played a little fast and loose with us last night in telling a great body of novel to go die, while at the same time saying that much of it he rather liked and would perhaps admit that some of his own work is actually part of that fine modern literature he was excommunicating for us. But I don't think that Sinclair Lewis in any fashion is much of a problem-- that is, he isn't much read. He's probably not the novel of the future more than Henry James. And specifically, I have nothing at all to say about him. | Stanley Hyman |
| 6:03 | Well, Mr. Collins, you are right on your feet. | Frank O'Connor |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |