Annotations for "Carvel Collins"

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Item	Time	Annotation	Layer
August 3, Evening Part Two	22:43	I suggest that before going ahead with the commentary on these talks and discussion of them, everyone feel he has the right for about 40 seconds to stand up and stretch, it seems to me.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	24:06	I think we'd better get on with the business of the evening.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	24:35	The commentator on these speeches is himself a novelist and a critic, and needs no further introduction-- Mr. Anthony West.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	57:09	Thank you, Mr. West. The program, I think, for the rest of the evening should be that first of all, we give the speakers a chance to speak to Mr. West's points. And then, people here on the panel discuss everyone-- discuss anything he wants to. And then we will have questions from the audience if there is time.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	57:31	Should this evening-- the panel take up most of the time AND there not be an opportunity for many questions from the audience, I think you might save them up. The WHOLE program has a certain unity, at least of subject, and on Wednesday evening, there will perhaps be more time for questions from the audience. And some of your questions that you might want to raise this evening may be answered a little later this evening or tomorrow.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	58:02	I'd like first of all to ask Mr. Hyman to use-- just let's all stay right here at the table-- to use that microphone, which I assume is alive, and speak to Mr. West's points.	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00:25	All right, Mr. O'Connor?	Carvel Collins
August 3, Evening Part Two	1:00:28	Mr. O'Connor, would you move the--	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	0:05	First of all, I wonder if the people in the back would fill up seats to the front. This makes a better operation all the way around. In the very first row, I wonder if the members of the conference or other members of ? parliament. ?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	0:42	A word about the microphone system, which is always a problem for everyone, has been solved very well here, I believe. That is, you're not supposed to walk to the microphone when you are making a statement from the audience. I'm told that if you merely look directly at the microphone from anywhere you are, the way they are scattered around is such that it will pick up the sound for this particular room. So instead of spending the afternoon stumbling over each other's feet, just speak from where you are at at that point.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	1:13	The function of these afternoon sessions is to add new material to the subject of the conference and give further opportunity to work over things that have been stated previously. We're fortunate to have today as a speaker, who will talk for approximately half an hour or so, a man who will give us new material and, I think, be dealing also with the essential subjects that were raised last night and will, I assume, be raised throughout the rest of the meeting.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	1:44	Professor Frohock has been a professor of French at Columbia University for some time. He is an authority on modern fiction. He's published a book about a certain group of American novels. The book's entitled, I believe-- I know the book well. I own the book. It's Novel of Violence in America. Is this correct?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part One	2:08	And he has also written a volume about Malraux, and is to speak to us today about some of the problems of literary criticism and the novel. Are critical systems and devices suitable for fiction in its contemporary form? Professor Frohock.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	5:45	Yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:00	Is there anyone who can speak to this?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:07	Well he writes about morons. Well, he doesn't specifically aim at professors emeritus of Harvard University, obviously.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:20	And therefore, he may not attract their favorable attention. This is a big subject. We've been having big subjects. Do you mean-- are you asking, essentially, whether or not William Faulkner has a moral imagination?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	6:50	I will say that I haven't made a living by, but I've supplemented my income by, giving a little talk around entitled-- just because of this problem-- entitled William Faulkner moralist, you see. To prove-- and any author who is a moralist-- the fact that I say is unproven-- but any author who is a moralist, we assume is not writing for morons because I think we assume that morons, at least the courts do, assume that they are neither eligible for officers candidate school nor are exempt in time of war and are not--	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	7:30	--and are not to be held totally responsible. They are frequently wards of the court or ward-- they are assigned people to take care of them as wards. No. William Faulkner, I think-- I'm naturally in a prejudiced position, here, because if I said I like him, this place would be in a category that you brought up. And I don't want to place myself there. The rest is up to you. But I think that without any doubt, whatever the Faulkner is an issue here.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	8:00	He is not the newest breed of novelist. He wrote in an earlier period. But I think one of the reasons for his present popularity, for the enormous attention that he is receiving, is that the times have changed-- as Mr. Ellison suggested and he somehow seems, to more readers, to be speaking to them. And I think one of the reasons that he has been accused of writing for morons-- though I really don't take that very seriously.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	8:30	I think he's been accused of writing for people who want to read filth. And this doesn't limit itself to morons. -- I think that William Faulkner has very-- fortunately for us at the moment, he wrote a kind of thing that wasn't extremely comprehensible at first glance to readers trained in another tradition. So that I find that the people who are his strongest supporters now are-- among his strongest supporters-- are the students who are, we hope, from whom the writers of the future will come.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	9:08	They don't want to do just what he's doing. But they feel that among the older hands who have been making a living at this for some time, here is the man who's doing closer to what they are trying to do than 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
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	9:36	Now Dos Passos's USA was a very popular book when it came out. And this rose from the middle classes though he is not middle class. And it was read by the middle classes. And it seemed to me-- speaking to Mr O'Connor's point of last evening-- it seems to me that Dos Passos fitted in with a time period and had a great boom. To me-- and I like Dos Passos. I remember once I didn't like him-- past tense. I remember once when Big Money, the third of the trilogy, came out, I went to a bookstore in the morning, rented it-- this was in the depression, which the book was about.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	10:11	And I thought I'd just glance at it that morning and found that I had finished it before I ate again. And this last summer, I tried to look over another volume of the trilogy thinking to assign it to some students. And over a period of a week of desperate struggle, I was unable to get more than halfway through it. Now, this has been presumed. Maybe it's just a solipsistic thing. Maybe just I have changed. But I don't think so. I think the times have changed. And I think that kind of thing is not of such interest.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	10:40	Now there was a thing in one sense less organized-- if you can ever say that what we recognize as art is not organized-- but certainly much more loosely organized. It had presented no difficulties to the reader except problems of endurance, which have increased, as I say. Whereas Faulkner, writing in approximately the same period-- a little bit earlier than that third volume-- Faulkner wrote a thing like The Sound and the Fury, which immediately brings up a problem that Mr. O'Connor dealt with last night.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	11:12	That is the question of external systems and so forth. Mr. O'Connor was speaking of great deal about Joyce, and very effectively about Joyce. And though I think I-- incidentally, I think I should resume my role as moderator this evening. But in the brief time remaining, I take it this is not comment vomit. It seems to me that it's quite right now to look at Joyce with a little less awe and almost approach Mr O'Connor's position because the trouble with Joyce is that these external systems-- The Odyssey or chart of human anatomy and so forth-- are presented in what has now begun to seem to a number of readers as in a sort of niggling fashion with an ulterior purpose.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	11:53	These ulterior structures have an ulterior purpose, which is in great part to show what an extremely learned man Joyce was, it seems to me. And also, they're a part of an extreme mania that he has, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out, for association, which would lead him to absurd extremes. Now for a man to present a technique as a pioneer is a different thing from seeing his followers take it up and adapt it, fit it to a slightly later time, and also, fit it to the lack of being a pioneer.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	12:27	A pioneer seems to me to perspire and be ungraceful, whereas the follower, settling a few waves behind the first wave of pioneering, can use these things, take them more as they come, fit them in, mesh the thing together, melt it down, and not use it so obviously. And in connection with these ulterior systems, I think Sound and Fury-- since you bring up Faulkner-- is a good example. The thing has at least three elaborately worked out ulterior external systems, which no critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:04	And yet, readers have liked-- some readers have liked it. And I think a growing number have liked it. Many of the students and would-be, hopeful writers that we speak of-- that wave of the future, if that phrase isn't hasn't a bad connotation. These people have got a lot of out of The Sound and the Fury. And they're what we would have to accept as so-called good writers-- good readers, I mean-- adequate readers.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:30	They're not people who are just overjoyed solely with Forever Amber. And they are able to go away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling somewhat good, feeling they've got some their money's worth in part-- a good many of them are. Now, Mr. O'Connor has asked that authors be less self conscious and less intellectual. Joyce seems to him overly intellectual. And this would seem-- he seems so to me.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	13:54	But, at the same time, Mr. O'Connor asks that the reader be extremely intellectual, and that if the novel has in it systems and things which are not subject to the reader's immediate conscious and intellectual examination, that the novel is a failure. And I'm of the opinion that there's a middle ground here where the author shouldn't be so self-conscious and intellectual and planned and smelling of the lamp as Joyce, a lamp with a reflector to show how much he's a poor figure, but a lamp which he wants to smell up to show he's spent the time near it. The author can do a little less of that.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	14:34	And I think though the reader these days is likely to be a little intellectual, after all, he's been able to read James's prefaces and other things, as Mr. Frohock has pointed out, still, I think it's possible for a reader, whom we might call a good reader, one we accept as who knows any more than Arnold's suggestion that the best people in literary matters-- if this reader goes away from a novel like The Sound and the Fury feeling good, feeling that something's come from this, if he doesn't know all the intellectual systems on which it's organized, who cares?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:04	The novel, for example, has several-- involves four days. These are the days of Holy Week. It has Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:16	And throughout these-- the days-- the events assigned to these days, the symbolic and traditional operations of those days recur but so melted into the realism that Mr. O'Connor asks for that the readers have not been aware that on the Thursday, the boy does a lot of washing of his hands and so forth, though feet is done in the Bible. This is the way the author changes it. And there's harrowing of Hell and other things that go through this thing. But they're not sticking their heads up too far.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	15:44	And then the title, following Joyce-- this, I believe, is an author who went to school with Joyce. And as Walt Whitman said something about the breadth of my students' shoulders only tests, I think, the breadth of my own shoulders, Faulkner, I think, has maybe taken Joyce's thing-- this is blasphemy to say-- and maybe done it better. The other pattern is as with Joyce, who took the-- who gave a title to his book to steer the reader to The Odyssey, so Faulkner takes a title from the fifth act of Macbeth, famous speech by Macbeth, and then organizes the book around this speech so that one of the monologues deals a great deal with "out, out brief candle."	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	16:24	The second monologue involves a great deal of life being a walking shadow. Quentin Compson, before he found himself up somewhere near the Brighton abattoir here in Charles River, walks his shadow around a great deal. And in the third monologue, the poor player struts and frets upon the stage. And in the end, where the peak of sound with Jason, or with the Idiot, and the fury with Jason, where they reach their peak, the novel ends with showing that it signifies nothing for these people, who fit into the novel as one of the big-- a novel that deals with one of the big subjects of our time, which is love or the lack of love in its broadest sense. And the novel has made very clear throughout that these children are being-- are suffering, or as the novel says two times, "poisoned" by the lack of affection from the parents, lack of support and lift from the hypochondriac mother and the cynical and alcoholic father.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	17:25	And this novel is a moralistic novel saying that that ain't right. And one of the ways it shows this is that the three interior monologues are also organized, as Joyce organized parts around the Chart of Human Anatomy. In this, they're organized around the Chart of Human Personality but as laid out by Freud so that the idiot's speech, so-called, the one assigned to the idiot, draws very carefully on Freud's definition of the id.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	17:51	The second monologue is very carefully based on Freud's definition as available to Faulkner in translation. And he did read a lot of Freud then, and he has this kind of mind. Based on the ego, Jason, the one who wants to repress all pleasure, who's the only one who cares what the community thinks, who in their three brothers' concentration on their sister is the one who hates her and who is against all voluptuousness, whether it leads to information or not.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	18:23	This-- Jason is strictly based on the superego. And such details as the idiot's trying to break out of the fence through the gate, and as a result, being brought in and by Jason being castrated, this is how the textbook, too, that famous portal that Freud set up in his spatial figure when he was moving from his hydraulic images to the geographical ones, this is the kind of episode which means something on the realistic level. Anybody with an idiot in the family, 33 years old with a mind of a 3-year-old, is going to be interested, as Jason is, in keeping him back of the house, inside the fence, not out presumably, or probably not actually molesting schoolgirls.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	19:05	But still, the thing has a life at another level. And I see no real harm in this. If the novel is able to live since 1929 with all kinds of people treading over it and dealing with it in every way, and these systems are so completely buried that all they've done is guide the author maybe and guide the reader perhaps subtly, or at least give him a feeling there's some unity here, I see no objection in doing this because the author has in two ways not paraded this learning. He has not made it stick out in the novel to such an extent as Joyce did. And he has not slyly said to an equivalent of Mr. Gilbert, yes, if you look farther, you'll see really something here.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	19:49	The analogy here, I think, is possibly that between the horse and horseman. The-- though I don't want the reader to be in every way equated to the horse because though readers are sharply different from authors, there are some readers who can approach being-- approach some authors. But I think that just as a horse not knowing where he and the horseman are going, as anyone who rides at all knows, is a little more happy, subtle things are conveyed by the hands, knees, and seat of the pants. And the horse somehow senses that the author, the horseman, is-- he'll change in a minute at the next jump.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	20:31	The horseman is aware of where he's going and knows the technique for getting the horse to go there. And the horse has a happier day. He had-- the ride he enjoys more.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	20:43	And I think that if an author, in dealing with this rapid flux that passes and giving it some kind of shape, has something that makes him-- I hope he has an internal smile, not a kind of leer or sneer. But if he's happily smiling to himself that he's got a gimmick now that will work, and if he doesn't intrude it too much, I think art works in subtle ways and that somehow, some readers, and apparently in growing numbers, have begun to sense that maybe something's going on here. Now if-- I do not believe that they buy this book and read it so that they can end up with a kind of mystery of the sort of the lady or the tiger. So when they get through, they say, well, what happened in this book?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:25	They may not know all these things happened. And because I say they happened doesn't prove they do. They may not happen there at all.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:31	But I do think that because the author has had this kind of plan and has been able to use it and adapt it, as Mr. Ellison said last night in the roundtable, taking these new techniques and the novels looking backward but not trying to move there, it seems to me that here is a possible place where some of this adaptation has been made.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	21:51	And if the reader does not know when he gets through everything that has happened, that's all right. But on the other hand, to return to your professor emeritus of Harvard, it is quite true that if the reader approaches this expecting a straight-out naturalistic with a capital N chronological order of the kind that Faulkner has in As I Lay Dying, which for many years was his most admired book because the woman died. The family tried to take her to a burying ground, and in the end they got there.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	22:22	This novel had a crystal, linear clarity, if there's such a thing, which made many readers say, Faulkner can't write a novel, but he wrote one here. Well, Faulkner's-- measured by those devices, these other novels are certainly chaotic. It doesn't even run Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But it has another kind of order.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	22:43	To take another example, Malcolm Cowley, who's in great part responsible for much of Faulkner's-- well, for part of Faulkner's boom in this country, or at least making the books available through the Viking Portable, has felt that Faulkner so abandoned the naturalistic novel that he needed to be rewritten. The canute thing operated with Mr. Cowley. So Mr. Cowley and the Viking Portable Faulkner has written the only good Faulkner novel.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:12	It has a chronological order. We start with Indians. We get early settlers. These are snippets from various places. And we come up to the very present.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:20	Now this has a beauty all its own, which has been imposed by Mr. Cowley. On the assumption that William Faulkner in his individual works had no aesthetic plan whatever, as in The Sound and the Fury, and that the important thing is he's dealt with one county to a considerable extent, but that it's so hard for the readers to find this out that now in this one volume they can do it. And so the important thing is the history of the county, which you can get from some-- also from some volumes prepared by the WPA.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	23:52	Mr. Cowley's also said that William Faulkner never wrote a unified novel. In other words, he writes for morons. And he cites the-- as Light in August, in which the two main protagonists, the main woman and the main man, never meet.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:07	Now this is a Procrustean bed that I don't propose to make the novel take for its lodging this night or any other. The novel has a theme which requires that these two characters never meet, a theme that has to do with time. One of the characters is embedded in the past. One is morbidly fixed on the future.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:26	And-- no, excuse me. The one doesn't meet. There are three characters here. The man we just spoke of frozen in the past, and the woman I just spoke of, the major one, eternally in the present, using figures from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:40	This is an author who may write for morons. But he's read the poems which are popular with professors emeritus in general. And he knows them rather well.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	24:52	And the Ode on a Grecian Urn sets up this girl as running through eternal present. And then another woman, who is killed by the man, is frozen in the future. Now this-- and to mention strictly parenthetically a thing that Mr. Frohock referred to in The Inferno, where some characters there have their heads turned backward, it's not really in connection. But to give you an idea of how really moronic this author is and how many schemes he uses which are not intellectually available to the reader without-- I've been reading them over and over again for money, you see? This is different.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	25:28	In this novel, when the man who is embedded in the past kills the woman who is fixed on the future, he cuts her throat in a scene which rather horrified some people. And when her body is carried out of this building, which is burning naturally, and this openly-- blanket in which it's been brought out is open in the yard, we see that her head is turned backward on the body. And there are some readers of a squeamish sort who asked whether or not this twist was necessary.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:00	And the point is that the people in The Inferno passage that Mr. Frohock spoke of were Cassandra, Tiresias, and others, whose sin was they looked too far in the future. So this woman who looked too far in the future, when her throat is cut and she's brought out, her head is turned backward on her body. Now this is maybe morbidly the author having games with himself.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:27	There is an element in all of this of the author's being the kind of person who could satisfactorily own a stolen Mona Lisa, in which he knows that everyone is looking for it. Those so-and-sos out there, and I'm the man who knows where it is. He can't tell his wife. He can't tell anybody else. But he's-- he knows it, and this is fine.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	26:43	There is this element, and it's a big risk. But when these external systems, this metaphor, so that this woman doesn't have a choice as to which way her body will lie as Bloom, as Mr. O'Connor pointed out last night, doesn't have a choice as to whether he'll go upstairs or out in the yard, this woman doesn't have the choice in the novel of whether her head will, when murdered, will be forward or aft. A metaphor requires that it be turned. But I don't mind that if the author doesn't force me to feel terribly unhappy if I don't get the point.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Three	28:09	That was not a moderate-- moderator's speech. I'm sorry. If there are other questions for any of the-- Mr. Frohock or any members of the panel-- yes, please.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:27	Mr. Lytle?	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:28	Well, I didn't get that. Will you repeat this question? Would you stand please? It's very hard to hear you without standing.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	2:47	Well, I will-- go ahead Mr. Ellison.	Carvel Collins
August 4, Afternoon Part Four	4:48	I think that the proper thing to do is stop now and bring up these questions again at the meeting tomorrow. Mr. Campbell, are there any announcements that I have forgotten to make at the moment?	Carvel Collins