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August 4, Afternoon Part Three
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3:29
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--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.
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Three
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4:01
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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 .
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Three
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4:34
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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.
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Three
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5:14
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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.
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Four
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2:50
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Yes. I think that that-- that's the writer's business. And oh, if INAUDIBLE was to write and to describe reality with as much truth and-- god, here I go-- beauty, he's writing works as he's possible to achieve. And he-- if he has any other role to play, it-- it is to reveal the mystery and possibility inherent in given reality.
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Four
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3:27
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But beyond that, you have politicians, experts on social organization and a whole apparatus who function in their own way. But I don't-- for the life of me, I don't see how-- how a writer can do anything more than write. It's a terrifically difficult thing, this business of trying to decide what is real, what is valuable, what is-- is reality.
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Ralph Ellison |
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August 4, Afternoon Part Four
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3:55
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People who want to-- I mean, you see him again, you-- you-- well this will lead to asking the writer to get out with-- on the picket line. Which is all right with me, but it isn't writing. And I don't think the two functions should be confused. I think that-- that there is enough pain, there's enough psychological misery involved in really grappling with reality in terms of art. And that the sheer job of mastering art, especially in a time like ours when the corpus of the novel and then the technique of the novel, the ideologies of the novel is so bad.
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Ralph Ellison |