More on the Same Subject

       On the afternoon before or the morning after one's public lecture comes the Informal Open Seminar With Interested Students of writing or Literature. In the course of that aforementioned maiden lecture-trip to Hiram college, I opened my maiden IOSWISOWOL thus:

       How many of you are familiar with W. H. Auden's sonnet "The Novelist"?

[Show of hand.]

       Let me refresh your memories:

THE NOVELIST

       Encased in talent like a uniform,

       The rank of every poet is well known;

       They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,

       Or die so young, or live for years alone.

       They can dash forward like hussars: but he

       Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn

       How to be plain and awkward, how to be

       One after whom none think it worth to turn.

       For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must

       Become the whole of boredom, subject to

       Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

       Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

       And in his own weak person, if he can,

       Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

       This poem helps account for the famous fact that young people's fiction -- I mean fiction written by, not for, young people -- is seldom very good. At least not as often as good as their poetry is. A look through almost any undergraduate literary magazine will bear out this painful truth, as will a review of literary biography: The actuarial profile of fiction-writers, especially of novelists, shows a slower maturation curve than that of lyric poets, theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and chess players.

       The last two lines of Auden's poem also imply one famous view of what the novelist's function is: a view echoed before the fact in Stephen Dedalus's celebrated vow (in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, last chapter) "to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."

       Well. I have come from State college P A to Hiram O in order to wonder aloud in your presence what a novel is and what it's for -- an activity suspicious at best and pernicious at worst. Pernicious because in the artist's worst case, talking about his art may become a substitute for making it; suspicious -- let's say suspect -- because what artists say about their art must often be taken with a grain of salt. They may speak vaguely of "inspiration," for example, when the fact is that their assiduously practiced discipline has become such second nature that they're no longer conscious of its complex operation. They may truly not understand their own work, in the critical-analytical way in which a professional talker-about-art understands it. Or they may be pulling the public leg: I think of Robert Frost's insistence that his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which has to do with a muted and deferred death wish, has nothing to do with a muted and deferred death wish, as John Ciardi and others insist it does, but is merely and literally about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I think of William Faulkner's reportedly replying -- to an interviewer who asked him whether The Sound and the Fury is not "on one level" a debate among the Id, the Ego, and the Superego -- "Wouldn't s'prise me atall."

       This foot-shuffling, shit-kicking, finger-in-the-collar, I'm-just-a-pore-country-cracker pose is Mister Mark Twain's legacy to American writers. I can't imagine Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Melville, or even Thoreau indulging in it. I myself find it unbecoming, though I understand the impulse. I am no friend of anti-intellectuality; anti-intellectuality, even anti-intelligence, has enough friends already, and does not need me. Yesterday I remarked that it's no doubt better to be able to make wonderful things that you can't explain than to be able to explain wonderful things that you can't make. I affirm that opinion today; but as a writer who also tries to teach literature (I mean teach students; I'm not likely to teach literature anything), and who happens to admire and respect good scholarship, I here go on record as believing that neither talent -- the talent for making or the talent for explaining -- is to be sneezed at. The gift of explaining wonderful things that you can't yourself make -- novels, paintings, trees, animal courtship rituals, planetary movements -- is also a wonderful thing. Better, certainly, than being able neither to make nor to explain.

       So: The question before us this December 1960 morning is What are novels for? And the answer is Any damn thing you want to use them for. For their readers, collectively, they may be public psychotherapy, as Aristotle seems to say Greek tragedy was: I take that to be the general sense of Auden's poem. For their readers individually, novels may function as extensions of or alternatives to their single mortality: Even the Bonapartes evidently found it tiresome to be just Bonapartes; they all read novels, and most of them wrote novels, too. Novels may function as criticisms of life, as criticisms of society, as ideological or moral propaganda. They may function as aphrodisiacs, soporifics, items of interior decoration, doorstops. The Doubleday hardcover first edition of my novel The Sot- Weed Factor happens to weigh almost exactly two pounds and has a dust jacket drawn by the wonderful artist Edward Gorey; you might frame that dust jacket for your Edward Gorey collection and use the text as a kitchen-scale counterweight to tell whether your roast of beef weighs more or less than two pounds. You might also read the book.

       As for the novelist himself, his motives may be as multifarious as his readers'. To be sure, he may be out to forge racial conscience in the smithy of his soul or to suffer dully in his own weak person all the wrongs of man. On the other hand, he may aim for nothing more nor less than aesthetic bliss -- that's what Vladimir Nabokov says his pure and total aim is. But the journals and biographies of the great novelists teach us that their novels also served for them such important functions as sources of income, of prestige, of social or sexual or career advancement; as outlets for their smart or cranky ideas or their mere spleen; as escape from their spouses, their kids, their chores. In short, as just about anything imaginable.

       This being the case, we must allow that what a novel is may be more than or different from what it's for. I propose we drop the for and address the is.

       My contention, as some of you heard yesterday, is that a novel is not essentially a view of this universe (though it may reflect one), but a universe itself; that the novelist is not finally a spectator, an imitator, or a purger of the public psyche, but a maker of universes: a demiurge. At least a semidemiurge. I don't mean this frivolously or sentimentally. I don't mean it even as a figure of speech (as Joyce does, elsewhere in the Portrait, when he speaks of the artist as God, standing in the wings of his creation, paring his fingernails). I mean it literally and rigorously: The heavy universe we sit in here in Hiram, Ohio, and the two-pound universe of The Sot-Weed Factor, say, are cousins, because the maker of this one and the maker of that one are siblings.

       This contention will strike you as immodest. It is.

       Questions?

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