Professor Amy
Hungerford: This is
"American Novel Since 1945."
Welcome. I am Amy Hungerford.
Today I am going to do a couple
of things.
In the first half of class,
I'm going to tell you a little
bit about the class and
introduce some of the questions
that we will think about over
the term if you stay in this
course.
In the second half of class,
I will introduce to you and
start telling the first story of
the term,
and that's about Richard
Wright's Black Boy,
which is our first reading
of the term.
In between those two parts,
I will ask that anyone who is
shopping the class and would
like to leave at that time do so
then.
I would be grateful if you
would wait until that point if
at all you possibly can.
It just makes the whole thing
work a little easier and it
prevents that drop in the pit of
my stomach when I see half of
the class leave.
So I will indicate when that
moment is.
Come on.
Make yourself comfortable on
the floor if you can.
My goal in this course is
to allow you or to invite you to
read some of the most compelling
novels written in the last
little over a half century.
This includes a whole range of
thematic concerns.
So when I look down at my list
of novels--which I have not
brought with me (I trust you can
find it on the web;
I didn't want to kill trees by
making enough of these for all
of you)--when I look down at my
list of books and I think about
what these books are about,
I see war.
I see war, all the way from the
Trojan War, to the
Mexican-American War in the
1840s, all the way up to the
Vietnam War.
I see love, in all kinds of
guises: be they criminal as in
Lolita, pedophiliac love;
be they sort of ideational
romantic, John Barth;
be they campus love,
that's The Human Stain,
Philip Roth;
all kinds and forms of sex and
love, and then there is politics
interweaving with all those
things.
There are questions of identity
and race.
There is a nervous breakdown
that actually happens right here
in New Haven in one of these
novels.
That's in Franny and
Zooey.
I see women who give up on
housekeeping altogether and let
their house go to ruin and
become vagrants.
I see suicide.
I see slavery.
All these things you can read
about in these novels,
but reading these novels is not
just about reading about those
things.
It's also going to be the
process of watching an artistic
form unfold over a very exciting
period of time.
In the second half of the
twentieth century and up now
into the twenty-first century,
writers were thinking very hard
about what to do stylistically
with all the innovations that
come in that powerful period
known as modernism.
So one of the things we're
going to think about together in
the course is what happens to
all those innovations.
Are they abandoned?
Are they embellished?
Are they stretched?
Are they rejected?
What happens to those resources
that the great modernist writers
endowed language with so
powerfully earlier in the
century?
So there are formal questions
that we will take up time and
again.
There are questions that
intersect between the form and
the content in every single
novel that we read.
Now perhaps those of you who
like to read fiction,
and especially who like to read
fiction from this period,
will look down at that syllabus
and you'll say,
"Well, where is?"
"Where is Don DeLillo?"
"Where is John Updike?"
My answer for the
question--"Why these writers?"--
my answer for the question is
the course.
It's an answer that unfolds
over these fourteen weeks of the
term.
Thirteen?
Thirteen.
The short answer is that I
think these writers best
represent all the different
threads, all the different
forces in the American Novel
Since 1945.
There are lots of other writers
we could include,
including those two that I
named,
that would equally illustrate
some of the threads that I've
got on the syllabus now,
but these are the ones for
various practical and more
substantive reasons that I have
chosen.
Now you do have an
opportunity--this class
does--that my class has never
had before,
and that is to nominate your
own novel for the last one that
we read, one of your choice.
Now I have done this in a
sophomore seminar,
and I did it in a graduate
seminar.
I invited my students to
present some choices to the
class, and then the class voted
on them.
It was incredibly successful.
In the undergraduate course--it
was a small seminar--I had
groups of students proposing two
novels actually for the end of
the syllabus,
and the exercise gets you to
think very hard about what you
think this period is all about.
It's not just about what's fun
to read, although it is that
too.
It's about thinking what would
make the right ending to this
intellectual trajectory,
this intellectual narrative
that we're going to move through
this term: what would make the
right ending.
So it has a sort of
intellectual purpose to it.
But I will tell you,
the students I had in that
seminar did amazing things to
push their choice of novel.
One group nominated Jeffrey
Eugenides' Middlesex.
There was a huge art
installation that I walked into
on that day of class.
It covered the ceiling and the
walls and the floors.
They had done original
photography for it.
It was really spectacular.
There was a theatrical skit for
Dave Eggers' How We Are
Hungry.
There was campaign
literature, pamphlets and so on.
So people were very creative
with it, and it was really lots
of fun.
And for me it's fun because I
may not know the novel that you
end up picking,
and so it is a kind of
challenge for me to take a novel
that you've chosen and come to
grips with it myself.
It may be one that I know.
Now let me just say in a
technical way:
if you decide to volunteer to
nominate a novel,
you'll get no extra credit.
It'll do nothing for your grade.
But you will get glory,
whatever glory there is to be
had at the front of this room.
Maybe that's miniscule,
but maybe it's going to be fun
for you, especially if you have
a sort of theatrical bent,
or if you like getting up in
front of people,
or if you're just really,
really passionate about a novel
that you want everyone to read.
So that's something that we
will do, and I will tell you
more about at mid semester.
So that's the piece of the
syllabus that I can't tell you
about.
I don't know what that dream
we're going to dream together is
when we read that novel.
I don't know what that'll be.
I want to just go over the
requirements of the course that
really are required,
not the optional piece,
just so that you understand
what my purpose is
pedagogically.
This course is very much open
to English majors and to non
English majors.
It's essentially a reading
course.
That's what I want you to take
away from this:
the knowledge of these novels.
I want you to read them.
I want you to think about them.
I want you to talk about them.
But I don't expect you to
become an English major in order
to do that if you're not already
one.
However, if you do happen to be
an English or a literature major
or someone who's just very
serious about reading at that
level,
you will find plenty to chew on
here.
Not all of the novels aspire to
or have as their purpose that
kind of difficulty that
sometimes English majors really
want.
They want to have to work
incredibly hard at the formal
level.
Some of the novels have that,
but not all of them.
The challenge for you is to
figure out: well,
what do we do with those
novels?
What is the aim of a novel that
isn't all about formal
innovation?
What are those novels doing?
Is it just inappropriate to
call them literature?
Should we think about them in a
different way?
How should we integrate that
kind of novel with novels that
have more formal ambitions?
So the paper length-- there
are two papers required,
and there is a final exam--the
paper length is designed to be
quite large.
It's two five-to-eight-page
papers.
Now a five-page paper is very
different from an eight-page
paper if you're actually
thinking about the words you
choose and how you write it.
If you just sort of the night
before scribble,
scribble, scribble until you're
done,
maybe there's not that much
difference between a five- and
an eight-page paper except
editing.
But substantively,
if you're using every sentence
in that paper,
you can write a lot more in an
eight-page paper,
if you've used every sentence
to say something substantive to
move an argument along,
than you can in the five-page.
That's for those people who
really want to push themselves
and want to advance a really
significant piece of thinking
about a novel.
Now I will also say that a
five-page paper written well can
trump an eight-page paper
written poorly any day of the
week.
So you don't have to write long
papers, but what I'm saying is:
the room is there for you to
stretch out if you want to do
that.
The final exam:
you should do well if you read,
and if you come to lecture,
and if you attend section.
The process of doing those
three things will have allowed
you to already have thought
quite a bit about these novels.
You should remember them.
I think they are quite
memorable.
They are quite distinct from
each other, and you should be
able to manage with that final
exam without undue difficulty.
I will say that the reading
load is heavy.
I have made some adjustments
every year.
I'm trying to deal with the
fact that there are so many
novels I love written between,
say, 1985 and the present that
are over 400 pages apiece.
So what do you do with those on
a syllabus?
Well, I guess it's the problem
that people who teach the
eighteenth-century novel always
have,
or the Victorian novel:
the Victorian novel like the
triple-decker,
the three-volume novel.
At least I don't have those.
But what I've done is to
excerpt some of the texts
earlier in the term--and
actually there's a slightly
heavier reading before break
than there used to be-- so that
it's a little bit lighter after
break,
when we're doing those long
novels.
Okay.
Last thing: This course,
as you may have noticed from
our friends behind us,
is being filmed as part of the
Yale Open Courses Initiative.
It is an initiative funded by
the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation.
This is one of eight courses
being offered this year that are
being videotaped.
They will be made available
free to the public via the
internet, so this is a way of
allowing the world to benefit
from what we all do at Yale.
That said, what we try to
do--what I will try to do,
and what I hope you will try to
do--is to forget about them.
It's sometimes hard for me,
but I trust that you will be
able to do that.
So forget about that.
The point is not to cater to
that camera, but to do what we
do, and to show the world what
it is that we do.
Now I like to ask questions in
lecture.
I really am just not a fan of
the sort of zone-out model of
lecture audition.
So I will ask you questions.
The only annoying thing I will
have to do is to repeat your
answers.
So I hope you will not object
to that, because you don't have
microphones on you,
and it's very cumbersome to get
them back to you,
so we're not going to mike you
so that your answers can be
heard.
All right.
Any questions so far about what
I've said?
Okay.
Now I want to talk about
the handout.
Those of you who don't have it:
there are a couple more up
front here.
There should be the rest of a
stack over here.
Oh, no. These are my notes.
Are we out?
Yeah, there are a couple more,
and if you don't have one you
can share.
What I have here for us to look
at together today are two little
texts.
I'm going to read parts of them
to you, and together I think
they give you the sort of
snapshot I want you to have of
where literature stands,
where reading stands,
at the middle of the twentieth
century.
The first one is an
advertisement for the Random
House edition of James Joyce's
Ulysses,
 and this appeared in
The Saturday Review of
Literature in 1934.
So I'm going to read just
parts, and I'm going to skip
around a little bit and stop and
start:
How to enjoy James
Joyce's great novel,
Ulysses. For
those who are already engrossed
in the reading of
Ulysses,
 as well as for those
who hesitate to begin it because
they fear that it is obscure,
the publishers offer this
simple clue as to what the
critical fuss is all about.
Ulysses is no harder to
understand than any other great
classic.
It is essentially a story and
can be enjoyed as such.
Do not let the critics confuse
you.
Ulysses is not difficult
to read, and it richly rewards
each reader in wisdom and
pleasure.
So thrilling an adventure into
the soul and mind and heart of
man has never before been
charted.
This is your opportunity to
begin the exploration of one of
the greatest novels of our
time.
What I want you to notice first
of all is the kind of reader
that's being invoked here for
that modernist classic
Ulysses.
It is not the fussing
critic.
Now if you read down,
if you sort of skim down,
you'll see that kind of
language applied to critics.
They seem fretful.
They seem interested in obscure
knowledge.
That's how this advertisement
represents critics,
even though it also invokes
critics to describe what's
powerful about the novel.
So there's a sort of two-faced
representation of the critic.
But the important one,
I think, is that dismissal of
the critic.
The point of this advertisement
is to make you feel like you
don't have to know what the
critic knows in order to read
this novel.
What you need is something like
strength or bravery.
Listen to that language:
"For those who are already
engrossed in the reading of
Ulysses,
as well as for those who
hesitate to begin it."
The people already engrossed
are the strong ones,
and "you can be that!," this
advertisement wants to say.
You can be the strong reader.
That hesitation--"those who
hesitate to begin it"--it's a
kind of feminized,
mincing approach to the novel.
It's sort of like those fussy
critics.
So this advertisement tells
you that the great classic of
modernism is something you
stride into like a man,
but you don't have to be a
particularly extraordinary man
to do so.
"This monumental novel about 20
hours in the life of an average
man can be read and appreciated
like any other great novel once
its framework and form are
visualized,
just as we can enjoy Hamlet
without solving all the
problems which agitate the
critics and scholars."
There's that agitation that I
was talking about.
"The average man":
this advertisement wants you to
see Ulysses as a story
about a man you can identify
with.
So you don't have to be a
critic;
you have to be strong;
but you know what?
You can be the average man,
because this is a story about
the average man.
"With a plot furnished by
Homer, against a setting by
Dante, and with characters
motivated by Shakespeare,
Ulysses is really not as
difficult to comprehend as
critics like to pretend."
This is like saying "dress by
Prada, shoes by Ferragamo."
It's as if there are
brands--Dante,
Shakespeare,
Homer--that are identifiable.
They're familiar,and-- what's
more--they carry with it that
sense of cultural capital.
So what do I mean by cultural
capital?
It's that knowledge that makes
you one of the elite of your
world.
It's also that knowledge that
an educated, sort of
belletristic reader of The
Saturday Review of Literature
would be very,
very familiar with.
So in a sense it tells you this
work of art is of a piece with
what you already know;
it's familiar in those ways,
and you shouldn't be afraid of
it.
At the same time it's part and
parcel of that elite body of
knowledge, so again there is
this kind of two-facedness to
the advertisement.
It's both Everyman,
and it's the elite,
who will best read this book.
Now I want to contrast that
with what we see from Nabokov in
this essay, Good Readers and
Good Writers.
This is from 1950.
Now the part of the essay just
prior to this explains that he
gave this little quiz that you
see to some college students
when he was giving a lecture.
So this is what he asked them
to do:
Select four answers to
the question 'What should a
reader be to be a good reader?'
"The reader should belong to a
book club."
"The reader should identify
himself or herself with the hero
or heroine."
"The reader should concentrate
on the social,
economic angle."
"The reader should prefer a
story with action and dialog to
one with none."
"The reader should have seen
the book in a movie."
"The reader should be a budding
author."
"The reader should have
imagination."
"The reader should have memory."
"The reader should have a
dictionary."
"The reader should have some
artistic sense." 
And Nabokov says: 
The students leaned
heavily on emotional
identification,
action, and the social,
economic and historical angle.
Of course, as you have guessed,
the good reader is the one who
has imagination,
memory, a dictionary and some
artistic sense,
which sense I propose to
develop in myself and others
whenever I have the chance.
There are at least two
varieties of imagination in the
reader's case,
so let us see which of the two
is the right one to use in
reading a book.
First there is the
comparatively lowly kind which
turns for support to the simple
emotions and is of a definitely
personal nature.
A situation in a book is
intensely felt because it
reminds us of something that
happened to us or to someone we
know or knew,
or again the reader treasures a
book mainly because it evokes a
country, a landscape,
a mode of living which he
nostalgically recalls as part of
his own past,
or,
and this is the worst thing a
reader can do,
he identifies himself with a
character in the book.
This lowly variety is not the
kind of imagination I would like
readers to use.
What a crime!
How many of you are guilty of
this kind of reading,
ever?
Okay.
Nabokov, be gone.
But he wants to get at
something here,
and I think it's helpful to put
it next to that advertisement
for Ulysses.
He wants you to think about
reading on his terms.
His terms are very much
informed by a modernist
sensibility of what literature
is all about--and I'm going to
say more about what that is when
I lecture on Lolita--but
it's very much in contrast with
that Ulysses ad.
"Don't identify.
It's not about you.
It's about something else."
Well, what is it about?
So what is the authentic
instrument to be used by the
reader?
It is impersonal imagination
and artistic delight.
What should be established I
think is an artistic,
harmonious balance between the
reader's mind and the author's
mind.
We ought to remain a little
aloof and take pleasure in this
aloofness, while at the same
time we keenly enjoy--enjoy with
tears and shivers--the
interweave of a given
masterpiece.To be quite
objective in these matters is of
course impossible.
Everything that is worthwhile
is to some extent subjective.
For instance,
you sitting there may be merely
my dream, and I may be your
nightmare.
(Some of you might think that
after Lolita.) But
what I mean is that the reader
must know when and where to
contribute his imagination,
and this he does by trying to
get clear the specific world the
author places at his
disposal.
If there is a balance of power
between the writer and the
reader in this little vignette,
the power really I think
finally resides with the writer.
It is the writer whose world
the reader is here asked to get
clear.
You are asked to use your
imagination to enter a world
made by the writer,
a world of imagination,
and so it's the writer who
directs you in that way.
You are not asked to imagine a
place you knew,
something from your history,
something from your knowledge
of yourself.
It is not about finding the
average man--which you are--also
in the novel,
there staring back at you.
It's about finding some other
dream world.
Maybe it's a nightmare world.
So, for Nabokov,
he wants to imagine a kind of
literary encounter that's very
much separate from those other
things he talks about:
other media;
the movies;
having seen the book in the
movie;
from the life that we all lead
when we work and when we go to
school;
the social, economic angle.
He wants to read it as apart
from the emotions,
although he wants to enlist
those emotions in a very
specific way.
Remember those "tears and
shivers."
Those have to be the tears and
shivers of impersonality.
That word,
"impersonality"--made famous by
T.S.
Eliot who advocated
impersonality as the ultimate
stance of the artist--that is
the stance from which all great
art should proceed.
So Nabokov imbues that state of
impersonality with certain kinds
of emotion and then asks the
reader to be as impersonal as
that modernist artist also must
be.
So what I think we get from
these two little readings today
is a sense of where literature
finds itself at a kind of
crossroads.
What kind of reader are writers
in this period looking for,
and what do they want from that
reader?
To what context do they address
themselves?
Is it a social context?
Is it a literary one?
Is it a psychological one?
Is it a philosophical one?
Is it a political one?
What should the novel strive to
do?
What can novels do in the world?
What is the role of the
imagination?
How does that factor into what
the reader lives in daily
reality?
What is the status of
identification?
Is that the primary model of
readership?
Is that what makes people want
to read?
Is that what should make people
want to read?
These are some of the questions
that these two readings raise,
and they are questions that we
will return to over and over
throughout the term.
Now, I'm going to stop
there.
I've gone on longer than I
expected.
I'm going to let shoppers
leave, and then,
in a very short time,
I'm going to pick up again and
talk about Richard Wright.
So anyone who wants to leave
now please do so.
And please sign in,
by the way, guys,
before you leave.
The sheets are coming around.
You can sign in right there.
Oh, there are sign-in sheets
there.
Thanks.
Those are my notes.
Yeah.
Don't take those.
Right here.
Oh, the syllabus?
Oh.
Oh.
Let's see.
Do I have any more?
No, it's not.
Hey, KC.
KC, can I borrow your handout?
Can he have it?
I'll give you another one.
Okay.
I'm going to start even though
it's still in flux here 'cause I
don't want to lose my time.
Ooh, that's bad.
Whoa.
I'm stepping over you.
I'm so sorry. Thank you.
All right.
That was dramatic,
wasn't it?
Okay.
All right.
Now, we've talked about the
imagination.
Now I want you to use it.
Imagine that you are a writer.
That's all you've ever wanted
to be.
You're at a very happy time in
your life.
You just wrote a really
successful novel.
Everyone loved it.
It was unlike anything that had
been written before.
It was very well received.
You decided,
"for my next project I am going
to write about my life."
You've had a hard life,
by the way.
You've had a hard life.
That hard life,
you think, is really what made
you into the writer you are.
It's what allowed you to speak
so powerfully to people in your
first novel, and you've always
wanted to write an
autobiography.
So that's what you do;
that's what you take up as your
next project.
So you write the story of your
life.
It's nearly 400 pages long.
It gets a really nice reception
at a very good publisher.
It's in page proofs.
Everything's going great.
You're thrilled.
And then someone says to you,
"You knowâ€¦."
Imagine this is Oprah.
Oprah gets page proofs of your
novel.
She's thinking about putting it
on her book club,
and--if any of you know
anything about contemporary
literature--getting on Oprah's
Book Club makes your sales for
the next 20 years.
It's huge.
There is no more powerful
marketing force in contemporary
fiction than Oprah's Book Club.
It even does wonders for
Tolstoy when Tolstoy gets on
Oprah's Book Club (not by a
séance).
So you get on Oprah's Book Club.
Oprah asks for the proofs for
your novel.
She takes them.
She says, "This is great,
but you know what?
I think--that last hundred
pages--you should get rid of
it."
And you think about it,
and you say yes,
and it comes out in that form.
And there you are,
and, for the next 40 years,
no one ever sees the novel that
you wrote, or the autobiography
that you wrote originally.
It's still only two thirds of
what you ever wrote it to be.
Well, this is what happened
to Richard Wright.
This is pretty much exactly
what happened to Richard Wright
in 1944.
So he had published Native
Son in 1940 to great
acclaim, a very successful
novel.
In 1944, he completed Black
Boy, then called American
Hunger, and he had placed it
with Harper and Brothers
Publishing Company in New York,
and they were very happy with
it.
It had a first part called
"Southern Night" and a second
part called "The Horror and the
Glory."
"Southern Night" was about his
experience growing up in
Mississippi.
So he was born in 1908 in
Mississippi, and in 1927--I
think it's '27;
let me get my date right--in
1927 he moved to Chicago,
moved north.
And in the 1940s he moved to
Paris, and he died there in
1960.
So his was a progression out of
a very poor, Southern childhood,
from a black family led by a
single mother,
to the circles in which
Gertrude Stein moved in Paris.
So this is a long trajectory.
Well, Black Boy,
or American
Hunger, as it was
then called,
covered the part in
Mississippi, and then the
beginnings of his life in
Chicago.
Now the part about his life in
Chicago was the part that was
finally cut from the novel--I'm
going to keep doing this,
call it the novel versus the
autobiography,
and I'll explain why I make
that mistake a little later--it
was cut from the autobiography.
Now he had this in page proofs
with Harper and Brothers,
and Harper and Brothers sent
the page proofs out to various
writers for blurbs and also sent
it to the Book of the Month Club
Editorial Board.
The Book of the Month Club was
a mail-order book club that
started in 1926,
and it became an incredibly
powerful engine for selling
books,
just as Oprah's Book Club is
today.
In 1926, it had about 4700
members.
Just three years later it had
110,000 members:
110,000 subscribers in 1929.
By the '40s and '50s,
it was incredibly powerful.
So what we have is this
marketing juggernaut getting
interested in Wright's
autobiography.
So they take it up,
and the board decides that they
only like the "Southern Night"
part.
They don't want any of the part
of the story of his life in
Chicago, and that's what he
finally agrees to.
So in the summer of 1944 he
embarks on this correspondence
with a woman named Dorothy
Canfield Fisher,
who was one of the editorial
board of the Book of the Month
Club, and they go back and forth
trying to figure out how he will
revise the ending to "Southern
Night" so that it sounds like
the end of a book rather than
the end of a section of a longer
book.
Now for Wednesday I am going to
ask you to go online to the
Beinecke Digital Archive and
read those letters.
We hold them here.
They are not published
anywhere, so this is kind of
fun.
This is one of the special
things about being at Yale.
We have those letters.
You can go and touch them.
You can read them online,
and I want you to read those in
addition to reading the sections
that I have indicated.
You can see what happens when
Wright starts coming up against
these demands on his manuscript,
and I will project them during
class too so that we can talk
about them.
Wright's manuscript was
therefore very much under
pressure as a literary
object--and it really was a
literary object.
I think we can make the
mistake, thinking about
autobiography,
that it's somehow not literary.
But in fact it's very literary,
and part of what makes it
literary is the fact that you
have to choose what scenes go
into that narrative.
You can't just write every
single thing that happened in
your life.
You have to choose.
Well, critics took it fairly
straightforwardly as the account
of a life and in that sense,
taking it that way,
some of them were a little
disappointed with what they held
in their hands.
For one thing,
it seemed exaggerated to some
people.
So the first scene,
as we will discover in Black
Boy, is when Richard,
young Richard--I think he was
6--burns down the family house
playing with matches underneath
the curtains,
and his mother finds him where
he has hidden under the burning
house and flogs him until he is
unconscious,
and he's sick for a good,
long time after that.
Okay.
Critics were like "I don't
think so.
That doesn't seem right."
A mother flog her son until
he's unconscious didn't seem too
credible.
As time went on there were
other kinds of complaints,
these about accuracy.
So, for instance,
his mother in the book is
represented as being uneducated.
Well, in fact she was a
schoolteacher.
Now there is a difference
between scholars on how long she
was a schoolteacher.
Some say she was a sort of
long-term successful
schoolteacher.
Others said,
"Well, she only taught school
for a couple of months."
So this was not--didn't seem to
be--accurate.
Then there was another
scene in the autobiography,
where Richard,
who is the valedictorian of his
high school class,
writes his valedictory speech,
gives it as required to the
principal beforehand,
the principal demands certain
kinds of changes,
and Richard refuses.
Well, apparently Richard in
real life did not refuse to make
those changes.
And imagine,
in a book that then undergoes
this publishing history that I
have described,
this is kind of a symbolic
scene.
This is a scene of whether you
as a writer compromise yourself
in the face of authority that
resists what you want to say.
So in the book it's a very
important scene.
It's the moment when Richard
really finds his voice and it
gives him the strength
eventually to leave the South.
But in real life apparently he
did cave.
Then there came to be
questions about whether the
scenes, the stories in the book,
actually did happen to him.
So there is this story about
his Uncle Hoskins who takes his
horse and cart with Richard in
the back and drives it into the
middle of the Mississippi River
as a kind of practical joke on
Richard.
Well, apparently this is not
something that happened to
Richard Wright.
This is something that happened
to Ralph Ellison.
Where these stories come from
began to be a problem.
So what is autobiography?
What is this genre that Wright
is working with?
It raised these kinds of
questions on the one hand.
But then there was another kind
of question, and that was coming
from the other side.
This is what William Faulkner
wrote to Wright upon reading
Black Boy.
He said: 
The good,
lasting stuff comes out of
one's individual imagination,
and sensitivity to,
and comprehension of,
the sufferings of Everyman--Any
Man--not out of the memory of
one's own grief.
I hope you will keep on saying
it, but I hope you will say it
as an artist,
as in Native Son.
So Faulkner's objection is on
the other side.
It's not fictional enough.
To write about your life and to
pretend that you're
communicating the memory of what
happened to you--your grief,
your private grief--doesn't
contain that universalizing move
that fiction,
by its very essence,
contains.
And you see that (you can
remember back to that conception
of literature we see in the
advertisement for
Ulysses) it's about
everyman,
that greatness in literature
comes from its ability to speak
to some archetypal Everyman,
Any Man, and Faulkner
capitalizes those words in his
letter as if they really are
types.
Well, Wright himself
described that difficulty of
writing his autobiography,
and these are the terms he
used:
I found that to tell the
truth is the hardest thing on
earth, harder than fighting in a
war, harder than taking part in
a revolution.
If you try it,
you will find that at times
sweat will break upon you.
You will find that,
even if you succeed in
discounting the attitudes of
others to you and your life,
you must wrestle with yourself
most of all, fight with
yourself, for there will surge
up in you a strong desire to
alter facts,
to dress up your feelings.
You'll find that there are many
things you don't want to admit
about yourself and others.
As your record shapes itself an
awed wonder haunts you,
and yet there is no more
exciting an adventure than
trying to be honest in this way.
The clean, strong feeling that
sweeps you when you've done it
makes you know that.
And even though in that little
passage he suggests that it's a
struggle to be truthful,
a struggle to be accurate,
a struggle not to dress up your
feelings with some sort of
embellishment,
he at other times says that,
well, some of the stories did
come from other people,
some of the stories he included
did come from other people's
experiences, not from his own
life,
and that this is allowed and
allowable because what he aimed
to do was produce a generic life
of a black boy living in the
South.
And from the titles we know he
considered for this book,
none of them make that claim
"The Life of Richard Wright."
None of them say that.
It's always Black
Boy, American Hunger.
These are not person-
specific.
These implicitly make a claim
to the generality--at the
national scale,
or in the racial sense--the
representativeness of this life.
And, indeed,
what more powerful testimony to
the power of narration is there,
the power of a story,
to say that you heard a story
and it became as if part of your
experience,
that you heard Ralph Ellison
tell that story,
and somehow you began to live
it yourself?
So what we see in the
publishing history of Black
Boy and also in its
reception brings us back to
those questions that I was
raising at the beginning of
class.
What is the relationship
between writing and the world?
What's the relationship between
the writer and the reader?
What's the relationship between
fiction and what we all
experience as the real world?
Our course over the term will
come back to this question over
and over again,
and it will also come back to
the generic question of
autobiography.
Even so experimental a book as
John Barth's Lost in the
Funhouse is totally absorbed
in the problem of what it would
mean to write about yourself.
It's a persistent problem
partly because it always raises
these issues of fictionality
versus truthfulness,
of honesty versus
embellishment.
It also raises the question
of how a self is made.
If we look forward to the end
of the term when we read The
Human Stain, which is about
a man,
Coleman Silk,
who tries to and succeeds in
passing as Jewish.
He's a black man,
and he passes for his whole
life as Jewish,
and in doing so rejects his
family.
In a way, what Coleman does is
write his autobiography,
a fictional autobiography,
in the very process of living
it.
So Roth imagines lived life as
fictional in the same register
as a novel, or as
truthful--dubiously so,
perhaps--in the same register
as an autobiography.
So these are questions that
will come back to us.
This is part of what I find so
compelling about fiction and
literature in general in this
period.
And this is why I study it;
this is why I teach it:
because that interface--between
the imagination and the world,
between literary art and trying
to tell the truth about
something, between form and
content--those contacts are
very,
very close, and they're very
compelling, I think,
in part, because other media
are so powerfully on the rise in
this period.
Literature has to figure
out where to stake its claim.
What can literature say that
nothing else can?
How can it address us in a way
that is compelling in a way that
nothing else is?
Can we make those kinds of
claims for literature?
The writers on the syllabus
consistently try to imagine a
way to make those claims,
make those claims for the
primacy and the importance of
what they do.
And I think that--in addition
to being able simply to
understand the literature of
your moment,
to understand the literary
world in which writers,
probably among you sitting
right here,
that world in which you will
bring forth your next novel,
what that world looks like--you
can understand that world,
but also you can understand how
art confronts the world in a
much more general sense.
That's what's exciting,
and that's what I invite you to
think about with me in the
course.
So I'll stop there,
and hopefully I'll see some of
you on Wednesday.
