The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 1 Transcript

January 14, 2008

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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 [your favorite writer]?"
"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'sUlysses, 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 ofUlysses, 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 onLolita--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 know."
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 sance). 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[ging] 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.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 2 Transcript
January 16, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: I just want to recap what I talked about last time very briefly. I
made the point in the first lecture that American literature in the middle of the twentieth century
is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between the writer and the reader, between
imagination and lived experience, between fiction and truth, between the reader and the text, that
these are very vexed and contested interfaces at this period. I also made the argument that at this
moment literary art is struggling with what to do with the legacy of modernism in the early
century, but there's another strain from the early century that matters--and matters particularly to
Richard Wright--and that is the American strain of naturalism: writers like Theodore Dreiser.
Wright is writing very much in the vein of those writers. So even though he's very closely
connected to the legacy of avant-garde modernism, he's also connected to a social realist strain,
the naturalist strain. Those are two slightly different things which I won't go in to right now. He's
connected to both those strains as well as the modernist strain.
So what I want to do today is look closely first at the selections from Black Boy that I asked you
to read and to look at those as a text and to ask ourselves what we can learn about what kind of
story it is. And I said about that problem: Is it autobiography? Is it fiction? What's it trying to do?
What kind of reader does it want? I suggested that there was a critical response to those issues
that was somewhat negative, and I want to sort of remind you of that just by reading you a little
bit from W. E. B. Du Bois's review of Black Boy when it came out. I think this sums up nicely
what I was trying to communicate last time. He says, "This book tells a harsh and forbidding

story and makes one wonder just exactly what its relation to truth is. The title, 'A Record of
Childhood and Youth' "--that was the subtitle--"makes one first think that the story is
autobiographical. It probably is at least in part, but mainly it is probably intended to be fiction or
fictionalized biography. At any rate, the reader must regard it as creative writing rather than
simply a record of life."
So that's W. E. B. Du Bois, and I'm going to take his advice and now begin to read this book with
you as creative writing. So let's see what it says to us when we look at it that way. I'm going to
read passages quite a bit today, since some of you may not have been able to get the RIS packet
in time, it being shopping period. So I'm going to read passages, and I hope you'll jump around
with me if you have the text in your hand. In general, you should always bring the book to class.
This is on page 267. This is from that second half of the book that was not published originally,
but I want to point to it first of all in raising the question: What did we lose in understanding this
as a literary object when the second half of the book. You can come in and sit down if you want;
there's some space down here. What did we lose in our understanding of it as a literary object
when the second half was not published? There are some seats here too.
On 267, this is in one of these parenthetical passages where the narrator is commenting on what
he's just given account of in his experience. "Slowly I began to forge in the depths of my mind"-this is the very top of the page--"a mechanism that repressed all the dreams and desires that the
Chicago streets, the newspapers, the movies were evoking in me. I was going through a second
childhood. A new sense of the limit of the possible was being born in me." What Wright gives us
here is an account of the two parts of this story that says this is an account of not one childhood,
but two. So one thing that readers lost, when they lost the second half of this book, is the sense
that maturing, the process of maturing, was more than just the process of leaving the South. That
has a typical Bildungsroman structure, the structure of a story about a boy who goes out from his
home and sort of becomes a man through his travels. If you just have the first half, you think that
that development is accomplished when Richard decides to leave the South. But what he tells us
very early in part two is that no, it takes two childhoods for a black man to make that journey.
So what is that journey, then, that required two childhoods to accomplish, a childhood in the
South and then a childhood in the North? So now I want to turn to the beginning of the book on
page 7. I'm also going to do some summarizing of these scenes for people who haven't read.
Make yourselves as comfortable as you can. As I mentioned last time, in the first scene of this
book the child Richard burns down his family's house playing with matches underneath the
curtains. He goes and hides under the house, afraid of the beating his mother will give him, and
indeed when his mother finally finds him he is beaten unconscious, and he is feverish and sick
for a long time afterward. And what I want to read to you is this passage on page 7:
I was lost in a fog of fear. A doctor was called--I was afterwards told--and he ordered that I be
kept abed, that I be kept quiet, that my very life depended upon it. My body seemed on fire and I
could not sleep. Packs of ice were put on my forehead to keep down the fever. Whenever I tried
to sleep I would see huge, wobbly, white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the
ceiling above me. Later, as I grew worse, I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes open
and I was gripped by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horrible
liquid. Day and night I begged my mother and father to take the bags away, pointing to them,
shaking with terror because no one saw them but me. Exhaustion would make me drift toward
sleep and then I would scream until I was wide awake again. I was afraid to sleep. Time finally
bore me away from the dangerous bags and I got well. But for a long time I was chastened
whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me.

Why start with this scene? I said last time that part of the art of autobiography is choosing. What
do you choose out of your life? Where do you begin? Where do you end? What do you put next
to what? Why does Wright choose this scene? It's very dramatic, so it has that going for it. It's a
hook. I would suggest that this little passage I just read to you tells us, in part, why. It's a moment
when a child realizes that the person who gave him life can revoke it. His mother, who gave him
life, can take that life away from him. It's a profound sense of jeopardy--physical, mortal
jeopardy--and I want to point to those "huge, wobbly, white bags, like the full udders of cows."
One of the wonderful things you can see in the Beinecke's Richard Wright Archives is the draft
copies of Black Boy. Wright revised this image in those drafts. It was at one time white faces, not
white bags: white faces. This to me is a fascinating revision. First of all, it suggests of course that
he was giving language to something, making a specific image out of something, that didn't quite
have that specific content in his experience as a child. But that revision is also away from a sense
that this jeopardy is represented by a racial face, the symbolic face of black oppression, the white
face that is always cruelly set against the black boy of this account. He revises it away from that
to the more generalized, fundamental, but also very personal figure of the mother and the
maternal. So the white bags, this is an image of the breast. We have this fear of the horrible white
liquid, as if milk were going to drown him. So the threat embodied by the mother who will beat
her own son unconscious is embodied in that fevered vision of the bags like the full udders of
cows. So this novel, this autobiography, begins with the sense that this boy is in danger from
practically the moment he comes into the world, the moment he comes into consciousness.
Then I want to note the transition that happens at the very bottom of this page after he says, "I
was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me." Then we
move into something that I call a catalog. There are three of these in the first half. It's a list of
sensations or perceptions that don't have a particular narrative structure, exactly. They are just a
sort of compilation of experience:
Each event spoke with a cryptic tone, and the moments of living slowly revealed their coded
meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-andwhite horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight
I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to
the bright horizon. There was the faint, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came to my cheeks and
shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning. There was the vague sense
of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi from the
verdant bluffs of Natchez.
I'm going to stop there. There's a lot you can say about these catalogs, and when I used to teach
the whole of this text over a course of two days, I would spend a lot of time--and, if you want to,
it's worth and it repays the time that you could spend--rereading these and thinking about the
exact language: for instance, here at the very top of page 8, when he talks about the "dreaming
waters" of the Mississippi River. What you have there is a moment when the perception of the
child becomes the perception of the world imbued with imagination. So the river is not
dreaming; it's Richard who is dreaming. So this is in part a catalog that represents the awakening
of sensuality, the awakening of the body to its environment, to his environment. But also, there is
this sense of imagination, and you get that in the dreaming waters; you get that in the sense of
travel or the image of the road that you can see in the green and red vegetables stretching away
in their rows to the bright horizon. There is that sense of space, of expansiveness, the possibility
of travel.
Why put this next to, right after, that very dramatic scene? Why is this the moment to enter into
that meditation? Well, I think it's because it's embodying an oscillation--that will come back in

this text--between radical jeopardy and deprivation and the compensation of sensuality, emotion
and imagination. These two oscillate back and forth so the moment of deprivation is often then
balanced by a moment of imagination. And so what I'm going to do is just now run through the
next two or three scenes and talk about why they're set next to each other. So the next one we
have, just on page 9--these come quite rapidly here--is the day his mother tells him that they're
going to Memphis on a boat called the Kate Adams. He says:
My eagerness thereafter made the days seem endless. Each night I went to bed hoping that the
next morning would be the day of departure. "How big is the boat?" I asked my mother. "As big
as a mountain," she said. "Has it got a whistle?" "Yes." "Does the whistle blow?" "Yes."
"When?" "When the captain wants it to blow." "Why do they call it the Kate Adams?" "Because
that's the boat's name." "What color is the boat?" "White." "How long will we be on the boat?"
"All day and all night." "Will we sleep on the boat?" "Yes. When we get sleepy we'll sleep. Now
hush." For days I had dreamed about a huge, white boat floating on a vast body of water, but
when my mother took me down to the levee on the day of leaving, I saw a tiny, dirty boat that
was not at all like the boat I had imagined.
If in the catalog imagination is awakened, this is what it can then do for Richard. It can endow
his daily experience with a kind of romance. But of course this is a poor, black child growing up
in the South, and his expectations, what his mind can imagine, is always going to be greater than
what the world can deliver. So if the landscape invites him to grow as an imaginative person, the
social world he lives in, this episode signals to us immediately, will never live up to that
imagination.
There is a sense of powerlessness that arises from the repeated oscillation that you start to see
even set up in these first three little vignettes, and the problem of powerlessness is first located
not centrally in that social world. I don't think we're meant to understand that the young Richard,
when he discovers that the Kate Adams is a dirty, little boat and not this romantic vision of a ship
he had hoped for, that the young Richard thinks to himself, "This is because I am a poor, black
boy growing up in the South." It's simply an experience of disappointment.
The sense of powerlessness, the most profound sense of powerlessness, suggested already by the
first episode where his mother almost takes back the life she gave him, is rooted in the family.
And we get such a dramatic vision of that in the next episode that follows, the episode of the
kitten. So for those of you who haven't read, Richard's father works nights and sleeps during the
day, and during the day the children therefore have to be very quiet. There is a cat outside the
apartment building that starts to meow and the boys are interested in it. The father yells at them,
says, "Make that cat shut up," and they can't. He says, "Make it shut up. I don't care. Kill it if you
have to. Kill that cat." Richard at this point already hates his father. His father will abandon the
family quite soon after this episode. For Richard, he is mostly this kind of presence: a cavailing,
angry, abusive presence. His resentment over his powerlessness within the family seethes in this
moment, and he thinks of a way to get back at his father. "I'll take his words literally; I will kill
the cat," he thinks, and so he does. He hangs the cat. Richard's mother finds out when his brother
tells on him, and the father cannot punish him. He has taken the father's words literally when
they were not meant literally, but in doing so--in relying on his father's words, in a sense, to
protect him, even as he subverts them--he escapes the punishment that would otherwise so
naturally and habitually follow.
So Richard's first exertion of agency in this book is through the agency of words, in this case in
asserting an interpretation of the words at odds with their intended meaning. It's as if Richard
takes those words, and he makes them his own, takes them from his father and gains a different
kind of strength from them, a strength he can then use to get back at his father. This is the first

instance in which Richard will do what he later describes Mencken doing, using words as
weapons. His discovery of Mencken using words as weapons in a political sense is a very
powerful moment for him in his intellectual development. In this case it's a much more visceral
kind of development. It's the understanding that he can make things happen in the world; he can
defend himself against his father's punishment through the use of words. But I want to note that
his mother takes a different approach. If his father resigns himself to Richard's subterfuge, his
mother does not, and this is on page 12. He says:
I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I had taken his words
literally. He could not punish me now without risking his authority. I was happy because I had at
last found a way to throw my criticism of him into his face. I had made him feel that if he
whipped me for killing the kitten I would never give serious weight to his words again. I had
made him know that I felt he was cruel and I had done it without his punishing me. But my
mother, being more imaginative, retaliated with an assault upon my sensibilities that crushed me
with the moral horror involved in taking a life.
And I want to just flip over to 13, about the same place on the page. She's confronted him with
having knowingly taken the father's words the wrong way:
"You stop that lying. You knew what he meant." "I didn't," I bawled. She shoved a tiny spade
into my hands. "Go out there, dig a hole, and bury that kitten." I stumbled out in to the black
night sobbing, my legs wobbly from fear. Though I knew that I had killed the kitten, my mother's
words had made it live again in my mind. What would that kitten do to me when I touched it?
Would it claw at my eyes? As I groped toward the dead kitten, my mother lingered behind me
unseen in the dark, her disembodied voice egging me on.
The mother has her own way of using words for power, and she does it by making the kitten live
again in his imagination. It's as if she is writing fiction there in that scene. She is representing
this kitten that he's killed so that it comes back to haunt him. So, once again, there is that
immediate oscillation. The moment Richard gains some power from the use of words, his mother
takes it back by exerting that power herself, taking that power away from him.
There is a kind of drum beat of thematic material as these scenes pile up. The drum beat is all
about language. Yes, this is a book about the privations of growing up in the South poor and
black, but it is very much, very consciously, a book about the development of someone who
attends to language. So in these early scenes it's all about power. But it's actually not even quite
so easy or so simple as these early scenes that I've just discussed might make out. Language has
powers that are entirely unpredictable, that can't be harnessed in precisely that deliberate way: by
making a decision to take someone's words in the wrong way, or by telling a story to make a
moral point, as the mother does.
So think about the scene where Richard gets drinks in the saloon as a child. Patrons pay him and
give him drinks to go up and repeat their words to other people in the bar. Usually this happens
between men and women, so a man will give Richard a drink and pay him a few pennies to go to
a woman in the bar and repeat certain things that he has trained Richard to say. In doing this, the
patrons titter; everybody sort of has fun with this. Richard has no idea what he is saying. He's
simply repeating the sounds of the words that are given to him. Through this process he becomes
addicted to alcohol at a very young age, but at the same time he learns something about
language. It has mysterious powers. It has capacities to make things happen in the world that he
doesn't know how to control. When he finally emerges from this time of being a young
drunkard--his mother sort of locks him up in the house and makes sure he can't get out and then
takes him to work with her and so on, so that he loses that taste for alcohol--in the text what you

have right next to that is the beginning of his insatiable questions. He starts to just torture his
mother with a thousand questions about everything in the world. The addiction to alcohol is in a
sense replaced by an addiction to knowledge. The experience of having language speak through
him and do things that he doesn't understand makes him want to acquire again that agency that
he experienced when he took his father's words literally.
This theme comes back in the scene where his grandmother is washing him. Do you remember
this scene? His grandmother is washing him and his brother in the tub, and she's washing his
butt, and he says to her, "When you're finished, kiss back there." And whew! She's flying off the
roof with anger, chasing him around the house trying to whip him with a wet towel, so on and so
forth: a very dramatic scene again of powerlessness within the family, of being the victim of
violence within the family. But in this case it's a response produced in the negative register
similar to the responses produced in the saloon. He says something, and he doesn't really know
where those words come from. He doesn't really know what made his granny so angry about
those words. He doesn't understand the words that he's used, but boy! Did they produce a
response!
So there is this sense in which the story of a developing writer is the story of someone learning-even before they learn how to control language fully--that language has these capacities. Well,
there is another element, though, to the kind of language that Richard is describing learning, and
that is the racial element. He is learning a racialized language. And here I want to look at page-let's see--page 79, actually first on 47, just in passing quickly. You know what? I'm looking at my
watch. We don't have time. We'll go straight to 79. On page 79 we get an account of a
conversation between Richard and his friends and it's annotated with interpretative asides. So I'm
going to start in the middle of this:
The crowd laughs long and loud. [This is in the middle of the page.] "Man, them white folks
oughta catch you and send you to a zoo and keep you for the next war!" Throwing the subject in
to a wider field. "Then when that fighting starts, they oughta feed you on buttermilk and blackeyed peas and let you break wind!" The subject is accepted and extended. "You'd win the war
with a new kind of poison gas!" A shouted climax. There is high laughter that simmers down
slowly. "Maybe poison gas is something good to have." The subject of white folks is
associationally swept into the orbit of talk. "Yeah, if they have a race riot round here, I'm gonna
kill all the white folks with my poison." Bitter pride. Gleeful laughter. Then silence, each waiting
for the other to contribute something. "Them white folks sure scared of us, though." Sober
statement of an old problem.
What we see here is a doubled voice. This is a moment when the narrative voice begins to split in
a very conscious way. So what you have is the account of Richard and his friends talking in the
past, and you have the present narrator's parsing of how this language relates to topics that
impinge upon their very context, the racial realities of the South. So what you see here is a
narrator who has learned to do that parsing. Some of these terms that he uses are literary--climax,
the creation of suspense--so he's tracking this as if it were the development of a narrative. But
he's also suggesting how humor is used to broach topics that are impossible to talk about in more
direct ways, or that feel dangerous to these boys to approach in more direct ways.
So there is a kind of grammar of race that this boy is learning while he experiences language in
all these other more visceral, family-oriented ways. There is this social context of race relations
whose grammar he is also learning, and I would just remind you of the passage where he starts to
ask his mother about whether his granny is white or not. There's a long conversation, and she
gets very frustrated with him. She doesn't really want to answer that question. She is a woman
who looks very white but is categorized as black in that system of the South. And so Richard is

learning a grammar of race even while he tries to work out how to use language as a source of
power in his family.
The split voice, the development of what you could say is that racial double consciousness that
W. E. B. Du Bois talks about, that double consciousness of the racial reality, is manifested in that
split in the narrative. In "The Horror and the Glory," the second half of the book as originally
written, that voice becomes the parenthetical. It takes another development altogether. So if you
look in certain passages--Let's see. On 272 and 273--actually, I'm going to start on 271. This is
where Richard is talking about the waitresses, the white waitresses he works with in the
restaurant in Chicago. This is what he says about them about three quarters of the way down the
page:
During my lunch hour, which I spent on a bench in a nearby park, the waitresses would come
and sit beside me talking at random, laughing, joking, smoking cigarettes. I learned about their
tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply, their
sex problems, their husbands. They were an eager, restless, talkative, ignorant bunch, but
casually kind and impersonal for all that. They knew nothing of hate and fear, and strove
instinctively to avoid all passion.
That commentary that you get right in the scene--not in the parenthetical--it's as if the voice of
Richard remembering the early parts of his childhood, the voice that can parse a conversation, is
then part of what gets remembered as part of the scene. When Richard is with those waitresses,
he's reflecting on these things as he experiences them.
But there is a second kind of development, and this gets to that second childhood he invokes that
happens to him when he goes to Chicago. There is a social analysis that he begins to be able to
advance partly due to his reading in Marxism, in sociology. Wright was very interested in the
sociology of the 1930s and '40s. He read a lot in that vein. He was very interested in economics,
and he wanted to understand how the social structures of capitalism and the economic structures
of capitalism impinged upon the way personalities were formed. And that's why he's interested in
the emotions of these waitresses. And in fact the question of emotion bears directly on his sense
of what books are for. There is a remarkable moment on page 280 where he talks about his
aspiration as a writer. And this is remarkable for how different it is from someone like Nabokov
or John Barth or many of our other writers on the syllabus:
If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be
conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I
strove to master words, to make them disappear, to make them important by making them new,
to make them melt into a rising spiral of emotional stimuli, each greater than the other, each
feeding and reinforcing the other, and all ending in an emotional climax that would drench the
reader with the sense of a new world. That was the single aim of my living.
That's remarkable for a writer to say, "I want to write so that my words disappear." He doesn't
want us to see the art of his sentences. He wants us to feel, and it is in fact feeling, that he credits
to novels, that allows him to imagine that he himself could have a different life. And he talks
about this if you look at the published ending on 413 that we find in the notes, when this second
half wasn't there, when he asks, "How dare I consider my feelings superior to the gross
environment that sought to claim me?" He states the problem of living in the South as a problem
of feeling, that he needed to claim and consider his own feelings. He says:
It had only been through books, at best no more than vicarious cultural transfusions, that I had
managed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. My belief in books had risen more out of

a sense of desperation than from my abiding conviction of their ultimate value. [And I'm just
going to skip down.] . . . It had been my accidental reading of fiction and literary criticism that
had invoked in me vague glimpses of life's possibilities.
Reading for him is a way of accessing feeling, and that's the kind of reading that he wants from
us, from the people who read his book. The kind of feeling that he wants us to have is sort of
stated in that alternate ending, but "The Horror and the Glory" shows how that kind of feeling
enters in to a much larger cultural analysis. That piece of it, which is gone when the second half
disappears, that piece of it is what he tries to communicate in a very condensed way. And I want
now to show you some of those letters that I mentioned. (Andrew, can you get the screen and the
lights? I am switching gears pretty quickly here 'cause we don't have a lot of time.)
As I explained last time, it was the Book of the Month Club that caused him to make this change
in his account. And what I have in front of you right now is the second page of the first letter that
Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote to Wright, where she first raises the problem that she sees in the
ending as he has revised it. Now the shame here is that she's talking about a version of the ending
you see in that note on 413 in our edition. She is talking about an early draft of that ending, and
it's not in the Beinecke. I don't know where it is. I don't know where the drafts that accompanied
these correspondences are. Now it's just possible that they're in that big archive somewhere, and
I just haven't found them yet. So if any of you want to be an archive sleuth and find them, great. I
looked and I can't find them. Sometimes when correspondence is saved you run into these kinds
of problems, so we have to guess a little bit at what she was looking at.
What I want to point out to you is this part of her letter, the third paragraph here, where she says,
"My idea is this." In the first part of the letter, she has made some sentence-level suggestions for
the end of the book, and now she embarks very tentatively on her major suggestion: "My idea is
this. You ask a question all of your many readers have asked themselves about you with an
eagerness full of anxious hope. What was it that always made me feel that way? What was it that
made me conscious of possibilities? From where had I caught a sense of freedom?" And if you've
read the ending in the notes, you'll remember those passages where he asks that question. And
his answer in that published version is, "From books." But this is what she is thinking:
We too ask ourselves that question, "we" meaning those Americans who, following the example
of their parents and grandparents, have done what they could to lighten this dark stain of racial
discrimination in our nation. What we have hoped, faintly hoped, was that those efforts of men
of good will have somewhat availed, a little, enough so that those suffering from racial injustice
might catch a passing glimpse of the fact that they are rooted in those American principles so
mocked and degraded by the practices of racial discrimination. In what else could they be
rooted? That they exist is a proof that American ideals are not the tawdry pretenses they are so
often accused of being. [And then I'm going to skip down to the bottom of the next
paragraph.]. . . To keep that conception in regard to decent race relations alive and growing has
been the aspiration of generation after generation in many an American family, judging by my
own and by those I know. To receive in the closing pages of your book one word of recognition
for this aspiration, if it were possible for you to give such recognition honestly, would hearten all
who believe in American ideals.
This is quite striking. Imagine that you are Richard Wright, and you've grown up with the life
that he describes in this book. Now you've read some of it. And you're being asked to suggest in
the closing pages of the autobiography--which is closing where you did not want it to close, in
the middle of your book, not at the end of your book--you're being asked to essentially thank the
good, liberal white people who have been working on behalf of the end of racial discrimination.

Well, Wright finds this an extremely difficult request to respond to. And you can track it here in
his response. I'm going to read from here so I can actually see it. "Your more general"-- He says,
"Okay. I'll respond to those sentence-level things."
Your more general suggestion was much harder to deal with. I fully understand the value of what
you are driving at, but frankly, the narrative as it now stands simply will not support a more
general or hopeful conclusion. The Negro who flees the South is really a refugee. He is so
pinched and straightened in his environment that his leaving is more an avoidance than an
embrace. For me, it has been my reading of fiction--far removed from political considerations-that evoked in me a sense of personal freedom or the possibilities of escaping the South. I added
a paragraph to the body of the epilogue expanding this notion.
And I take that to be the paragraph where he talks about what fiction has done for him
specifically. Canfield Fisher is not satisfied with this. She comes back at the problem. This is at
the bottom of the letter:
I gather that you cannot bring yourself to use even once the word "American" in speaking of "the
tinge of warmth which came from an unseen light," such a beautiful, sensitive phrase. Some of
the novels and stories you read were, it is probable, laid in your own country of America. Hence,
some of the characters in books through whom you had glimpsed life's possibilities were fellow
Americans of yours. These unseen lights which shone through them upon your faith were
reflections of American efforts to live up to an idea. Those characters could have been no other
than products of American tradition. However dimly that light came through to you, suffering so
acutely from the rough denial of the very existence of American ideals, part of it must have come
through American delineation of American characters.
Now keep in mind this is 1944. This is the summer of 1944. America is just joining the war
effort in Europe. This is a fight against fascism. That's the way that it was presented to the
American public: a fight against Nazi Germany. And in later letters in this series between her and
Richard, and also in the review (the little sort of summary that she wrote up for the Book of the
Month Club newsletter), she invokes the Nazis specifically as a comparison to the kind of
oppression that Richard was trying to escape in the South. So this is caught up in a moment of
patriotism where American freedom is being held up very much as the ideal, that thing that we
fight for when we go to Europe to fight. And so to have Richard present this picture of America
that doesn't ring the changes of that patriotism comes to be a problem in her mind. Now
when Black Boy was published there was a war bond advertisement on the back cover of the
book. It really was just, even as a physical object, all bound up with the politics of its moment.
Richard's response to this--we just have two seconds, and I want to show it to you. I love these
pieces because you can just see him struggling on the page. (Sorry.) This is his first attempt at
writing back to her. See all the scribbles? This was hard for him. There are two other drafts. If
you go and look at them, it's quite interesting. He's trying extremely hard to make an answer, and
what he ends up doing is bringing that knowledge that he built up in Chicago, the knowledge that
he gets from reading economics and sociology and Marxism. He gives an analysis of industrial
capitalism. That's the kind of framework he uses to try to get her to understand what it would
mean to be a Negro in the South, how isolated he was culturally, how impossible it is to see
something like an ideal America of freedom and justice from that subject position.
In the end, the compromise is that he notes several writers including Dreiser and Sherwood
Anderson. And I just want to have you compare the catalog of writers on 413 that he mentions.
They are Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, H.L. Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis: all American writers.
Compare that with the catalog that he gives of his reading on 249, and you'll see what's being

elided. This is the top of 249. So certainly we have Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, but then
we have Dostoevsky, George Moore, Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Frank Harris, Mark
Twain, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, Zola, Norris, Gorky, Bergson, Ibsen,
Balzac. You get the point. This is a very cosmopolitan reading list. What Canfield Fisher asks
him to present is a totally nationalistic one.
My point in sum, what I want you to take away from this, is to see how an account of a life is
struggling against forces outside of itself--publishing forces, the forces of politics, of war, of an
editor--how a writer is struggling to make his account faithful to his own artistic vision, his own
social vision, against those forces, and how those forces have an impact--try as he might, have an
impact--on what the text looks like when we hold it in our hands. Black Boy or American
Hunger is a dramatic example, and--thanks to the Beinecke and to the scholarship that's been
done on it by the editor who brought this whole text out in the 1990s, Arnold Rampersad--thanks
to that work we get to see it up close; we get to see what that back-and-forth looks like. We'll
have another version of this when we think about Lolita, which in your edition has an essay at
the end called "On a Novel Entitled Lolita." That's only there because someone tried to censor
that book. It's another example of how the world comes to impinge on and change our reading
experience. It's something that we will come back to and explore more in the next class.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 3 Transcript
January 18, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: We finished Black Boy last time, and one of the big questions
coming out of my discussion of that autobiography is: how do you manage the question of
context in reading a novel or an autobiography--in reading any text? And we had a very complex
publishing history to think about with that text. Flannery O'Connor's work raises questions of a
similar kind, but they look very different. And so, my lectures on Flannery O'Connor will
highlight the methodologies that we can bring to any reading of a novel, and it will highlight the
differences between different methodologies and what they allow us to see in a different text.
Flannery O'Connor, as most of you probably know, is a Southern writer. She is very often
assimilated to a whole group of southern writers who were working in the 1930s and '40s, the
"Southern Agrarians." She was friends with a lot of the major figures of that movement,
especially Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. She lived out her life mostly in a small town called
Milledgeville, Georgia. She was born in Savannah in 1925. She studied writing at the Iowa
Writers Workshop. She lived in New York for a short time, but she was afflicted with lupus, a
very serious illness, and she died at the age of 39 in 1964. So, she lived a pretty short life. Over
the course of that life, she wrote mostly short stories, and so she is very much known for her
short stories. She has a couple of novels. Of them, this is, I think, the most successful.
O'Connor, you may also know, has been understood as a religious writer. She was a Catholic, and
she very much made her Catholicism at the center of all the things that she said about her
fictional practice. And so, we're going to see a couple of those things today. Let's look--just to
begin with, if you brought your books--let's look at the cover of this book. What does this cover
say to you? What does this image remind you of? What does it look like to you? Do you want to
answer that?

Student: Is it the Sacred Heart?

Professor Amy Hungerford: It's the Sacred Heart, yes. It's the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In
Catholic iconography of a certain kind, the figure of Christ is shown usually parting His clothes
and His flesh and showing you His Sacred Heart, which is usually crowned with flame and often
encircled with thorns. So it's an image of Christ the suffering godhead: the very human, fleshly
person who will part His own flesh in order to connect with, in order to redeem, the believer. So
right in the packaging of this novel that we have today--this cover has changed over time-nevertheless, even today, that very Catholic iconography is right on the front of the cover. And
when you see Wise Blood, that title, right below the Sacred Heart, you can't help but think of:
well, this blood is somehow the blood of Christ. That's the kind of blood we're talking about. It's
already entered a sort of metaphorical register, religious register, in the way this book is
packaged. Then, when we open up the front, we see the author's note to the second edition, and
this was something O'Connor added to the novel in 1962. I just want to read that with you today.
She says:
Wise Blood has reached the age of ten and is still alive. My critical powers are just sufficient to
determine this, and I am gratified to be able to say it. The book was written with zest, and if
possible it should be read that way. It is a comic novel about a Christian malgr lui, and as such
very serious. For all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and
death. Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain
preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling
block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them, Hazel
Motes's integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from
tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author, Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to
do so.
So, right up front, we are told that Hazel Motes is a Christian in spite of himself, that this is how
we are to understand this character who we will come to know. I also want to give another layer
to this understanding of O'Connor as a religious writer by looking at what she said in her
correspondence to one of her readers who asked her some questions, and this is on the handout
that I passed around.
This is a letter to a man named Ben Griffith from 1954. So she had just finished Wise Blood, and
people are starting to read it, ask her questions. She was a prolific correspondent. She was very
generous in her letter writing. She would write to almost anyone who wrote to her. She would
write back in a substantive way. I think it's in part that, suffering from lupus, she was very much
confined to her house in Georgia, and the letter writing, this kind of correspondence, was
certainly a way for her to keep in contact with the world of readers and other writers and friends.
So he had written to her. He was teaching writing at a local college. He's obviously been asking
her about the sources of some of the images and characters and themes in Wise Blood. So, I want
to point out a couple of things. This is the first full paragraph:
I don't know how to cure the sourcitis, except to tell you that I can discover a good many
possible sources myself for Wise Blood, but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the
sources after I had written the book. I have been exposed to Wordsworth's Intimation Ode, but
that is all I can say about it. I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of
the way it went in. The Oedipus business comes nearer to home. Of course, Haze Motes is not
an Oedipus figure, but there are obvious resemblances. At the time I was writing the last of the
book, I was living in Connecticut [actually very close, here at Yale, and one of the people who is
still at Yale, Penny Laurens--I don't know if you've met her--she was married to Robert
Fitzgerald, and she knew Flannery O'Connor]. When I was living in Connecticut with the Robert

Fitzgeralds, Robert Fitzgerald translated the Theban Cycle with Dudley Fitz, and the translation
of Oedipus Rex had just come out and I was much taken with it. Anyway, all I can say is I did a
lot of thinking about Oedipus.
This is very typical in tone for O'Connor. When she talks about education or learning--and if you
read more in this letter (I won't go through the whole thing), you will see that--she's very selfdeprecating. She says she has "what passes for an education in this day and age." She says that
she has read a little bit of Kafka and "doesn't know what to make of him, but it makes you a
bolder writer." She reads a little Henry James because she thinks that makes her a better writer,
somehow, but she doesn't quite know how. There's always this veneer of innocence, or lack of
learning, or lack of sophistication; so, she is presenting herself as a simple person. I think that's
important, although not directly connected to her presentation of herself as a Catholic person. I
think it does factor into her sense that the truth she is accessing, or the truth that she is trying to
present to the world in her stories, is one that even a child might be able to understand. And that
fits very comfortably within a New Testament understanding of the teaching of Christ. So, Christ
is that one to whom the little children can come, and I think she cultivates that childlike sense in
her self-presentation. But then there is this very explicit discussion of her Catholicism, a little
further down:
My background and my inclinations are both Catholic, and I think this is very apparent in the
book. Something is usually said about Kafka in connection with Wise Blood, but I have never
succeeded in making my way through The Castle or The Trial, and I wouldn't pretend to know
anything about Kafka. I think reading a little of him perhaps makes you a bolder writer
And so on. If you turn over, this is another letter to Ben Griffith written fairly shortly after this
first one. She expands a little bit on this sense of her Catholicism. This is in the middle of the
page:
Let me assure you that no one but a Catholic could have written Wise Blood even though it is a
book about a kind of Protestant saint. It reduces Protestantism to the twin ultimate absurdities of
the Church without Christ or the Holy Church of Christ without Christ, which no pious
Protestant would do, and of course no unbeliever or agnostic could have written it because it is
entirely redemption centered in thought. Not too many people are willing to see this, and perhaps
it is hard to see, because Hazel Motes is such an admirable nihilist. His nihilism leads him back
to the fact of his redemption, however, which is what he would have liked so much to get away
from. When you start describing the significance of a symbol like the tunnel, which recurs in the
book, you immediately begin to limit it, and a symbol should go on deepening. Everything
should have a wider significance. But I am a novelist, not a critic, and I can excuse myself
from explication de texte on that ground. The real reason of course is laziness.
There is that characteristic self-deprecation. With letters like this--which were published
copiously in a beautiful edition that Sally Fitzgerald edited--with letters like this, or her frequent
essays and lectures, which are collected in a book called Mystery and Manners, she was
expounding a certain reading of her fiction, even while she was still writing it. And those who
were close to her have picked up that understanding of her fiction and promulgated it. And
there's a huge critical industry around Flannery O'Connor, and at the core of it is a body of
criticism that finds and articulates and explains the religious meanings of her texts.
With that in mind, I want to point up to the two quotations that I put on the board to start us off
today: "'I like his eyes. They don't look like they see what he's looking at, but they keep on
looking.'" This is Sabbath Lily Hawks. And then, a character you haven't met yet if you stopped
at page 100, Onnie Jay Holy: "'I wouldn't have you believe nothing you can't feel in your own

hearts.'" These two quotations seem to me a kind of rubric under which we can start to think
about what it means to read this novel, and what it means to read it in the light of the religious
context that O'Connor herself, critics, marketers, have built up around her work.
The first quotation from Sabbath Lily of course focuses on the eyes, and it is not hard to read
into Haze Motes's name that the trope of sight is going to be important. "Haze Motes." There is
that famous passage in the New Testament (or is it--oh, gosh--now I'm going to forget if it's New
or Old Testament; someone will correct me): "Do not try to remove the mote from your
neighbor's eye before you have removed it from your own," or "lest you fail to remove the mote
from your own eye." So there is this sense of occluded sight; "Haze," that haze. Somehow,
something is wrong with Haze Motes's eyes, something wrong with his sight, or rather there is
something important about his sight that we're going to have to unpack. But what I want to take
out of Sabbath Lily's comment about Haze is this sense of what you look at. What does Haze
look at and what does he see? What do we look at when we read this novel, and what do we see?
Those are questions that are going to frame the two lectures that I give on this novel.
The second quotation, from Onnie Jay Holy, raises the question of sentiment. This novel--as you
will soon see, once you get to the parts where Onnie Jay Holy begins to preach--this novel is
very much a critique of sentimentality. If Richard Wright's ideal response to his fiction was that,
for the reader, the words would disappear, and all they would be left with is their emotional
response, for O'Connor it's precisely that kind of response--to any call: be it textual, be it an act
of reading, an act of audition, hearing someone preach--that kind of response is precisely not the
one you are supposed to have. And so I would ask you to think about a couple of simple
questions as you move through this book, and as you think about what I have to say about it. One
of them could begin with a reflection like this. Would you ever want to sit down to dinner with
any of the people in this novel? I see people shaking their heads. They are quite unlikable, and
this is consistent pretty much across O'Connor's fiction: short, long, medium, whatever. Her
characters are not very endearing. So you want to ask yourself why that's so. This is a conscious
decision on her part, and you want to think about that decision.
If there is any character who seems kind of endearing, at least for me, it's probably Enoch. And
we'll talk a little bit more about him: not today, but in the second lecture and in section. So, with
these questions in mind, I want you think about how we can see the novel and how we can think
about it in the face of the interpretation that's already layered on to it. And what I want to do is
now, kind of just descend in to the text, and read with you the passage when Haze first takes the
Essex out for a spin: his wonderful car, the Essex. So, this is on page 73, is about where it begins,
and I'm going to read through the next two or three pages. And I'll skip around in the book as
things come up that I want to show you in other parts of the book. So let's think about seeing and
theology and all the issues that are already on the table for us. I'm going to begin at the bottom of
73: "When the car was ready."-- If you have your book, go ahead and open it up. "When the
car was ready, the man and the boy stood by to watch him drive it off." (Is it the wrong page
numbers? Shoot. Oh, dear. Sixty-nine. Okay. So, it's four off. [Refers to discrepancy in
pagination among different editions of the novel] Thank you for telling me. You rely on
publishers and then they let you down. Okay. Does everyone have it?)
When the car was ready, the man and the boy stood by to watch him drive it off. He didn't want
anybody watching him because he hadn't driven a car in four or five years. The man and the boy
didn't say anything while he tried to start it. They only stood there looking in at him. "I wanted
this car mostly to be a house for me," he said to the man. "I ain't got any place to be." "You ain't
took the brake off yet," the man said. He took the brake off and the car shot backwards because
the man had left it in reverse. In a second he got it going forward and drove off crookedly past

the man and boy still standing there watching. He kept going forward, thinking nothing and
sweating.
I just want to stop there for a minute. Haze sees the car as a kind of home. Well, how are we
meant to understand the meaning of that? It has the feeling of a rare moment of explanation from
Haze. He almost never explains himself to other people. Here he is accounting for his need for
the car. Now, of course, O'Connor was very good at imbuing her writing with repeated symbols
that grow and accrue meaning across the text. So we've already seen the trope of the house. And
if you look back at 24 (oh, no--try 20; see if we can find it here.), when Haze describes--or, we
sort of know through his consciousness--the story of his time in the Army, this is what we learn
about how he felt there, after he's wounded:
He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there.
When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something he had always known. The
misery he had was a longing for home. It had nothing to do with Jesus. When the army finally let
him go, he was pleased to think that he was still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to
Eastrod, Tennessee. The black Bible and his mother's glasses were still in the bottom of his
duffle bag. He didn't read any book now, but he kept the Bible because it had come from home.
He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever become dim.
O'Connor has already put in place in the novel through that little passage the sense that the
longing for home and the longing for redemption--or the resistance to redemption--these things
are very close to one another. You can mistake--here we find out about Haze--you can mistake
the longing for Jesus for the longing for home, or vice versa: the longing for home, for the
longing of Jesus. The Bible that he carries around is important to him because it comes from
home. I want to suggest to you that the fact that it's the religious book for him, for his culture, for
his family, is not of course incidental to the fact that it's what reminds him of home. It's not just
that you can mistake the longing for home for the longing for Jesus. You can in some ways see
religion and home as conflated. And this gets to a traditional Christian notion of the believer as
not being at home in the world: that the believer somehow belongs to God's kingdom, and that
this is either countercultural--at odds with the general world in which he or she would find
herself--or it is totally incompatible with the world in which we live.
The Bible is a physical manifestation of the proximity of the spiritual and the material in this
world. So what makes him feel close to home, in a way, has to make him feel close to the
religion he's trying to reject. That conflation is part of what makes it impossible for Haze to
escape the question of redemption, even if he wants to answer it in a way that's at odds with how,
for example, his grandfather, the preacher, would answer it. This is why he's continually
mistaken for a preacher, no matter what he does. Remember he goes in to the prostitute's house,
Mrs. Watts's, and he's got a hat on, and the hat just makes him look like a preacher. There's
nothing he can do. He says, "I'm not a preacher," and she says, "That's okay if you're not a
preacher." It's just something that's in his body; it's physical.
So the car--going back to the passage that I was talking about before with the Essex--the car
(even though religion is not mentioned directly right here), the sense of home that it embodies,
carries with it all that sense of unhousedness. And, because it's a moving house, it carries the
sense of the wandering believer with it as well. And you get that reinforced on the very next page
(if you just skip over about a page from there): "A black pickup truck turned off a side road in
front of him. On the back of it, an iron bed and a chair and table were tied, and on top of them a
crate of Barred Rock chickens." So other cars on the road looked like houses, mobile houses, as
well. It's not just Haze's Essex that is imagined as home.

So O'Connor is giving us a version of the road, and I want you to keep this in mind because of
course we're going to read On the Road, and we are going to see a major road trip
in Lolita, actually two of them. So the iconography of the American road is something that is
going to come back to us. Well, here is our first example. This is the road of the unhoused, of the
spiritually seeking, of the wandering, of the lost. People wander in search of some kind of
coherent meaning. I want to now move down a little bit and observe how landscape is presented
to us. This is after that, "since he was going very fast":
The highway was ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and roadhouses. After a while,
there were stretches where red gullies dropped off on either side of the road, and behind them
there were patches of field buttoned together with 666 posts. The sky leaked all over all of it, and
then it began to leak in to the car. The head of a string of pigs appeared, snout-up, over the ditch,
and he had to screech to a stop and watch the rear of the last pig disappear shaking into the ditch
on the other side. He started the car again and went on. He had the feeling that everything he saw
was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing he had forgotten had happened to him.
So what do we notice about this landscape? First of all, it's very much constructed. It's buttoned
together with posts, as if someone had built it, and--what's more--these are described as 666
posts. I think this is probably a size of lumber, but you can't get away from the mythology of that
number. In the Book of Revelation it's the number of the beast; it's the number of the devil. It's
also a landscape that is full of pigs, wandering pigs, so if the people are wandering through this
road, the pigs are equally wanderers throughout these fields. They're unconfined; they seem to
cross the road at will. The sky, the world above, is really bound up with the world below. There
is very little separation, even if there is a sense that the sky is impinging on the earth and not the
other way around. "The sky leaked over all of it." It's really, in a sense, the physical image is of
rain; it's raining, so it's leaking all over it. But there's more than that. There is this sense of the
concerns of the sky somehow, the concerns of the above; the concerns of the transcendent are
seeping their way in to the concerns of the material world below. And then you get that sort of
lyrical moment of interpretation: "He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off
piece of some giant blank thing he had forgotten had happened to him." Now this is where the
omniscient narrator comes in quite forcefully, and gives us something to work on as we analyze
Haze and we think about who he is as a character and where he finds himself.
This connects I think with a whole host of other passages that have to do with nothingness. And
one of them is right above on that page, and I read it a little earlier: "thinking nothing and
sweating." It's as if "thinking nothing" is not a passive activity, but an active one. So that, to
think nothing is something you have to work at; it's something that you can be preoccupied with.
And similarly, if you look back at 37--this is again a description of landscape--you can see this
connection between (or, well, somewhat of a disconnection between) the above and the below,
another description of sky. This is Hazel walking in Taulkinham: "The black sky was
underpinned with long, silver streaks" (this is the very beginning of Chapter 3 if you're trying to
find it):
that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all
seemed to be moving very slowly, as if they were about some vast construction work that
involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was
paying any attention to the sky.
Here that omniscient narrator, as when that narrator looks in to Haze's mind, offers you a reading
of the sky and its separation from the minds of the characters that suggests, or makes you look
for, kinds of structure. Here, it's the construction work; she actually uses that word. But you get
scaffolding; you get depth or perspective: counting thousands of stars, "movingas if they were

about some vast work that involved the whole order of the universe." It vaults the very concrete
materiality, the physicality, of these characters and their circumstances. It vaults that discussion
into a much larger, metaphysical, transcendent context, the whole order of the universe.
It's moments like these when that omniscient narrator lives up to its name, that sense of
omniscience that we might associate with God. Another example is at the very opening of the
book:
The train was racing through treetops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing
very red on the edge of the farthest woods. Near the plowed fields curved and faded, and the few
hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs. Wally B. Hitchcock, who was
facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time
of day, and she asked him if he didn't think so too.
"Pretty" is not exactly the word that comes to mind--at least not to my mind--when I read this.
It's more like "heavy" or "saturated," and there's again pigs running around. Again there is a
biblical iconography behind this. There are two instances that come to my mind. When demons
are cast out by the apostles and sent into a herd of pigs, and the pigs go running off a cliff and
die; that's one image. Another is the admonition not to throw your pearls before swine, not to
preach to those who can't hear, or won't be perceptive.
So these moments of landscape description offer up that consistently Christian-inflected theory
of the universe, that sense of transcendence as structure, as something that's moving inexorably,
that will take all time to complete. It has a project; it has a teleology. So, that's present in all of
these moments, but--equally present--I want to get back to this sense of blankness. There is a
vagueness to this language that I think is quite calculated, and it relates, in Haze's case, to his
determination to not be converted to evil, but to nothing. When he's in the army, he says--he
decides--he can get rid of Jesus by converting not to evil, but to nothing, to believe in nothing.
So what O'Connor does, is she presents a sense of the world imbued with structure and meaning,
but a structure and meaning that looks essentially blank. And I think the task of the novel is to
fill that structure in.
The last thing I want to point out, in this passage from here to the end of the chapter, is the way
that Haze's senses are described. We already talked a little bit about his name and the occlusion
of sight. The trope of sight is obviously extremely important here. We have the blind preacher.
There are more things, which I won't reveal, that happen at the end of the novel to do with this. If
you haven't read, I won't give it away. But here, there are simpler examples: when the truck pulls
up in front of Haze and starts moving very slowly, "Haze started pounding his horn, and he had
hit it three times before he realized it didn't make any sound." He keeps doing this. When he
comes to the roadside sign, "Woe to the blasphemer and whore monger. Will hell swallow you
up?" it says "The pickup truck slowed even more, as if it were reading the sign, and Haze
pounded his empty horn. He beat on it and beat on it but it didn't make any sound." He doesn't at
first hear the horn fail to blow, and then later, when a truck pulls up behind him, he fails to hear a
horn that does blow:
He was looking at the sign, and he didn't hear the horn. An oil truck as long as a railroad car was
behind him. In a second, a red, square face was at his car window. It watched the back of his
neck and hat for a minute, and then a hand came in and sat on his shoulder. The driver's
expression and his hand stayed exactly the way they were, as if he didn't hear very well.
These two characters are as if there is a wall between them, a wall of foam. They can't hear each
other. They're insulated from understanding what the other is preoccupied with. In Haze's case,

he does this over and over and over again. And the most pitiful example of it is on 57. Poor
Enoch! I feel so bad for him in this passage. Enoch is trying to hang out with Haze. This is on the
bottom of 56, probably your 52. Haze is trying to get rid of Enoch:
"Listen," Haze said roughly, "I got business of my own. I seen all of you I want." He began
walking very fast. Enoch kept skipping steps to keep up. "I been here two months," he said, "and
I don't know nobody. People ain't friendly here. I got me a room and there ain't never nobody in
it but me. My daddy said I had to come. I would never have come but he made me. I think I seen
you somewheres before. You ain't from Stockwell, are you?" "No." "Melsey?" "No." "Sawmill
set there- set up there once," Enoch said. "Looked like you had kind of a familiar face." They
walked on without saying anything until they got to the main street again. It was almost deserted.
"Goodbye," Haze said. "I'm going thisaway too," Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the left there
was a movie house where the electric bill was being changed. "[And then I'm going to skip
down.] "My daddy made me come," he said in a cracked voice. Haze looked at him and saw he
was crying, his face seamed and wet and a purple-pink color. "I ain't but 18 years old," he cried,
"and he made me come and I don't know nobody. Nobody here'll have nothin' to do with nobody
else. They ain't friendly. He done gone off with a woman and made me come but she ain't going
to stay for long."
Okay, and so on and so on. Poor Enoch! Does Haze care? No; not at all. "Haze looked straight
ahead, with his face set." Poor Enoch. Nothing can penetrate Haze's imperviousness to other
human beings. If Haze is busy looking at something, what he's looking at is manifestly not the
person in front of him. He can't hear major elements of the soundscape: the truck horn behind
him. He can't hear his own horn, whether it blows or not. He can't hear the voices of other
people. What he sees is a mystery. As Sabbath Lily says, "his eyes, they don't look like they see
what he's looking at." What is he looking at, then? I think we're meant to understand that he is so
focused on the question of redemption that he fails to see anything else; he fails to see anyone
else in his preoccupation with that problem.
Now I want to switch gears, just for the last couple minutes, and ask you: what do you see when
you read this novel? And I'm going to suggest to you something to think about. I see body parts.
When I read this novel, I see a lot of dismembered body parts. What do I mean by that? Well,
let's take a look. On page 32(try 28; see if you can find it), this is Haze coming to the house of
Leora Watts: "He went up to the front porch and put his eye to a convenient crack in the shade
and found himself looking directly at a large, white knee." And what's she doing? She's cutting
her toenails. "Mrs. Watts was sitting alone in a white iron bed cutting her toenails with a large
pair of scissors. She was a big woman with very yellow hair and white skin that glistened with a
greasy preparation. She had on a pink nightgown that would have better fit a smaller figure."
That large, white knee: the way this narration allows us to see through Haze's eyes begins to take
the whole body apart, so what he sees is not Mrs. Watts; he sees a large, white knee. We saw a
version of this also in the passage I was reading just before, where "a hand" comes in the
window and rests--"lands"--on Haze's shoulder. "A square, red face." And then these things,
these body parts, are then referred to with the pronoun "it"; "it," the hand, did this or that. Take a
look at page 18. This is Mrs. Hitchcock in the train; it's Haze bumping into Mrs. Hitchcock:
Going around the corner, he ran in to something heavy and pink. It gasped and muttered,
"Clumsy." It was Mrs. Hitchcock in a pink wrapper with her hair in knots around her head. She
looked at him with her eyes squinted nearly shut. The knobs framed her face like dark toadstools.
She tried to get past him, and he tried to let her, but they were both moving the same way each
time. Her face became purplish except for little, white marks over it that didn't heat up.

It's that she's rotting; there is mushrooms growing on her, figurative mushrooms growing on her
head. Her face is purple except for the white marks. The white marks are little scars, acne scars
perhaps. She is a sort of mass of flesh. As Mrs. Watts, that pink wrapper--actually two pink
wrappers, too tight on their bodies--suggest the excess of their corporeality, they"re big hunks of
flesh.
On 62, we get an account of Haze's childhood sin. He goes into the freak show at the fair, and he
joins the crowd where his father also is. "They were looking down into a lowered place, where
something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he
thought it was a skinned animal, and then he saw it was a woman." On 15 (I'm going to skip back
to the train; I'm just going to rack these up for you, and then we'll think about them), this is Haze
waiting to be seated in the dining car of the train:
Haze hesitated and saw the hand jerk again [the hand of the steward]. He lurched up the aisle,
falling against two tables on the way and getting his hand wet in somebody's coffee. The steward
placed him with three youngish women dressed like parrots. Their hands were resting on the
table, red speared at the tips. He sat and looked in front of him--[I'm skipping down a little bit],
glum and intense, at the neck of the woman across from him. At intervals her hand holding the
cigarette would pass the spot on her neck. It would go out of his sight, and then it would pass
again going back down to the table.
What do we make of these odd moments of description? Why all these body parts hanging
around? Why this sense of disgusting, excessive body matter? It's often women who appear in
this guise, but it's not always women. What I want to suggest to you is that, when we actually
look at the sentences on the page, when we look at the words that O'Connor chose in the
moments of the narration, we see something that becomes more complicated than the "Flannery
O'Connor is a Catholic writer"; "Haze Motes is a Christian malgr lui." That's a kind of focus. If
we think about this, analogize it to how Haze looks, it's a way of looking at O'Connor's fiction
that sees nothing but the theology behind it, that sees nothing but the Christian iconography. And
I want to ask: what is it that we don't see, when that's all we see? What do we miss?
I've begun to point out a few things that I think we miss: the fragmentation of bodies. Why are
bodies consistently fragmented--not just here--everywhere in O'Connor's fiction? People are
always losing a wooden leg and having parts of their limbs fall off. It's very hard to keep a body
together in O'Connor, hard to keep body and soulwell, I won't get in to that. So why is that?
What kind of methodology for reading would allow us to have something to say about that? Is it
something we need to have something to say about? Is it in the same register of importance in
our reading as some of these more theological, structural considerations that have been offered to
us in her letters, in her preface, and in the very overt symbology of the landscape scenes, of these
other scenes that I was reading to you today, in that image of the unhoused believer trying to find
a home in an alien world?
So, in my next lecture, what I'm going to do is pretty much contradict most of what I said today.
I'm going to set aside theology as the lens through which I read. And, if you felt you were
convinced by my reading of that iconography in these passages, then you want to think about
why that's convincing. You want to think about how much attention and primacy we should give
to an author's statements about what her work mean--as readers. Maybe you want to say, "You
can't argue with that; we have to accept that. That's really what the writer intends to say, and
that's what we should see, and that's what we should strive to understand." Well, I'm going to
offer you two different ways--actually more like three different ways--to look at the novel in the
second lecture. So, finish the novel for next Wednesday, and we will go from there.

[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 4 Transcript
January 23, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: I started last time, and actually my whole lecture existed under the
rubric of, this quotation from Sabbath Lily Hawks, and I'm just going to read it to you again. "I
like his eyes. They don't look like they see what he's looking at, but they keep on looking." So,
last time I suggested that what O'Connor asks us to see in her fiction is a theological structure
and a religious message. What I started to suggest at the end of class--as I gave you the catalog
of body parts lying around the text--what I began to suggest is, that if we actually see what we're
looking at rather than, like Haze, not seeing what we're looking at, we begin to see something
that's harder to assimilate to that neat theology that O'Connor's letters and essays point us
towards. One kind of question, then, I was raising is: what context do you use to read any novel?
And today I'm going to suggest two--actually, well, yes--two additional contexts that we can look
to, to read the novel. And I will let you know what those are when they come, but be looking for
that.
So, two hundred people show up to see Asa Hawks blind himself. That's what we're told. That's
what the newspaper clipping tells us. We show up to see O'Connor take her characters apart. I
began that catalog of body parts. Today I'm going to extend and embellish the catalog of
suffering and distortion that we see in this novel. And, just to remind you of that catalog, I just
want to look at page 43 in your edition, 47 in mine. I noted that a lot of the body parts that we
see in her prose are parts of women's bodies. Well, the sense of the body as grotesque goes
beyond just dismemberment. There's a general ugliness of women that pertains in the novel. And
if you look on that page, about in the middle, this is Enoch describing his foster mother: "'This
woman was hard to get along with. She wasn't old. I reckon she was 40 year old, but she sho was
ugly. She had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling
over her skull.'" Okay. It's funny a little bit. It's a picturesque comparison, hair and gravy, but it
emphasizes that ugliness. Now, if you look on page 80 (84 in my edition), this is a woman
climbing out of the swimming pool. Remember when Haze and Enoch are in the middle of the
park at the swimming pool. Enoch's hiding in the bushes, spying on the women. Here's one
climbing out of the pool:
First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like bathing cap coming down
almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands, until
a large foot and leg came up from behind her, and another on the other side, and she was out,
squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself and stamped in the water
dripping off of her.
She comports herself like a dog in this scene. Okay. So she shakes-- as if she had fur to shake-but register the weirdness of this sentence: "Then she rose on her hands, until a large foot and leg
came up from behind her." It's as if they're sneaking up behind her. It's as if they're separate from
her, not part of her body at all. So, even when you see O'Connor describing these emergence of a
body from the water--a moment when you'd think the whole body would be most on view, or
most pertinent to describe-- what you have is almost a distortion of our senses, a distortion of
vision, so that we see--even in a woman climbing out of the water--her legs, her feet, as
dismembered from the rest of her body.

There is a critic at the University of Michigan. Her name is Patricia Yaeger. She wrote a very
compelling argument about O'Connor's fiction--not about Wise Blood in particular, but about her
stories. And in that essay she argues that O'Connor's grotesqueness, especially the grotesqueness
of the women figures in her novels, is all wrapped up with the culture of southern womanhood.
It's a culture of beauty that requires all kinds of grooming practices to form and shape the body
in such a way that it can appear socially in a decorous way. So, Yaeger argues that what we see in
scenes like this is the registration of the violence of those practices of beauty. So she does not let
these things sit in the text to be assimilated to a theological structure, but she brings them out.
And by reading things like contemporaneous autobiographies from southern women that she's
chosen from the canon, and just accounts of what was required of women (etiquette and so on),
she weaves a reading of passages like this into that kind of context to suggest that O'Connor's
vision of violence has more to do with being a woman in the South than it does with the stated
religious concerns that O'Connor talks about in her letters.
Now, remember, as I mentioned, O'Connor suffered from lupus, and she was disfigured by this
disease. Especially, she was on crutches for a long time, and for periods of time could not walk at
all. Her legs would swell up. There's a lot of imagery of swelling, of distortion and distention of
the body that some critics point to her biography to explain. They look at her experience of her
own body and, when you think about Yaeger's argument--that kind of distortion of the body in
the context of a social culture that really emphasizes the control of a woman's body--then you
begin to see the power of the tension that we can read into moments like this. But I would
suggest, and actually Yaeger suggests this too, that the violence of southern culture goes way
beyond just the violence of the culture of femininity, the culture of the southern woman. And so,
let's look a little bit and extend the catalog.
Another category of violence we have is murdered children, murdered and also just generally
neglected or abandoned children. Enoch, if you'll recall, was traded by his father off to the Bible
woman with the gravy hair; so that bespeaks the pain. And last time I read you a passage where
Enoch begins to tell that story in this very pitiful way, getting no sympathy from Haze. So,
clearly he feels the abandonment from his father. If you look at page 120 in your edition (122 if
anyone has mine), this is a little story that Sabbath Lily tells to Haze while they are supposedly
seducing each other. (Don't try this on your next date; I don't think it works very well.) So this
was her story:
"There was this child once," she said, turning over on her stomach, "that nobody cared if it lived
or died. Its kin sent it around from one to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was
a very evil woman, and she couldn't stand to have it around because the least good thing made
her break out in these welps. She would get all itchy and swole. Even her eyes would itch her
and swell up and there wasn't nothing she could do but run up and down the road shaking her
hands and cursing, and it was twicet as bad when this child was there. So she kept the child
locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell fire swole and burning, and it told her
everything it seen, and she got so swole until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well
rope around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck. Would you guess me to be
fifteen year old?" she asked [seductively].
Okay. Yes, very romantic story Sabbath tells to our friend Haze. These images of babies
abandoned: here it's called an "it." Children are often called "it" in O'Connor's fiction. Especially,
I would note, if they are female children, they're normally called "it." Lily herself is a child who
is completely unloved by her father. Her father just wants to get rid of her and is willing to
collude with her to try to make Haze take her off his hands. And remember the story of her
naming. Her mother gave birth to her on a Sunday and right after she was born gave her the
name Sabbath, then turned on her side and died. So poor Lily is also an orphan, at least in the

emotional sense, if not in actual reality. Her father, of course, had run off from her mother right
after she had gotten pregnant, and then I suppose he came back. So, children are deeply abused
and neglected.
What else do we have? On 231, just to add to this catalog--we have murdered, abandoned,
neglected children--we also have police brutality. (231. Now, let me see. I may not have gotten
the right page number for you guys for this one.) This is right when Haze has been found in the
ditch by the two policemen, and maybe you recall it. Haze asks whether it's day or night. This is
the bottom of 230:
"It's day," the thinner one, the cop, said, looking at the sky. "We got to take you back to pay your
rent." "I want to go on where I'm going," the blind man said. "You got to pay your rent first," the
policeman said, "'ever bit of it." The other, perceiving that he was conscious, hit him over the
head with his new billy. "We don't want to have no trouble with him," he said. "You take his
feet." He died in the squad car, but they didn't notice, and took him on to the landlady's. She had
put him in her bed, and when she had pushed them out the door, she locked it behind them and
drew up a straight chair and sat down close to his face where she could talk to him.
Here this image of a man--obviously an indigent found on the road and then gratuitously abused
by the police--echoes the earlier moment when the policeman pushes his car off the road and
down the hill. These are instances where police are using their power utterly on their own
authority, with seemingly no checks, with excess force. Remember again: this is the South. We
all know that these kinds of violence, official violence, were part and parcel of southern culture
toward African Americans. What I think O'Connor is doing here is taking some of that reality
and injecting it into Haze's narrative. So, these are the kinds of images that the Civil Rights
movement really brought to light. Here we see them in relation to Haze.
But overt racism is there, too, and if you look on page 67 in your book--and this is on 71 in
mine--you will see that O'Connor does not hesitate to use the word "nigger" in the dialog of her
characters. Now, the narrative voice does not use that word, but here it is on the bottom of 71.
Her characters are perhaps typical poor southerners:
"Well, what do you want to pay for it?" the man asks. [This is Haze buying his Essex.] "I
wouldn't trade me a Chrysler for an Essex like that. That car yonder ain't been built by a bunch of
niggers. All the niggers are living in Detroit now putting cars together," he said, making
conversation. "I was up there a while myself and seen. I come home."
She's invoking, in a very casual way, the southern racism of the poorer white working class. This
is just part of her representation of the place, part of her representation of these characters. It's a
kind of realism, of course. Nevertheless, there it is in front of us, and again I call you back to that
quotation. What are we going to see when we look at the fiction? Do we see what's in front of
us? So, this is one of the things that O'Connor puts in front of us. On page 174--Again, check and
see if this is the same in your edition. Generally, annoyingly, it's sometimes four pages'
difference earlier; sometimes it's two. So I tried to get them all, but I think I didn't look this one
up; this is Enoch stealing the new Jesus:
He had darkened his face and hands with brown shoe polish, so that if he were seen in the act, he
would be taken for a colored person. Then he had sneaked into the museum while the guard was
asleep and had broken the glass case with a wrench he borrowed from his landlady. Then,
shaking and sweating, he had lifted the shriveled man out and thrust him in a paper sack, and had
crept out again past the guard who was still asleep. He realized as soon as he got out of the
museum that, since no one had seen him to think he was a colored boy, he would be suspected

immediately and would have to disguise himself. That was why he had on the black beard and
dark glasses.
Okay. So, there's a certain sense of humor here. So, Enoch goes in black face to commit the
crime, so that if he's seen he won't be taken for white, but then he realizes a black person--just by
definition--is suspicious. So he has to now disguise himself from being a black person. This is
partly Enoch's sort of craziness, but the joke relies on the fact of racial profiling. It relies on the
fact that it's very plausible to think that at this moment in the South to walk down the street as a
black person, to drive a car as a black person, would be a risky endeavor in some places in the
city. So, it's a joke, but it's a joke that rests on a very dark reality.
So, what you have, then, is a set of things that are put before us, that we are asked, in a
way, not to respond to. Let's look at one more example. This is on page 159. This is a silly
example. This is when Hoover Shoates--and note in connection with my lecture last time; I
talked to you about pigs, and why there are pigs all over a landscape--well, Hoover Shoates: a
shoat is a little pig, so she's continuing that metaphor with his name, or that trope with his name.
This is Haze being approached by Hoover Shoates:
"My name is Hoover Shoates," the man with his head in the door growled. "I know when I first
seen you that you wasn't nothin' but a crackpot." Haze opened the door enough to be able to slam
it. Hoover Shoates got his head out of the way but not his thumb. A howl arose that would have
rended almost any heart. Haze opened the door and released the thumb and then slammed the
door again.
"A howl arose that would rend almost any heart." What you want to ask about all these things
that I'm putting in front of you is, "Are these supposed to rend our hearts?" I don't think we're
meant to feel much for Hoover Shoates here. He is a figure of critique. He's a figure of satire.
He's the charlatan preacher. We're certainly not meant to identify with him or to sympathize with
him, but here you can't help but thinking about someone getting their thumb smashed in a door.
And then it gets more intense of course on page 206(and that's 204 in this edition), when Haze
commits murder. So here we have the murder scene:
"Take off that suit," Haze shouted and started the car forward after him. Solace began to lope
down the road taking off his coat as he went. "Take it all off," Haze yelled with his face close to
the windshield. The prophet began to run in earnest. He tore off his shirt and unbuckled his belt
and ran out of his trousers. He began grabbing for his feet as if he would take off his shoes, too,
but before he could get at them the Essex knocked him flat and ran over him. Haze drove about
twenty feet and stopped the car and then began to back it. He backed it over the body and then
stopped and got out. The Essex stood half over the other prophet as if it were pleased to guard
what it had finally brought down. The man didn't look so much like Haze lying on the ground on
his face without his hat or suit on. A lot of blood was coming out of him and forming a puddle
around his head. He was motionless, all but for one finger that moved up and down in front of
his face as if he were marking time with it. Haze poked his toe in his side, and he wheezed for a
second and then was quiet. "Two things I can't stand," Haze said, "a man that ain't true, and one
that mocks what is. You shouldn't ever have tampered with me if you didn't want what you got."
The man was trying to say something, but he was only wheezing. Haze squatted down by his
face to listen. "I give my mother a lot of trouble," he said through a kind of bubbling in his
throat, "'never giv'er no rest, stole theter car, never told the truth to my daddy or give Henry
what, never give--" "You shut up," Haze said, leaning his head closer to hear the confession.
"Told where his still was and got five dollars for it," the man gasped. "You shut up now," Haze
said. "Jesus," the man said. "Shut up, now, like I told you," Haze said. "Jesus hep me," the man
wheezed. Haze gave him a hard slap on the back and he was quiet.

How many of you when you read that felt like a character who mattered to you had died? Just a
few; you guys are exceptionally, exceptionally sympathetic. I commend you. It's hard to feel too
much for this prophet, and I would argue that his confession at the end is part of what makes it
quite difficult. It's such a, kind of, trivial set of things that he begins to recite, or, at least, he
recites them in such a cliched way: "I gave my mother trouble. I was a bad boy. I took some
money to tell where the still was." These are such, sort of, clichd southernisms that you start to
see this character as a caricature. He is very hard to see as a human being. And yet, I would
contend that the part about the Essex actually running over him is quite compelling. At least I
feel it when I read it. In a more abstract sense, I feel the violence of it when I read those
passages.
So, there is a sense in which you have to ask: Is this meant to rend our hearts? If Hoover
Shoates's thumb in the door doesn't quite do it, does this do it? Does southern racism do it? Does
the dismemberment of women do it? What is the point of putting these on the page? And, if you
think about the way some bodies literally explode, think of the new Jesus--remember when Haze
takes that little, shriveled body from Lily and throws it against the wall, the head pops, and out
comes dust and trash. If bodies are exploding here, why are we not asked to care? And, if we
aren't asked to care, what is it that we're asked to do, or to think, in response to these things?
Now, Patricia Yaeger, in her argument, rejects what has typically been offered up as a way to
account for these things, and that's the religious reading. She says, to dismiss that violence into
an old and comfortable theology is simply not to see it, not really to see it, not to notice that
O'Connor put it there in such a sharp and compelling form.
I want to change tack for a minute, and now I'm going to veer into that second kind of context
that I said I was going to talk about today. There is something else I think we're meant to see that
is neither theology nor southern context, and I want to show you that now by looking at chapter
7; it starts on 115 in your book (117 in this edition). I just want to read the opening. I'm going to
treat this chapter as a sort of microcosm of the book, with respect to its craft. Let's look at how
this opens: "The next afternoon when he got his car back, he drove it out into the country to see
how well it worked on the open road. The sky was just a little lighter blue than his suit, clear and
even with only one cloud in it, a large, blinding white one with curls and a beard." Notice that
image of the cloud, the blinding white cloud. It's very hard not to see it as a symbol. What kind
of symbol is it? Well, it's a God symbol. It's even got that typical children's book iconography of
the curls and the white beard. Okay. So this is like your children's book representation of the
Christian God, and there it is as a blinding white cloud. You wouldn't even need the curls and the
beard if you just had the blinding and the white. And, of course, as we go on, as I'll show you,
the curls and the beard are pared away, and you're left more with that blinding whiteness.
So, the blinding white cloud begins this chapter. And what happens of course thereafter, as you'll
remember, is that Lily pops up from the back seat: "Hi." He didn't know that she was there. And
she's got a handful of dandelions, and she's painted her mouth red with lipstick, and she's trying
to seduce him. And he had, in fact, given her this little sort of seductive note earlier suggesting
that he wanted to seduce her, too. And he still has in his mind that he should do this, and his
point is to do it so that he will prove that he needs no redemption and that there is no sin. The
problem here is that Lily is interested in the seduction precisely because she sees it as a kind of
sin. So, if the two enter into this seduction, they do so agreeing on the same act, but completely
diametrically opposed on its theological meaning or its metaphysical meaning.
And so, what you'll notice in this chapter is an extended example--in one of the only extended
conversations of the book--of that phenomenon I talked about last time, where the characters just
don't seem to register the existence of the other person at all. So Haze, as I argued last time, is
kind of insulated. Even his senses are insulated. He can't hear things. He doesn't see what's in

front of him. He doesn't seem to be in his context physically at all. He doesn't seem to register
the pain of other persons. Sometimes, he doesn't even seem to register the existence of other
persons. Well, this is an example--this conversation--of completely missed signals between the
two of them. Sabbath Lily tells the story of wrestling with her identity as a bastard, and on 119
you get her account of her writing to the advice columnist Mary Brittle about the problem of
being a bastard and what kind of sexual play is appropriate for a bastard, given the fact that the
Bible says a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. So she's trying to figure out, really,
whether she should sleep with someone, because what does she have to lose? She can't get in to
heaven anyway. So she says:
"Dear Mary: I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know.
But I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not? I shall
not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway so I don't see what difference it makes.'"
And then she writes back, Mary Brittle:
"Dear Sabbath: Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to
the modern world. Perhaps you ought to reexamine your religious values to see if they meet your
needs in life. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living, if you put it in the
proper perspective and do not let it--[I think this is a misprint. Do you have "warf" there? I think
it's "warp," "warp you."] Read some books on ethical culture."
Clearly, O'Connor is offering us Mary Brittle as the butt of her critique, the shallow modern
thinking of the "enlightened"--psychologically and ethically--modern person. Sabbath in this
chapter is an odd Christ figure. She is a Christ figure. Remember how she hides and skips from
tree to tree in this scene, when she's teasing Haze, towards the end of it. Well, that tree is also the
image of the cross that is part of Christian tradition. There are lots of hymns that talk about the
tree as the cross, or the cross as the tree, for example. But it's the figure, the ragged figure that
moves from tree to tree in the back of Haze's mind, that's the Christ that won't let him get away.
So Lily actually embodies that Christ-like figure.
So, for all her impurity, O'Connor presents her in contrast to Mary Brittle as understanding
something fundamental about the world, and what's important in the world that much more
plausible people don't understand. So, this is a moment when Sabbath tempts Haze back to
belief, and Haze's meditation on, or his wrestling with, the question in this chapter of whether a
bastard can be in the Church without Christ. And he comes to that point where he says, "No. A
bastard can't be part of the Church without Christ because the word 'bastard' would just simply
not mean anything, so you can't say that." And it takes him a long time to wrestle with this, as
Sabbath Lily talks to him, and he comes to this moment. And so, when he comes to that
conclusion, he also rejects her advances. It's coming to that conclusion that so preoccupies him
that he rejects her advances. Sabbath, if she had been able to seduce him--I want to suggest;
O'Connor, I think, is suggesting--would have drawn him back into the realm of belief.
What leads Haze on through this scene is that blinding white cloud. Here it is as they decide
whether to turn off the road and enter the field where Sabbath will try to complete this seduction:
The blinding white cloud was a little ahead of them, moving to the left. "Why don't you turn
down that dirt road?" she asked. The highway forked off on to a clay road and he turned on to it.
It was hilly and shady and the country showed to advantage on either side. One side was dense
honeysuckle. The other was open and slanted down to a telescoped view of the city. The white
cloud was directly in front of them.

So, here the city is at a distance. We're in a pastoral space, a beautiful space, and this is all sort of
under the guidance of this white cloud, this blinding white cloud. And of course, I don't have to
say to you, I'm sure, "Blinding white cloud? Why is this the blinding white cloud?" Well, this is
all about blinding, this book. It's about Asa's failed blinding of himself for Christ, and it's about,
in the end, finally, Haze's successful blinding: a kind of blinding that, I would argue, we're meant
to understand as a final clarity of vision, that to be blind is to see properly.
So, the blinding white cloud has this clichd God imagery--the curls and beard--in the beginning.
It takes on this leading aspect in the middle of the chapter, and then, if you look at the end, this is
at the very end of the chapter, a few pages on. This is after the man from the filling station has
given Haze some gas and not charged him for it, a very unusual act of kindness in this novel.
Haze drove on, leaving the man who has helped him: "The blinding white cloud had turned into
a bird with long, thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction." There's a perfect
circularity to this symbolism. It's at the beginning; it changes in the middle, and arrives at the
end. By the end it has changed from the clichd image of the Christian God to a less farcically
clichd image of the Holy Spirit: the bird ascending, the white bird. It's moving in the opposite
direction, suggesting that Haze in this scene has missed his chance. It was presiding over
Sabbath Lily's attempts to seduce, and he was so absorbed in the question of whether a bastard
could be in the Church without Christ that he doesn't follow her into the sin that would, in fact,
be the catalyst for his redemption. And so, the cloud departs at the end.
I have to say: this is incredibly heavy handed. If we think about the religious reading, and think
about religious symbolism, this is hardly innovative. And I would suggest to you that
O'Connorwell, I don't know. Did O'Connor know that it was heavy handed? It don't know.
What is true about O'Connor is that she was trained to write stories like this. Flannery
O'Connor--and this is, again, that context coming in--Flannery O'Connor was a student at the
Iowa Writers Workshop, a very prestigious writing program. Even then, it was a very prestigious
writing program. There is a peculiarity for writing in the second half of the twentieth century,
and here I'm drawing on another critic, from UCLA; his name is Mark McGurl. He has argued
that what is historically novel about this period is that writers have consistently been located in
universities. They have been trained at universities; they have taught at universities; they have
gone to creative writing programs embedded within universities; they have held visiting
positions; they've done readings; and they have written books whose primary readership is
around a seminar table or in a lecture hall like this.
His argument is that a kind of formal structure, characterized by the principle of unity, a formal
structure that was (in that simplified version) at the very heart of the most powerful critical
movement of the early twentieth century, and that is the New Criticism. The New Criticism is a
way of reading that has its roots in high modernism, and it emphasizes the writer's--usually the
poet's--ability to create a beautiful, whole, consistent, internally structured literary object that
stands outside of history in a certain way, that is autonomous. And so, this view of the artwork-probably you have experienced it if you've taken other English classes, and in fact I've been
producing it for you in my readings--this mode of reading looks for those tropes that unify a
work. It looks for that circularity that I've described in this little chapter, tracks the symbols.
There's more to it than that. It also looks for ambiguity. O'Connor says about her symbols that
they should "keep on deepening," that they should never be reduced to a simple equation, X
equals Y, cloud equals God, that they should have a sense of mystery about them. Well, this was
part and parcel of what a New Critical reading practice would look like, and it's still extremely
powerful in our classrooms. We do a lot of close readings. Now, we put our close readings to
different kinds of uses, and Mark McGurl has done readings of lots of different novelists that
reveal (or, his argument is that they reveal) how the writing program and its tenets have shaped

contemporary fiction in a profound way. The implications of this are large and important for how
we understand the period.
So what you see in O'Connor is, to borrow a phrase from McGurl's title of his essay on this,
"Flannery O'Connor, B.A., M.F.A.," the product of a mid-century American institution, the
writing program. I would suggest -- and this is the third kind of context I want to give you today
-- that the three I've given you--O'Connor's letters, her theological commitments, southern
context, southern social context, the New Critical writing program, the institutionalization of
modernism--these things are not in fact separable from one another. Because in my own work,
I'm writing a book on religion and fiction since 1960; now, this is a little bit before this period.
But what I have discovered--what has really been known for a long time, but nobody's really
made much of it--is that the New Criticism is deeply religious in and of itself. New Critical
writers of theory: many of them were, in fact, Catholic, and many of them were southern. There
are social and religious elements that infuse their literary theory, so that to argue that the poem is
this unified whole, and that what you should do with the poem is show its wholeness-- read it in
order to see its wholeness, see how it embodies a formal beauty, a formal order--this looks very
much like the kind of metaphysical order that I was drawing out of the Catholic version of what
O'Connor's doing in her novels, her version of what she's doing in the novels, where you have
that transcendent sky, and there is this sense of an ordering that seeps down in to the material
world, that moment when Haze thinks that he's somehow seeing broken-off pieces of something
that once happened to him. There is this latent order everywhere. And, for O'Connor, it's part of
this moral religious order, this redemptive order, that Catholicism is for her.
The New Criticism sits in a kind of deep analogy to that way of thinking about religion. That's
why, I think, O'Connor found it so comfortable to learn and practice the New Critical tenets of
formal construction of the literary. That's why she produced story after story after story that can
be read in these formal ways with these symbols that accrue meaning and deepen and change
over the course of the novel or the story. So her commitment to the New Criticism: McGurl
argues that O'Connor found the New Criticism comfortable because Catholicism had taught her
to be obedient, that it was a matter of obedience to a formula that allowed her to produce what
she produced on the page. I would argue it differently: that there is something, in fact, religious
about the New Criticism that made it particularly comfortable for O'Connor to inhabit.
Now, I want to conclude by pointing you towards Lolita. Today the question of torturing your
own characters has come up. Yaeger calls it, with respect to O'Connor, an "aesthetics of torture."
I want you to think hard about whether this is a way of understanding Lolita when we read it. So,
have that in your mind, and think about the ways that violence is or is not presented to us
in Lolita, the way that we're asked either to attend to language or to see through it. Ask those
questions about whether we're being asked to identify with certain characters or not. How is the
distance between reader and character, between reader and what's on the page, how is that
mediated? How is that policed? How is that structured? So, think about that as you start to
read Lolita. I'm going to stop there.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 5 Transcript
January 28, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Last time I finished up my lectures on Wise Blood by trying to
draw together three different ways of reading the novel into one interpretative framework, and
what I ultimately argued was that the New Critical formal unity of the novel that is epitomized, I
think (in a somewhat, perhaps, heavy-handed way), in Chapter 7 of the novel--that's book-ended
by the symbol of the blinding white cloud--that it's that unity, in a sense, that replaces the bodily
unities that are always blown apart in O'Connor's fiction. And, in a certain way, what you see is a
fiction that is personified in that way, that it takes on the qualities and the values of the person,
and for O'Connor that means the person understood in a religious framework as something with
transcendent meaning and transcendent value and, indeed, a transcendent life.
There is a very different image of the personified word in Lolita, and I'm going to refer now to
an essay, a 1992 essay, by the British novelist Martin Amis. He compares the prose style
in Lolita with a muscle-bound man, a man whose body is bulked up purely for aesthetic reasons,
for only the purpose of looking a certain way, that the bodybuilder is not that person who's going
to go out and use their muscles to do some job. It is simply there to be looked at, to be oiled up
and presented and displayed. That's how Amos describes the prose style of Lolita. So, I want you
to keep that image in your mind. The question of the relationship between the person and the
aesthetic in Lolita is going to be at the heart of my overarching argument about the novel.
Today, you're not going to see much of that. What I want to do today--since we have three
lectures on Lolita--what I want to do today is simply to begin to open the text for you: to give
you some ways of reading it; to alert you to certain kinds of questions; to ask you some
overarching questions; and also to just get you thinking and into the texture of the novel. First, I
want to ask you though, what do you think of this so far? I just want to hear from you. What are
you responses? Who really hates this novel so far? Anybody? Yes. Okay. Why do you hate this
novel?
Student: I guess it's because of the fact that he's doing something that's really not good, and it
almost seems like he's trivializing it.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. What about it trivializes that crime?
Student: I guess it's just that there's no moral lens that we're looking at it through. It's just his
view of the world.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Okay. So, Humbert's lack of a moral vocabulary to
understand what he's doing makes it seems like it's trivialized. Okay. Other thoughts on this?
Who else is really put off by this subject matter? Even if you like the novel, who else is really
put off by this? Yes.
Student: I agree with her. It's disturbing how much we identify with Humbert, how we're made
to see the world through his eyes, and we kind of-- even I--grew to like him a lot. At least, the
way he's presented, he's a very likable character. And then, it's kind of like the things that he does
are kind of on the side, when you think about it in a very.The whole telling of the story is not
objective at all, and when you think of it in an objective sort of way, it's a completely different
story.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. So, you're suggestion is that what's so disturbing about this
is that we actually like this guy; we actually come to like Humbert. How many of you-- now, I
asked you this question about O'Connor's characters--would you like to sit down to dinner with
any of them? Would you like to sit down to dinner with Humbert? (And I would say this

knowing that all of us are outside the nymphet age range.) So, given that, who would like to sit
down with Humbert and why? Okay. Yes, you. Why?
Student: Well, simply because I would argue that Humbert in fact does have a moral vocabulary
and tells us how terrible the things he's doing are. And yet, you like him anyway, and I think
that's the power of the novel, and that's why I think he's such a [compelling] character.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Do you think that Humbert really believes that his actions
are terrible? Do you believe him when he says, "Oh, I was so ashamed. I was so awful." Do you
believe him?
Student: No.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh, you don't. Okay. All right. Does anyone believe him? Yes.
Student: Well, sometimes he brings up these classic figures that, he argues, would have the same
interest. He mentions Virgil and Dante, and it seems like the desperation of bringing up such
grand figures makes me think that he does have doubts.
Professor Amy Hungerford: About what he's doing. Uh huh. Uh huh. So, the authority of the
canon that he invokes to defend himself in fact suggests perhaps that he has some doubts? Yes.
Student: That's interesting. I took those same references the exact opposite way, 'cause I thought
that essentially he's referring to the temporality of our moral structure, and how it's just this
arbitrary code which our society has decided upon. And, at one point in time, he laments the end
of the old Latin world and the B.C. world, when people could have these child slaves.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, this evidence is very possible to see
in diametrically opposed ways, and you're certainly not the first two students that I've seen have
those two different reactions to the same thing. What else does this novel bring out in you: what
other thoughts, what other responses? Does anyone absolutely love this novel? Okay. Lots of
you. Good. Why? Who wants to tell me why? Yes.
Student: The beauty of the language and symmetry, the sentence structure, the word choice: I
guess going away from the theme, more of just the language.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Okay. The language, yeah, absolutely.
Student: Even more about the language: it's not just that it's beautiful. It sort of draws attention
to the power of words, because you've tried to ask us whether or not we find him sympathetic,
and I think in this book we're sort of reminded of how words can make us feel things and make
us believe things that are repugnant to us, and sort of mask--it sort of takes the mask off literature
and shows us the way we are convinced.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. "Takes the mask off literature." I actually want to change
that around, if I might, and play with that, because that's a really useful image for us: "takes the
mask off literature and reminds us how we come to be sympathetic or how we come to think
something." Think back to Richard Wright, who wants words to disappear, to be completely
transparent and to leave you just with your response. In a certain way, I would want to flip your
image around. It's as if Nabokov allows us to see the mask of literature, to actually see it there
palpably doing its work, so we can become self-aware of how we respond. But, how many of
you didn't experience it as understanding why you were having that response to Humbert, but

just having it? Were any of you sort of experiencing this more like Wright wants us to experience
literature, to just have the response? Anyone really seduced? Yes.
Student: Well, I found that, while I might have found the prose more or less relentlessit was
very difficult to escape into my own reaction, and I was more or less in his head.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes. Do we ever escape from his head? You're saying that
you don't- you didn't feel like you ever could, in the world of this prose. This is going to be an
important question for us as we think about what happens to Lolita over the course of the novel.
Do we ever escape from the subjectivity of Humbert? Is there any way to access the subjectivity
of Lolita herself? So, this is one question you want to ask yourself. And, if there are moments
when something like Nabokov's voice or point of view shades into Humbert's, what are those
moments, if you think there are some? What are the moments when that subjectivity, the sort of
prison of that subjectivity, wavers? Where do you see those? I'll leave that as a question for you.
Well, let me give you a little bit of background. It's very helpful for me, as I address you, to think
about what you're seeing in the text, and that helps me to think about what I want to say to you.
So, before I get in to that, let me just give you some background. Some of you probably know a
little bit about Nabokov's life. He was born in 1899, and his life, to me, is fascinating because he
was one of the last generation raised in the old aristocratic chateau life of Russia. And it wasn't
just a Russian aristocracy; it was really a very cosmopolitan European aristocracy. He lived in
the summers on a country estate outside St. Petersburg, in a beautiful chateau. And his uncle
owned the chateau down the road, and actually left it to him when he was a very young man. So,
he actually owned for a short time this huge chateau, and other relatives and friends lived in
estates surrounding theirs. It had huge parks as part of its land, where he first learned to hunt
butterflies and mount them. And he became a serious lepidopterist as he grew older, and was
very early in his life passionate about collecting and classifying butterflies. In the winters he
lived in the city in a beautiful town house in St. Petersburg, and he attended school only later in
his life. When he was young, as was the custom, he had tutors. So he had a French tutor who
lived with the family for a long time. He had Russian and English tutors that came in succession;
he had drawing masters and so on, to cover the range of education thought to be appropriate to a
young man of his station.
His father was a democrat in czarist Russia, and he was quite a reformer. At the time that the
Bolsheviks took over in 1919, there was a brief window of time prior to the family's flight. The
family left Russia in 1919. So, the revolution, I think, starts in 1917. And things are quite
complex in those early days, so there's more than one anti-czarist factor. And his father was a
democrat but not a Bolshevik; so, he was anti-czarist, but he was not a Bolshevik. His father
wrote for revolutionary newspapers, and he continued to write and publish a newspaper even as
an migr. He was assassinated in 1922 in Europe on account of his publishing activities.
Nabokov was very, very fond of his parents. He has these luminous, luminous essays about his
life as a child in this sort of perfectly intact aristocratic world, and in that picture his mother and
father loom very large and in a very fond light. Nearly invisible are his siblings. He had two
brothers and two sisters, and it's amazing, when you read his memoirs, how invisible they are.
This is one thing I find striking about those memoirs, but it's an interesting thing to ponder as we
think about Lolita. It's the image of a person who is profoundly--at least in his representation of
himself--profoundly occupied with what's going on in his own mind. His parents were very much
absent from his growing-up life. He spent a lot of time with his nannies and tutors and nurses
when he was younger. His parents would travel, and his father was often away in the city on
political business when they were in the country. So his parents loomed large: but not so much as
physical figures, people he would interact with in a daily sense, but almost as icons, or as figures
of the imagination, for him. The real people he was, sort of, with--certainly his brother, Sergey,

who he was educated with (his sisters were educated in a different way and were somewhat
younger than him)--even Sergey is sort of invisible to him.
He wrote literature in Russian, novels in Russian, when he was in Europe. And then, when he
moved to the United States, he began to write in English, and took America as his adopted land
and English as his adopted language. English was a native language, in a certain way, because
English was spoken in his household all the time, and he was trained by an English governess as
a young child. So, it's a language that goes deep in his upbringing. It's not really analogous--well,
I'm not going to get in to that--it's not analogous to, say, Conrad, who is Polish and learned
English. And you can see the marks in Conrad's fiction of his having learned English and then, it
comes across as a sort of clotted style in Conrad. Some of the difficulty of Conrad's style is the
difficulty of writing in this acquired language. Nabokov has none of that.
So, what I want to do now is, with that background in mind, I want to take this up and just open
up the first few pages. And I urge you not to neglect the foreword by John Ray Jr., so I hope you
read it, the little italicized foreword. And I want to focus especially on pages 4 and 5. Now, a
foreword is of course supposed to suggest how you should read the text that's coming. And so, if
we take it on in that role, let's see what we see. I'm going to read a little bit of this. This is on
page 4 and 5:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the real people
beyond the true story, a few details may be given, as received from Mr. Windmuller of Ramsdale,
who desires his identity suppressed, so that the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business
should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, Louise, is by now
a college sophomore. Mona Dahl is a student in Paris. Rita has recently married the proprietor of
a hotel in Florida. Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbed giving birth to a stillborn girl on
Christmas day in 1952 in Graystar, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. Vivian Darkbloom
has written a biography, My Cue, to be published shortly, and critics who have perused the
manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no
ghosts walk.
First, let me point you to this notation about Mrs. Richard F. Schiller. I'm not going to tell you
who that is, but I want you to figure it out. Okay? So make a note in your notebook. By the end
of the novel, I would like you to know who this is. Vivian Darkbloom: if you take those letters,
you can spell Vladimir Nabokov. Vivian Darkbloom is one of Nabokov's palindromic versions of
his name. He inserts these even in his autobiography, by the way. He attributes certain things to
Vivian Darkbloom and other kinds of characters of such names. So, here, you can't avoid the
sense that, even though this is attributed to John Ray, in fact there is some other voice here, and
it's a voice that can't help but drop the name of Vladimir Nabokov into the prose. So, right away,
in this moment of layered narratives, a framed narrative around another narrative, there is a sort
of instability in the layers. Where is Nabokov here? There is also the question of what kind of
reader we are that this preface brings up and sort of puts in front of us. Are we the kind of reader
who is interested in the real persons? Well, it gives the story that's to follow that sense of being
true, because it suggests its fictionality as a thin veneer and that the real is something that we can
know about. And I would suggest to you that we can connect this with Humbert's moment of
wondering what happens to the little girls whose images he is excited by. This is on page 21, the
beginning of chapter 6:
I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later in this wrought-iron world of crisscross cause and effect. Could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their
future? I had possessed her, and she never knew it. All right, but would it not tell sometime later?

Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was
and remains a source of great and terrible wonder.
Both Humbert and John Ray suggest that the tissue between the fictional, between the
imagination and the real, is very light: that it can be pierced somehow, that one can affect the
other. And I want to point you to a kind of language that also permeates between the preface and
the story proper. And this is on page 5; this is the middle paragraph:
This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and
lectures, namely that 'offensive' is frequently a synonym for 'unusual,' and a great work of art is,
of course, always original and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking
surprise. I have no intention to glorify HH. No doubt he is horrible. He is abject. He is a shining
example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery,
perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual
opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs
through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He
is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a
compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author.
Do you see that word "throbs"? "A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession."
"Throbs" is a word that Nabokov brings out over and over again, in multiple contexts, always
connected somehow with this novel. So, I'm going to ask you to read the afterword, "On a Book
Entitled Lolita." When you read that, you'll notice that the word "throbs" comes back. The first
impulse to write this novel is described as a throb. The throb is of course undeniably associated
with Humbert's rising desire in that physical way, and there is that emotionalized version of that,
the throbbing heart of romantic clich. It comes back and forth in his memoirs too. In Speak,
Memory that word appears. It's interesting. As the essays move chronologically--they were
written over a period of time--as the essays that were written near Lolita come into the book, that
word appears, also, describing various things. It's as if that word really embodies the feel of this
novel, and so, like "Vivian Darkbloom," that word suggests the permeability--not just of fiction
and the real--but of these narrative layers. Where is Nabokov? And I think he's there in that
throb.
Now, I want to ask a question that we're going to need to think about, and addresses the response
of--actually--the two of you sitting up front here, when I was asking you how you responded to
it. Can we have a moral response to this novel? And what would that look like? Well, John Ray
asks us to, and I want to just read part of that language of morality that he uses. I'm going to start
on 4, and then I'm going to skip down to the bottom of 5:
Viewed simply as a novel, Lolita deals with situations and emotions that would remain
exasperatingly vague to the reader, had their expression been etiolated by means of platitudinous
evasions. True: not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work. Indeed, the robust
Philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish
array of four-letter words in a banal novel will be quite shocked by their absence here. If,
however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a
certain type of mind might call aphrodisiac [And then he makes reference to the court case in
which Ulysses was ruled not to be obscene in 1933], one would have to forego the publication
of Lolita altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of sensuous existence
of their own are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending
unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial
pornography makes the same claim. The learned may counter by asserting that HH's impassioned
confession is a tempest in a test tube, that at least 12% of American adult males (a conservative

estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann, verbal communication) enjoy yearly in one
way or another the special experience of HH that HH describes as such despair, that, had our
demented diarist gone in the fateful summer of 1947 to a competent psychopathologist, there
would have been no disaster, but then, neither would there have been this book.
In this part, he suggests the possibility of the tale ending in a moral tale, a moral apotheosis. But
that's grounded, also, or hedged around by the sense of psychiatry offering other ways of
understanding what we think of as deviance. But this is hard to take seriously for a number of
reasons, not least the Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann who is referred to here. It is, of course, Dr.
"White Blackman," and it's referring to the Kinsey Report, the famous Kinsey Report on the
sexual habits of Americans. It came out in the 1950s. Dr. Black Whiteman: it suggests that these
are matters of the heart that have been reduced to a black-and-white set of statistics, and you feel
the absurdity of that 12%, that number, appearing in that sentence right here. And I'm just going
to skip down to the bottom of 5 now:
As a case history, Lolita will become no doubt a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art it
transcends its expiatory aspects, and still more important to us than scientific significance and
literary worth is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader. For, in this
poignant personal study, there lurks a general lesson: the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the
panting maniac. These are not only vivid characters in a unique story. They warn us of dangerous
trends. They point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us--parents, social workers,
educators--apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a
better generation in a safer world.
Well, aren't those ringing words from John Ray? Nabokov ensures that the very idea of taking a
moral lesson from this novel is unavailable to us because it's already been ridiculed. He not only
makes us see the psychiatric evasion of morality as ridiculous, as banal, as reductive, reductive
to the black and white; he ensures, too, that the language of morality is the language of clich.
The status of clich in this novel is one with which we're going to have to struggle, and I want to
move in that direction, now, by turning to our first hearing of Humbert's voice. What can we say
about Humbert's style? If John Ray's style is full of certain kinds of clichs that we can classify
in the ways that I have just done, what about Humbert's style? Where does it come from, and
why is it so enchanting? So, let's just begin with that first chapter, the tiny chapter, Chapter 1.
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a
trip of three steps down the palate to tap at three on the teeth: Lo-li-ta." The first thing he does is
make us feel words in our bodies, and especially in the mouth and in the tongue, in that very
sensuous way. So, that's the first thing that his style does for us: it makes us align ourselves--in
the way that some of you were talking about earlier--not just to identify our minds with the point
of view of this particular person, this particular character, but actually to move your body, and to
feel something bodily that he wants you to feel, to share that sensuous experience with him. It's
just the first little temptation. He wants to draw us into the "special experience" that he
documents in his story:
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks.
She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always
Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did. Indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been
no Lolita at all had I not loved one summer a certain initial girlchild in a princedom by the sea.
Oh, when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can
always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit
number one is what the seraphs--the misinformed simple noble-winged seraphs--envied. Look at
this tangle of thorns.

I'm seduced. Are you? He's feeding us questions. This is another thing to notice. He's not just
making us experience Lolita's name the way he does; he's assuming that there are certain kinds
of questions that we will ask. "Did she have a precursor?" Why is this the first question that you
would ask? If someone was telling you this story, is that the first question you would ask? So did
she have a precursor? No, probably not. Okay. Why? Why does he want to plant this question
with us? Well, he's working towards something that he will also in some ways backhandedly
discredit. He's counting on us to analyze him in somewhat Freudian terms. So, even though he
will make a habit later on of playing with psychiatrists--staying at clinics extra weeks just to
bother the newcomers by giving them made-up dreams and primal scenes to read and interpret-even though he's going to do that, he's still manipulating us, because he knows how deeply those
kinds of exculpatory narratives run with his audience. So, she had a precursor. So what? Does
that make any difference? Does that make any difference to how we're to judge him? And we are
the judges: "ladies and gentlemen of the jury." We are, in a way, invited to judge, even though
he's begging us not to at every moment.
So, it's a choice on Nabokov's part to foreground the question of judgment from moment one,
and then for him to invoke multiple kinds of exculpatory narratives. He's planting them in there
for us to find. "Oh, when?" In childhood. By safely locating that precursor in his own childhood
when, as he says, he was her equal, where there was no crime, only a kind of infantile passion
that nobody would blame him for, he invites us to think of Humbert as somehow still retaining a
kind of innocent purity, that that passion itself is the innocent purity that flames at the heart of
childhood. Then we get these allusions, and if you have the annotated Lolita or if you already
know Poe, Annabel Lee is a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and "the princedom by the sea" is
a feature of it. And so, I'm going to read this to you, and there's a reason why I want to read the
whole thing. So, it'll just take a minute, but here we go. This is Annabel Lee:
It

many
and
many
a
year
In
a
kingdom
by
the
That
a
maiden
there
lived
whom
you
may
By
the
name
of
Annabel
And
this
maiden
she
lived
with
no
other
Than to love and be loved by me.

ago,
sea,
know
Lee;
thought

She

child,
sea,
love-Lee-Heaven

But

was

was
we

a
In

child
this
with
a

loved
I

With
a
love
Coveted her and me.

that

And

this

was
In
blew

The

angels,

Yes!

that

not
Went
was

and
I
was
a
kingdom
by
the
love
that
was
more
than
and
my
Annabel
the
winged
seraphs
of

the
this
A
wind
out
chilling
So
that
her
And
bore
To
shut
her
In this kingdom by the sea.

the

reason
that,
long
kingdom
by
the
of
a
cloud
by
my
Annabel
highborn
kinsman
her
away
from
up
in
a

half
so
envying
reason

happy
her
(as
all

in
and
men

ago,
sea,
night
Lee;
came
me,
sepulchre
heaven,
me:
know,

In
this
That
the
wind
came
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But

our

kingdom
out
of

by
a

the
cloud,

it
was
stronger
by
far
than
the
those
who
were
older
than
Of
many
far
wiser
than
And
neither
the
angels
in
heaven
Nor
the
demons
down
under
the
Can
ever
dissever
my
soul
from
the
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For

sea)
chilling

love
Of

love
we-we-above
sea,
soul

the

dreams
Lee;
eyes
Lee;
side
bride,
sea--

moon
never
beams,
without
bringing
me
Of
the
beautiful
Annabel
And
the
stars
never
rise
but
I
see
the
bright
Of
the
beautiful
Annabel
And
so,
all
the
night-tide,
I
lie
down
by
the
Of
my
darling,
my
darling,
my
life
and
my
In
her
sepulchre
there
by
the
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

So, that's the whole poem. Humbert is drawing on a nineteenth-century Romantic tradition that
still has a certain power. You can hear that incantatory voice of Poe's speaker in the poem making
this doomed love into something aesthetic, but it's also a kind of clich. If John Ray works with
the clichs of psychiatry and of social work and, in a way, of politics--progressive
politics--"bring up a better generation for the future"-- Humbert has truck with the clichs of the
literary. So, his is a vocabulary of very high-born clichs. It's interesting. When you read Speak,
Memory, Nabokov's autobiography, he talks about his own experiments with this kind of poetry
when he was young and especially when he was beginning to fall in love with girls that he would
meet around St. Petersburg. He represents them as overheated attempts at literature, as dripping
with a kind of excess, romantic excess, as essentially unable to do more than repeat a tradition.
What Humbert has found, and I guess Nabokov has given him, in the Poe, is not only that kind
of overheated Romantic poetic referent; he's also chosen, of course, someone who married a
very, very young bride. So, Poe, I think at the age of about twenty or twenty one, married his
fourteen-year-old cousin. So, for that reason Poe becomes a kind of model, and he's the model in
both ways: both as a pedophile and as someone who imagined himself and his young love fully
clothed in the language of romance. So, it's a kind of fairy tale. Now the fairy tale language that
is invoked here, "the princedom by the sea," is brought back for us vividly in the scene where
Humbert first sees Lolita. This is on page 39. So, he's walking through the house. The "Haze
woman" is giving him his tour of the house:
I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a
sudden burst of greenery. "The piazza," sang out my leader, and then without the least warning a
blue sea wave swelled under my heart, and from a mat in a pool of sun half naked, kneeling,
turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark sunglasses. It was
the same child, the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky, supple bare back, the same
chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape
eyes but not from the gaze of young memory the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day
and, as if I were the fairy tale nurse of some little princess lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy
rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds, I recognized the tiny, darkbrown mole on her side. With awe and delight, the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the

nurse drunk, I saw again her lovely in-drawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly
paused and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her
shorts that last mad, immortal day behind the Roches Rose. The twenty-five years I have lived
since then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished.
This is a remarkable passage to me. He occupies in this passage every subject position of the
fairy tale: the nurse, the hounds and the king. He's the nurse recognizing the beloved child. He's
the king after her, and the hounds really after her. At the same time, I think we feel the freshness
of this prose, and we feel the humor of it, the self-parody. So, even though he is counting on us
to be seduced by the romantic language, that incantatory trance of Annabel Lee, there is a certain
way in which it's refreshed for us, like when he says, "The twenty-five years I have lived since
then tapered to a palpitating point and vanished." That is not from the fairy tale. That's his own
voice.
One thing that Nabokov does--and I think this is related to the way words like "throb" and the
layers of fiction and reality, how these things permeate into different texts and different layers of
the story--he always mixes originality with clich. He mixes the bad with the good. He has a real
disdain for the black and the white, that sense of simplicity. And so, you're going to find--even at
moments where I think we're meant to understand Humbert's prose as overwrought, that musclebound man that Amis talks about--you're also going to find in those passages, while you're being
just brought to the sense of parody, just to the edge of what you can tolerate in that vein, you're
going to get a sharp sentence; you're going to get a sharp piece of very original prose style. This
is part of Nabokov's talent, is to manipulate you. This is another way of manipulating you, is to
make you see the clich and then to draw back from it to something that surprises you. So, this is
part of the strategy. And then watch what happens to the prose style and the difference in tone:
I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of
passionate recognition. In the course of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the
kneeling child, her eyes blinking over those stern, dark spectacles, the little Herr Doktor who
was to cure me of all my aches, while I passed by her in my adult disguise, a great, big,
handsome hunk of movieland manhood, the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail
of her bright beauty and these I checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later of
course she, this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype. All I
want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that "princedom by the sea"
in my tortured past.
And I think there's a reason why there are quotations around that princedom by the sea and why
it's Poe: a fatal consequence--not just of his early love for Annabel Lee--but a consequence of the
poetry. This is another kind of defense: "the poetry made me do it." It's the romance that's being
offered in the poetry that lends his life its course. So, here the rationales for his guilt, and our
forgiveness of it, begin to multiply.
Now, I want to draw back from just being immersed in those details of the text for a minute to
suggest to you that this question of morality is something that Nabokov deliberately courts.
When Nabokov was an exile in Europe, he spent a lot of time composing chess problems. These
are setups of pieces on the chess board that have particular solutions. And they're very complex,
and they have a kind of aesthetic form to them. And he would aim for certain kinds of elegance
in them. He never wanted to have an alternate solution. He always wanted to have a single kind
of solution. There are certain themes in chess that refer to different kinds of strategic movements
that he would bring out through these little arrangements, and he would spend inordinate
amounts of time organizing them. Let me read to you how he describes the action of setting one
of these things up:

It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between white and
black, but between the composer and the hypothetical solver. Just as in a first-rate work of
fiction, the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world. So that
a great part of the problem's value is due to the number of tries, delusive opening moves, false
scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray.
But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey
sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more
overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind: from the charting of dangerous seas, to the
writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set
himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with
the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients--rocks and carbon,
and blind throbbings.
Lolita is, I think, for Nabokov, a kind of chess problem. The chess problem is: how can Nabokov
make us identify with a pedophile? How can he produce, from these debased ingredients, what
Lionel Trilling called it--and you have this blurb on your back cover-- "the greatest love story of
our time"? That's a question for you: is it the greatest love story of our time? Was Lionel
Trilling--a great mid-century literary critic--was he seduced by Humbert? What would it mean to
be the greatest love story of our time? But certainly Nabokov has in mind the rhetoric of love
stories, the shape of love stories, and he's using those, with all the skill he can muster, to try to
make us enter in to the ecstasy that he describes at the heart of this kind of logical problem, the
setting up of this logical problem. So, in a way we are the solvers of this problem for him; we are
the other half that completes the aesthetic experience; we are there to participate in it with him.
And, on the handout that I have given you [I'm not going to read it now 'cause we're running out
of time; I'd like you to read that at home and I'm going to refer to it later] the world of
imagination and of the aesthetic is very much on the surface of this text. And you can see it in
lots of ways, too, just in that little bit of the first chapter that I read to you, that sense of fancy: "a
fancy prose style." So, you want to think of "fancy" not just as a sort of effeminate
ornamentation, but as that older-fashioned sense of the word: "the fancy," the imagination. So,
imagination is a privileged realm for Nabokov, and it is a realm that always has about it that
golden glow. And as you read Lolita, try to notice how much light imagery there is. For
Nabokov, sunlight, goldenness--all those midges, the golden midges, the downy golden hair on
Lolita's limbs, her tawny skin--all of that goldenness is very much of a piece with the world of
imagination. So, it's as if imagination makes everything glitter, and its color is that of the most
aesthetic of metals, of gold. So, keep these things in mind as you read, and in the next couple of
lectures you'll see more of the development of argument about the book, but I hope this gets you
started.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 6 Transcript
January 30, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Today it is my very great privilege and pleasure to introduce
Andrew Goldstone, a TF in this course. Andrew is going to provide for you today the only relief
you will get all term from my voice, so enjoy it! On the syllabus it says that I would be
presenting a lecture on censorship in this slot.

Andrew Goldstone: That's been suppressed, actually.

Professor Amy Hungerford: It's been suppressed. That's right.
So, I will talk about censorship somewhat in my last lecture on Lolita, and in preparation for
that, for next week I'd like you to finish the novel and then read his essay, "On a Novel
Entitled Lolita." It should be bound at the back of your book. Andrew is a fourth-year student in
the Ph.D. program in English, and he is writing a dissertation on the autonomy of the work of art
in modernism: on that as a problem, on that as a subject to be questioned and understood in a
deeper way than it has been up until now. It's a wonderful dissertation. It prepares him very well
for the lecture he's going to give you today. So: Andrew.
Andrew Goldstone: Thanks, Amy. So, on Monday we had three main themes that were used to
introduce this novel to you. First is the idea that the novel invites ethical questions but also holds
them off through parody in the same way that it uses the tropes of romanticism and romantic
love and parodies them. Secondly, we looked at Humbert's techniques of rhetorical seduction and
related that to a kind of intellectual problem that Nabokov sets himself of trying to make you
identify with this villainous character. And that leads to the third big question we looked at,
which is the place of Nabokov in this novel amidst the many layers, whether he crosses them or
confuses them. And that's the question that I'm mostly going to focus on today. I'm going to
bracket the ethical question, leave that for Monday's lecture, and the way I want to approach this
question of the style in the novel and the question of aestheticism is by placing Nabokov in the
context of literary modernism. So, I'm going to outline for you a little bit what I mean by that
term, and then I'm going to look at some specific predecessors that Nabokov refers to, and the
way he uses them. And then, at the very end, I'm going to try to connect that to Nabokov's exile
and the themes of exile.
So, let's start with an example. If you look on page 15, Humbert describes his adolescence, his
education:
At first I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqu talents do; but I was even more
manqu than that; a peculiar exhaustion--I am so oppressed, doctor--set in, and I switched to
English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. [Well,
that's why I'm in graduate school!] Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I
sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed
pastiches: [Humbert's poem]: "Fraulein von Kulp may turn her hand upon the door. / I will not
follow her. / Nor Fresca. / Nor / that Gull."
So, this is a spoof of a poem by T.S. Eliot which I've given you a piece of on your handout, so
let's look at that for a second, Eliot's 1920 poem, Gerontion. I'm just going to read a little bit of
this so that you have the flavor of the thing that Nabokov is burlesquing:
Here
I
am,
an
old
man
in
a
dry
Being
read
to
by
a
boy,
waiting
for
I
was
neither
at
the
hot
Nor
fought
in
the
warm
Nor
knee
deep
in
the
salt
marsh,
heaving
a
Bitten
by
flies,
My house is a decayed house.

month,
rain.
gates
rain
cutlass,
fought.

And the poem goes on, and this is the tone of a poem. It's a poem of crisis, a poem of a kind of
hollow speaker, someone who emerges as, more or less, buried alive. And this is supposed to

reflect both personal crisis and a historical crisis. And it comes to a moment where the possibility
of rejuvenation is described as devoured by a series of caricatures of Europeans, and that's this
second part on your handout, the people that devour rejuvenation. So:
By
Hakagawa,
bowing
among
the
By
Madame
de
Tornquist,
in
the
dark
Shifting
the
candles;
Frulein
von
Kulp--[There
she
Who
turned
in
the
hall,
one
hand
on
the
door.
Vacant
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An
old
Under a windy knob.

man

in

draughty

Titians;
room
is--]
shuttles
house

What in Eliot is crisis, in Nabokov is just a joke. In other words, these terrifying figures in Eliot-Fraulein von Kulp--are just some of Humbert's nymphets. A fraulein is just a young woman;
Fresca, another Eliot character: the fresh woman, right, a young woman again. So, I called this a
burlesque of Eliot's modernism. It takes something meant to be really serious, and turns it in to a
dirty joke. And that's the first way Nabokov will relate to literary modernism.
That's quite interesting, that he takes this approach, because Eliot in some ways comes very close
to the kind of ideas about art that Nabokov himself holds. Eliot says poems should be autotelic.
That means they should be an end unto themselves. Nabokov will say in that afterword you're
going to read, "the novel has as its only purpose to afford aesthetic bliss." So, the parody is of
something very close to home. And this poem that I've given you will come back on page 134.
You don't have to turn to that now, but you should think about that return. It's much more serious
and strange. Okay. So that's enough on Eliot.
Now I want to really clarify for you what I mean by this term "modernism." It just means the art
and literature of the early twentieth century, especially the "high art," although its roots are
definitely in the nineteenth century, especially the French nineteenth century, fiction and poetry.
In English it begins with the late novels of Henry James around 1900, in poetry with Eliot and
with Ezra Pound. In prose its main exemplars in English would be James Joyce, Virginia Woolf.
And you should know about this movement that it had very rapid success. So, although its first
centers are London and Paris, it's already taught as classic literature in American universities
before the war; it's already classic.
So, now, here's just a list for you: eight features of literary modernism that are all important to
Nabokov. Eight features of literary modernism: An obsession with the idea of art's autonomy, the
idea that art is its own law, that it responds to no other laws, that it has no other purpose than its
own purposes. In other words, art for art's sake. That's Eliot's autotelic poem. The only purpose
of the work of art is to afford aesthetic bliss. Second, a sense of crisis, a radical break in culture,
an overturning of conventional artistic forms that goes with a sense that civilization itself is
being overturned. Third, the idea that the paradigm of experience is artistic experience, that the
norms for everyone should be artistic norms of careful perception, deep reflection, that the idea
that culture itself is the saving, most important activity that people can engage in. Fourth--and
this goes along with that--a rejection of convention, especially sexual convention, sexual
morality, and that's the obvious connection to this book, the very deep roots of modernism.
However, at the same time there's an idea that the artist is a kind of technician, someone whose
values are craft, form and style rather than message, personal expression or wisdom of any kind.
Sixth, this is a term from the critic Joseph Frank: spatial form, the idea that in place of a linear
narrative you have a system of cross-references and repeated motifs that give the structure of
works. In place that is only visible, in other words on rereading, only visible on rereading.

And then, this anticipates my last points: Modernism is self-consciously international. In other
words, it will look to international tradition and has as its ambition to be a culture not just for one
nation but for many, maybe for all. It goes along with this eighth characteristic that's important:
the artist is seen as a kind of spiritual exile, someone who is alienated from a home society and a
home culture, whether or not he or she has actually left it, as Nabokov did. So this is what I mean
by International High Modernism. You should add to this list of writers especially Faulkner and
Hemingway, and you should remember that there's a parallel American tradition, the realist
tradition that we saw Richard Wright referring to: that is Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and
then going back to the nineteenth century, writers like Mark Twain. I had a teacher who used to
compare Lolita to Huck Finn. They are two novels about traveling across America and an
unconventional couple. Right?
So, anyway. Okay. But now, that modernist tradition is something that Nabokov owes a lot to,
but he always tries to distinguish himself from it. For Nabokov, the highest value is originality.
He says this in his last Russian novel, The Gift. Or, he doesn't say it; his autobiographical hero
says it: "Any genuinely new trend in art is a knight's move, a change of shadows, a shift that
displaces the mirror." Okay. Any genuinely new trend is a knight's move. I just remind you, in
chess the knight doesn't move in a straight line. It starts out in a straight line and then it hops off
on a diagonal. Unlike any other piece, it skips over pieces in the way. So the knight, far from
going on a straight course, surprises you. You might think of walking in here expecting Professor
Hungerford on censorship and getting me instead. But this is a very important idea for Nabokov
both as a way of treating predecessors and as a way of writing. And I want to show you that way
of writing very early in the book on page 10 now. Let's take a look at that. This is at the top of
the page:
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and,
save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and
dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the
sun of my infancy had set:
Okay. So this is a knight's move: from traumatic event of the mother's death--should be the
center of the sentence; it's just dismissed--hopped beyond into this stylistic wash, a golden haze.
And he goes on to describe the sensations of early childhood. So, the strategy of the knight's
move is to frustrate your expectations, to leap over the apparently important events into
something else characterized by a kind of aesthetic play, and these parentheses are a real icon of
that. A critic has counted 450 sets of them in this novel, the parentheses, an important example of
the knight's move.
And I want to show you another kind of knight's move, and to do that I'm going to talk just for a
moment about Nabokov's relationship to the French writer, Proust. Proust is the great aestheticist
of modernism, the novelist who writes about art, who holds up art as a value, as well as giving a
theory of memory--memories are important in Lolita; that really comes from Proust--a theory of
memory that has a lot to do with the work of the artist. Nabokov, in 1966 he said this: "The
greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose"--this is convenient; take this down--"are, in
this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka'sTransformation"--that is, The Metamorphosis--"Bely's St.
Petersburg," a pretty obscure Russian avant-garde novel, "and the first half of Proust's fairy
tale, In Search of Lost Time." I'm not sure the fairy tale should remind you of that first meeting
between Humbert and Lolita that we looked at on Monday, described in fairy tale terms. But
actually, the thing I want to think about is a crude pun there, a "fairy" tale. Proust is himself gay.
One of his big subjects is homosexuality, and Nabokov's reaction to this is really homophobic.
This is not just about Nabokov's personal prejudice. It's about a relationship to predecessors who
are seen as too similar.

The danger for Nabokov--remember that his value is originality--the danger is that he will fall
too in love with something too like himself. He has to hold off this possibility of being too
attracted to these male predecessors who are too similar to him. This should cue you to think
about the theme of doubling in this novel, to think about the possibility of desire between men
here, to think about the word "queer," the treatment of Gaston Godin, that funny French
character in Beardsley, to think about Humbert's constant protestations that he's attractive to all
women, about his supposed virility. And it should just make you wonder whether pedophilia is in
itself a kind of knight's move from homosexuality. In other words, is there another form of
perverted desire hiding behind the one that's in front of us? Just a suggestion: look on page 20,
still in Humbert's early life, near the bottom:
It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street
and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus
isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all
speed toward my lone gratification.
So, we have a kind of image there of the autonomous aesthetic pleasure, right, the pleasure of
imagination that's taken alone, according to one's own thoughts rather than in some broader,
more social form.
But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the
disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window
in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.
So, the object of this wonderful aesthetic reverie, the nymphet, turns out to be an adult male. And
I just want you to ask yourself why that could be.
But, Nabokov's relationship to this modernist past is not just the burlesque that he visits on Eliot,
is not just this complicated attraction and dis-identification that he works on with Proust. An
element of admiration is also present, and that's really part of his relationship to Joyce.
Remember that he names Joyce as the greatest master of twentieth-century prose. I'm just going
to name for you four features of Joyce's style that are important to Nabokov: stylistic virtuosity,
the ability to imitate any style; at the same time, a scrupulous attention to the banality of
everyday life and all its detail; yet, the third characteristic, the constant use of a superimposed
structure. So, in Ulysses, famously, Joyce puts the narrative of the Odyssey on top of a day in
Dublin, or in Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a linear narrative in
which a young boy grows up is structured as a series of structurally paralleled chapters in which
moments in each one correspond to the ones in successive chapters. And this comes with a kind
of suggestion that that banal reality is redeemed by the artist's activity. Fourthly, Joyce loves
puns. So does Nabokov. This is incredibly important, and there's a direct glance at that just ahead
of where you read, so don't turn here. I don't want to spoil what's coming up, but on page 221
there is a reference to--don't look, don't look--to a writer named Vivian Darkbloom plagiarizing
from Joyce; Vivian Darkbloom you remember from Monday. That's the anagram of Vladimir
Nabokov, so it's an explicit recognition. And the thing that's being plagiarized, I've actually given
you on the handout. It's a little piece of Finnegans Wake, which is Joyce's work in which almost
every word is a pun. I'll just read you a sentence of this so you know what it's like: "Say them all
but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N
for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of no-vembrance."
And that spells out "rainbow." Right.
The important thing here is that Nabokov acknowledges this debt to Joyce as not just a parody,
but a real debt. And so now I want to think at more length about another Joyce allusion which

shows how complicated the relationship to his predecessor is. And, with Eliot, I read the
Nabokovian version first. This time I'll give you the Joyce first. So this is on your handout as
well from Chapter 2. This describes the hero, Stephen Dedalus, as a young boy trying to write a
poem. And eventually in the novel he will succeed in writing a poem, but here he doesn't manage
to. And so, this is a kind of forecast of what will happen later on. The further complication is that
here he's writing a poem and then he remembers an earlier attempt; that layering of memory, and
that kind of layering, is actually a prototype for the layering in Lolita:
The next day he sat at his table in the bare upper room for many hours. Before him lay a new
pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. [Skip a little.] On the first line of the page
appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: "To E-- C--." He knew it was right to
begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had
written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath, he fell into a daydream and began to
draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself sitting at his table in Bray the morning
after the discussion at the Christmas dinner table, trying to write a poem about Parnell on the
back of one of his father's second moiety notices. But his brain had then refused to grapple with
the theme and, desisting, he had covered the page with the names and addresses of certain of his
classmates: Roderick Kickham, John Lawton, Anthony MacSweeney, Simon Moonan.
The version of this that comes up in the novel is in the midst of Humbert's diary, and the diary
itself, I should say, owes a lot to Joyce. And I've given you a piece of that diary to look at on
your own on the handout. But this is the moment that directly alludes to Portrait, and it's really
very important for understanding Nabokov's technique. So, page 51, near the bottom:
Thursday: We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume
of the Young People's Encyclopedia I found a map of the States that a child's pencil had started
copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the
unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring,
evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale School.
And I think of that front and back of the page as another kind of knight's move. You think you're
looking at one thing, and you land on another.
It
is
a
poem
I
know
already
by
heart:
Angel,
Grace
Austin,
Floyd
Beal,
Jack
Beal,
Mary
Buck, Daniel [and so on; I'll come back to this list, actually; just skip to the bottom on page
52]
Talbot,
Edgar
Talbot,
Edwin
Wayne,
Lull,--[a
lull
in
the
book,
right?]
Williams,
Ralph
Windmuller,
Louise
A poem, a poem forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this Haze Dolores: she, in its
special bower of names with its bodyguard of roses, a fairy princess between her two maids of
honor.
That's the fairy tale again. In a way this is just like the Joyce. A list of names leads up to this
aesthetic sensation, the revelation of a poem. The ordinary materials of life become the basis for
a kind of artistic achievement. However, obviously this is not like the Joyce, where there is a
realistic depiction of a young boy trying to write, getting bored and failing. Here something else

is happening, because the list of names is not ordinary. Right. There is that bower of roses. That
refers to Mary Rose Hamilton; Haze, Dolores; Hanek, Rosaline. And then there's Emile Rosado
and Carmine Rose--a red rose--Angel, Grace-- really!--Stella Fantasia. And then even the
ordinary names are kind of plants, because almost every name on this list comes back elsewhere
in the book. You could look, for example, for Louise Windmuller or Vivian McCrystal. And then,
right in the middle (oh, and then we have Shakespeare too: Miranda Anthony, Miranda Viola)
and right in the middle you have a kind of explanation planted: McCoo, Virginia; McCrystal,
Vivian; McFate Aubrey.
McFate, which as you know is something Humbert gets kind of obsessed with, is the icon of the
difference between the realistic world of Joyce and the already artificial, already aestheticized
world of this novel. No one was ever really named McFate. McFate is a kind of parody of real
randomness. You might think of it as having the same relation to real fate as Chicken McNuggets
do to chicken. In other words, you might think of it as a kind of artificial, processed, bland,
easily consumable version of fate. I really mean that. One of the funny things about that debt
to Finnegans Wake is, Finnegans Wake as a book of puns is unreadable. Nobody reads it except
specialists like me. Lolita was a bestseller. Nabokov made so much money from it he was able to
retire to Switzerland. And you should ask yourself what about this novel makes that possible;
why is that, that you have this McNugget version of the modernist novel? And I don't really
mean that to disparage the novel, but it makes it clear that there's some kind of difference
between this and the works that Nabokov is looking back to. I want to think a little bit more
about this idea of a McFate.
There is a kind of short circuit between the Joycean idea of taking ordinary life and transforming
it into an aesthetic order, because the ordinary is already aesthetic in the book. In other words,
chance is already fated. The thing that stands for randomness in this book, the thing that looks
like ordinary detail, has already been arranged to give you artistic pleasure. That's why Humbert
can be instantly delighted in the list of names. This doesn't look forward to Humbert's poem; it
already is a poem and it is a poem to the crazed, aroused mind of Humbert. So, the artificial has
taken the place of the real here, and this novel really reminds you of that all the time. On 84,
Humbert's thinking of killing Charlotte, and he says, "No man can bring about the perfect
murder. Chance, however, can do it." Chance can do it, and of course the perfect murder does
happen. Charlotte Haze dies as if by a total accident, but we're aware that the accident is so
perfect that it was arranged. So, this is the, kind of, hand of Nabokov, taking a narrative of real
events and twisting it into something that makes a kind of sense, taking fate and making it
McFate.
And I want to show you one more example of that, in the scene where Humbert and Lolita have
reached the hotel, the Enchanted Hunter. This is on page 118 near the bottom. "In the slow, clear
hand of crime, I wrote 'Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, 342 Lawn Street, Ramsdale.' A key,
342, was half shown to me, magician showing object he is about to palm and hand it over to
Uncle Tom." The coincidence--normally, in real life, it would be a delightful coincidence to go to
a hotel room that has the same number as your street address--here it's a kind of too-easy icon of
the correspondence between the place where Humbert meets Lolita and the place where he rapes
her. And the book just tells you that, right, in one of those parentheses--"the magician showing
the object he is about to palm"-- the ordinary event which is really trickery, a suggestion that
nothing has been left to chance in the novel; nothing is ordinary.
Now, as I come to my last section here, what I want to suggest is that this kind of transformation
of arbitrary, real fated events into conspicuously artificial tricks (which you might think of a
knight's move on the real: fate; McFate) is a response in particular to exile, in particular to
Nabokov's condition of exile. An exile, living in a foreign country, lives in a kind of

denaturalized world, a world where, instead of everything making instant sense everything has to
be decoded. Right. Nothing is initially known to make sense; everything has to be figured out
and reinvented. In that afterword to this book, Nabokov says he had to invent America. That's
because he didn't know it already; it wasn't given to him. Now, in a way this is a terrible state, a
state of discontinuity with the world you exist in. But it has a payoff, kind of, a payoff which is
the possibility precisely of inventing, and this is visible everywhere in this book. One example is
the transformation of housework. This is on page 179. "My west-door neighbor"--west
door--"who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me
once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date,
defrosted his driveway (I don't mind if these verbs are all wrong)." Of course, the point is that
they're all wrong.
The point is that this clichd suburban life of mowing the lawn, washing the car and so on has
been transformed--precisely because Humbert is a foreigner--into something you can laugh at,
something you can enjoy, something that you can apply the knight's move to. And this is, even a
couple pages before, explicitly described as something particular to foreigners. Because, you
remember, Gaston Godin says about the school that Lolita's going to go to, the girls are taught
"not to spell very well, but to smell very well." And Humbert comments that it's "with a
foreigner's love for such things"; the foreigner's love for this kind of move is a response to this
denaturalized world of the exile.
It's important, in this connection, to remember that the knight's move as a way of avoiding
obstacles, in particular, keeps skipping over forms of violence. There is that mother's death at the
beginning. There is another moment in which Humbert is tracing his hand along Lolita's leg and
he discovers a bruise there that he'd given her accidentally. That's early on in the book. In other
words, this surprise is a violent surprise. You can even look at the mention of a knight's move in
this book. That's page 192:
One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was
glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical
position--a knight's move from the top--always extremely disturbed me.
The knight's move--which is just a playful way of describing where the window is, right-- the
knight's move is nonetheless a kind of wound or damage. So, even as it's the prototype for
originality, it's also something very disturbing and harmful. And that conjunction, I want to
suggest, that conjunction has to do with the traumatic event of having had to emigrate, having
had to take up another language. Nabokov will say that his private tragedy is that, let's see:
[His] private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to
abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a
second-rate brand of English devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black
velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, the fractails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.
Here, being in exile prevents Nabokov from making that knight's move. And you might think
about that homophobic attitude to a Proustian past, the fear that it's too like what he wants to do.
But the main point here to think about is that feeling of damage. On the other hand, the critic
Michael Wood has pointed out that Nabokov didn't lose Russian. He didn't lose it on the way
while he was riding the boat; he decided to stop writing in it. And Wood says this: "Nabokov
could appreciate language itself only after he had made himself lose a language and had found
another in the ashes of his loss." A kind of economy, a balance between the loss of one language
and a particular set of techniques that comes in its place.

These techniques are really I think the source of the most appealing writing in this book, and so
let's look now at one of those evocations of the American landscape which I just think maybe are
the closest the book comes just to pure beauty. On page 152--oh, and by the way, this book was
written on road trips. Nabokov's wife, Vera, drove him on thousands of miles of trips around the
country while he was writing this novel and hunting butterflies, so think about that--but here is
152, evocation of the landscape:
By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North American countryside had at first
seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition, because of those
painted oil cloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above
washstands in central European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bedtime with
the rustic green views they depicted: opaque, curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of
vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence, or hills of greenish gouache.
So, so far the American landscape is already a work of art, already part of a European memory.
Then something else happens: "But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became
stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain"--in
other words, the already worked-over, domesticated plain--"beyond the toy roofs, there would be
a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach
tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant
amorous mist."
"Inutile loveliness" is kind of the key word of Nabokov's technique, and he says the novel has as
its only purpose to provide aesthetic bliss. So, here is inutile loveliness coming just from seeing
the landscape as a stranger. Humbert goes on:
There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot, still noons above a
wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only
their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might
be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummynecked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quicksilverish water and harsh green corn, the
whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.
So, a European artist actually appears again there, with Claude Lorrain, but kind of made
strange: given that knight's move, given a new twist. So--instead of familiar, incorporated into
this profoundly strange, vast landscape that gets Humbert's most appealing rhetoric--the rhetoric
of an exile. But, I don't want you to think that this just means everything's okay. Of course,
everything is not okay. Even Humbert will tell us so. Just a few pages later, on page 175, he talks
about his journey:
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our
long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous
country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined
tour-books, old tires, and her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned
sleep.
We have to pair that with that other evocation of the landscape to see this alternate idea, that
actually this distanced criss-crossing of the landscape could be damaging. Think of those other
violent knight's moves, like skipping past the mother's death. Somehow this is skipped past,
that--the sobs in the night. There's another version, yet another version, that relates back to that
funny figure of Gaston Godin. And I spoke about Proust; Gaston Godin has a picture of Proust
on his wall, and in fact, he has pictures of all great figures of French modernism--Andr Gide,

the dancer Nijinsky--all figures of this kind of aestheticism, this belief in the power of art, and all
gay, as Godin himself is. And Humbert has a kind of hatred for that, which he voices on page
173. Sorry, 183:
There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum,
repulsive, fat, old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly
ignorant of the English language. There he was, in priggish New England--[here are we!]
crooned over by the old and caressed by the young, oh, having a grand time and fooling
everybody, and here was I.
And the contrast here is between someone who has remained tied to that European past,
remained comfortably alienated--and by that very means been able to fit into society--with
someone who is in a much more ambivalent position, someone who's trying to become an
American writer, as Nabokov says he's doing: trying to invent America, trying to bridge the gap
between Russian and English, but always finding that English is only a kind of second best. And
in fact it's more than that: he translated Lolita back in to Russian later on, and he added a second
afterword where he said this:
That wondrous Russian tongue that, it seemed to me, was waiting for me somewhere, was
flowering like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had held in
safekeeping for so many years, proved to be nonexistent. And there is nothing behind the gate
but charred stumps and a hopeless autumnal distance, and the key in my hand is more like a
skeleton key.
So, there's a kind of lost paradise of European culture which he can't get back, even with this
spectacular effort in English. So, that suggests that it's not all to the good; it hasn't been saved by
taking up these knight's move techniques, the defamiliarizing techniques; there's still a record of
damage.
And so, I'm going to end a little early, just throwing out an analogy for you. And it's an analogy
that Nabokov himself tries to debunk completely in that afterword. So, you should be skeptical
of it, but then you should also ask yourself whether you can really do completely without it.
Might it be that Nabokov's own relationship to American culture, his relationship to the English
language that he transforms, is like Humbert's relationship to Lolita; that is, might it be that it's a
kind of kidnapping of an American innocent by a cosmopolitan European for his own ends, ends
which are seen as a kind of perversion? That's that element of violence that keeps coming back,
the trail of slime across this dream of transforming reality, in this Joycean way, into something
saved, the dream of turning fate, the fate of a dead mother--or, in Nabokov's own case, a father
killed by assassination, a brother killed in a concentration camp--turning that into this beautifully
worked out, playful system, defined by puns, and images, and a spell of rhetoric. In other words,
could it be that all of this modernist technique that Humbert succeeds in putting to his own
ends--that Nabokov succeeds in putting to his own ends--is not an unambiguous good, but a
record of a kind of damage?
Now, on Monday you're going to hear about this novel's confrontation with the idea that art
could be saving, that it could somehow be redemptive, but here I think is a hint that it's
something that the novel simply laughs at hollowly. And you might think of one last example. all
these things I've been saying about the delight in words is put in the mouth of that horrible
woman, the headmistress of the Beardsley School, Miss Pratt, on page 197. Miss Pratt says to
Humbert, "I'm always fascinated by the admirable way foreigners, or at least naturalized
Americans, use our rich language." In other words, that the aesthetic discovery of English is
something that just kind of fits comfortably into this prejudice of the dull suburban American.

So, I'll just end there with this thought, this doubt, about Nabokov's own use of modernist
technique in this novel, about the emphasis on the aesthetic here: whether it could be--not just
that triumph of the imagination that Humbert sees in the list of the names--but a mark of a
wound that can't be healed.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 7 Transcript
February 14, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: I want to start my lecture today looking back to that handout I
gave you--but didn't give you a discussion of--a couple of days ago, from that essay Good
Readers and Good Writers [see handout] that I quoted at the very beginning of class this term. If
you took the time to read that, what you saw is Nabokov meditating on how reader and writers
meet, and so I just want to read to you a little bit from that. If you still have it, you can get it out:
The real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly
tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must
create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the
art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real
enough (as far as reality goes) but it does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and
to this chaos the author says "go!" allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined
in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map
it and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries are edible. That speckled creature
that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake
Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain--and that mountain must be
conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom
do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and
are linked forever if the book lasts forever.
So, this is Nabokov's beautiful evocation of how writer and reader meet at the summit of this
misty mountain of the imagination. But, I've been suggesting to you over the course of the
lectures so far this term that this is, for many books, a totally idealized sense of how a reader
encounters it. And no book demonstrates that in quite the same way on our syllabus
as Lolita itself. It's true that Black Boy was censored, even after it was published in its
abbreviated form. In the '80s it was censored from high school libraries, but Lolita was censored
at the very start in a different way, and completely. If you read, as I asked you to do, the essay at
the back, On a Book Entitled Lolita, you'll see, as Nabokov describes, he circulated it to
American publishers, four of them, and it was turned down by everybody, finally published in
France by the Olympia Press which had also published other controversial books like Naked
Lunch and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Nabokov cannot meet his reader on the misty mountain
because somebody has to agree to publish this book first; it has to exist in the world before that
reader can meet it. And the very fact of censorship--So, the book was published by the Olympia
Press, and then it was banned in France and in Britain; it was imported into the United States,
and several years later an American publication was made. And it rocketed to the bestseller list.
So, it was a very popular book in the U.S., but it did have this history of being banned in Europe,
and it was certainly controversial here. Therefore, the mark of censorship is actually still on this
book. The essay that you read was produced at the behest of his French publisher. They wanted
him to write something that would make people feel better about the book, that would give some

account of its origin and give some defense for its publication and its content. And so, we have it
bound with the book, always, now.
And so, in a way, you can say that, although it's Nabokov's voice, and it's adding to the novel
(nothing was taken away from the novel in the way that half of Black Boy was removed before it
was published), it's still deformed in a certain way, or influenced by the history of that
censorship. Now, I think it's worth thinking about what he says in that essay. And I'm especially
interested in this passage on 313 about the genre fiction of pornography, so this is 313, if you'll
turn to it:
In modern times the term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict
rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic
enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the
traditional word for direct action upon the patient. Old, rigid rules must be followed by the
pornographer in order to have his patient feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example,
fans of detective stories feel, stories where if you do not watch out the real murderer may turn
out to be, to the fans' disgust, artistic originality. Who, for instance, would want a detective story
without a single dialogue in it? Thus, in pornographic novels action has to be limited to the
copulation of clichs.
Artistic originality turns out to be the murderer, to the fans' disgust. Artistic originality here is
likened to the murderer of convention. It's originality that destroys convention, and here it's
given that frisson of being a criminal too. He's suggesting the criminality of real artistic
innovation, and by doing that, by using that language to describe artistic originality, he allies
artistic originality with the figure of Humbert. So, there are multiple ways, at multiple levels, that
Nabokov is defending his work in this afterword. For one thing, he insults the publishers. He
suggests that they didn't finish the manuscript because, when his manuscript turned out not to be
pornographic genre fiction, they stopped reading, 'cause that's what they wanted, and they said,
"This is terrible," put it down. So, he insults the people who turned down the book in the United
States; he allies originality with criminality, and he suggests that it is the banal attention to
convention that is, in fact, what needs to be censored, what needs to be done away with. He also
gives us, if you notice, his little secret map of Lolita, or so it seems as it's presented to us, his
secret map of the scenes that delight him in his own novel, and this is on 316:
I find it [Lolita] to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a
summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze. [There he's playing with the name
Haze.] And when I thus think of Lolita, I seem always to pick out for special delectation such
images as Mr. Taxovich, or that class list of Ramsdale School, or Charlotte saying "waterproof,"
or Lolita in slow motion advancing towards Humbert's gifts, or the pictures decorating the
stylized garret of Gaston Godin, or the Kasbeam barber who cost me a month of work, or Lolita
playing tennis, or the hospital at Elphinstone, or pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly
Schiller dying in Gray Star, the capital town of the book, or the tinkling sounds of the valley
town coming up the mountain trail on which I caught the first known female of Lycaeides
sublivens--[my Latin is bad] Nabokov These are the nerves of the novel. These are the secret
points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted--although I realize very
clearly that these and other scenes will be skimmed over and not noticed, or never even reached,
by those who begin reading the book under the impression that it is something along the lines
of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.
He says these are the scenes, and I want you to keep those scenes in mind. Some of them we've
already talked about. Andrew talked about the class list and gave you some ways of
understanding those pictures in Gaston Godin's apartment. So, we've talked about those. Today,

I'm going to pick up on some of those other scenes that he mentions as his secret points of
delight in the novel. What kind of novel do we see if we attend to those scenes? So, what I'm
going to do is, I'm going to take that essay--the product of censorship, the response to
censorship--and I'm going to use it to read back into the novel. And I want to work with you to
see what we can see, if we use those scenes as our points of reference. And so, our task today
will be to think about that second road trip in the novel--so, this was your reading for today--to
begin at that second road trip that Lolita initiates and think about what happens to the novel from
there to the end.
Now, the most conspicuous things that happen are an increase in the violence of the novel. He
hits her; he pushes her; he rapes her repeatedly. We see more of those scenes in the second half
of the novel. His style becomes more manic. It gets even funnier. There are many passages of
outright comedy in this second half, especially the shooting of Quilty, which is a sort of parody
of the climax of a crime movie. So there are all kinds of flourishes in the style, and Humbert
presents himself as more and more of a hapless madman. You can see it in his perceptions. You
can see it in his language. You can see it in the behavior he reports, as when he vomits at the
resort in Colorado when he thinks that Lolita has gone away, and then he sees her playing with a
dog, and he thinks, "Oh, if only she would play with me; she's playing with a damn dog," and
then he's sickened by this idea. You see more of that kind of physical deterioration. He drinks
more. So, he's getting very desperate.
Lolita, on the other hand, becomes more calculating, and it's this that I want to focus in on today:
what becomes of Lolita in this second part? And I want to suggest, if we turn to page 207 and the
beginning of that trip, I want to suggest that in the second half Lolita takes on the role of the
artist. If you'll recall, the two of them have a fight over her participation in the play because he
suspects her of deceiving him somehow: either with boys, or, somehow, with someone associated
with the play. He doesn't quite suspect the truth yet, that she has met Quilty through that play. So,
they have this big fight. It's raining. She rides her bicycle away into the rain when the neighbor
calls to complain about their yelling at each other. So this is on 206, 207: "In front of the first
drugstore I saw with what melody of relief Lolita's fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead
of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled and entered." Okay. There he is struggling with the door. There
is that physical comedy, and I'll suggest to you that in that sentence, the pushing and pulling,
you're seeing part of Nabokov's verbal play. It's not just, sort of, physical comedy translated into
prose, but there are a host of other moments in the novel where pushing and pulling figure:
darkly in one of the rape scenes (he pushes her in to a room); less darkly at the drugstore (the
soda jerk pulling on the levers of the dispenser).
"Look out!" Some ten paces away Lolita through a glass at a telephone booth, membranous god
still with us, cupping the tube confidentially, hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away
with her treasure, hurriedly hang up and walked out with a flourish.
So, here now, we move from Humbert's verbal flourish, to Lolita's physical one:
"Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly. "A great decision has been made. But first, buy
me a drink, Dad." She watched the listless, pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the Coke, add
the cherry syrup, and my heart was bursting with love-ache: that childish wrist! My lovely child!
"You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by." Mr. Pim
watches Pippa suck the concoction. J'ai toujours admire la supreme l'oeuvre ormonde du
sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.
So, here is his verbal ecstasy as he watches her:

"Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening
sidewalk. "Look. I've decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the
play. I really do. Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again, but this
time we'll go wherever I want, won't we?" I nodded. My Lolita. 'I choose; c'est entendu?" she
said, wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.
"Okay, Entendu. Now hop, hop, hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked." A storm of sobs was filling
my chest. She bared her teeth and after her adorable schoolgirl fashion leaned forward, and away
she sped, my bird. Miss Lester's finely groomed hand held the porch door open for a wobbling
old dog qui prenait son temps. Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree. "I'm drenched,"
she declared at the top of her voice. "Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?" An
invisible hag's claw slammed down an upper floor window. In our hallway, ablaze with
welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards
me two bare arms, raised one knee. "Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight."
She's seducing him in this scene, so the flourish passes from his prose. It's not gone from his
prose, but in this scene, very clearly, it passes from his prose into her acting. And Humbert
reflects that her work in the play has trained her into certain affectations. Unfortunately for him,
he doesn't exactly spot this one. She, now, is using the clichs of romance to seduce him into
following her map for their second journey, starting out on the second journey by calling forth all
his mad love for her, so that he will be, in a sense, blinded by that and not see her machinations.
You see it again on 209, a little later in this scene. His suspicion is aroused when a car pulls up
next to them as they're heading out of town. It's Edusa Gold driving up next to them, and he's
asking who was it exactly that had been impressed by Lolita's acting. And Lolita takes him to
mean, who was the person in the car next to them, not who was the person that the person in the
car was referring to.
"I was not referring to her." "Who, exactly, concocted that play?" "Oh, yes, of course. Some old
woman, Claire something I guess. There was quite a crowd of them there." "So she
complimented you." "Complimented, my eye. She kissed me on my pure brow," and my darling
emitted that new yelp of merriment which, perhaps in connection with her theatrical mannerisms,
she had lately begun to affect."
And I just want to skip down to the bottom of that paragraph. He gives her a kind of warning-which I'm going to talk about in a little while--but at the very end he says, "The tour of your
thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen-and-a-half inches." He's warning her not to grow
up, essentially: "'More might be fatal.' I was kidding of course. We are now setting out on a long,
happy journey. I remember." And then, look at the paragraph break there. "I remember as a
child" Now, this is not in quotes:
I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had Appalachian
mountains boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they
spanned, Tennessee to Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine,
appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet: all mountain, glorious
diamond peak upon peak.
This is the realm of that mountain of imagination that I was showing you in the passage
from Good Readers and Good Writers. This is Humbert's meditation on looking at a map and
seeing a range in which imagination can have pure play. Now, as it turns out, if you keep reading
there, he's disappointed to find what the Appalachian mountains actually look like in the United
States. He finds them much less romantic, a kind of garbage dump, a very seedy stretch of the
world. But what I want you to note is how that chapter break brings us from Lolita's first efforts
at motivating the romantic clichs; her first efforts immediately pay off in transporting him into

that mountainous imagination. This is how we know that she's got him; she's got him in the
imagination. She's not just seduced his lustful body. She has him fully under her power at this
point, and it's that chapter break that you can see demonstrating the fact.
Now, I want to look at page 231, 232. This is one of those passages that Nabokov points out as
being special to him. This is Lolita playing tennis. So, 231. "My Lolita"--this is near the bottom
of the page:
had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle,
when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed
foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm, and far back-flung racket as she smiled up with gleaming
teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she
had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean, resounding crack of her
golden whip. It had that serve of hers beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory
and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its
long, elegant hop."
And then a little further down the page: "She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life
revealed an innocence of frankness, a kindness of ball playing that permitted a second-rate but
determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory."
That pose--the pose of tennis service, the raised foot--it's the same pose she uses to seduce him in
that scene I just read after their fight: "I feel sort of romantic tonight." She is acting out a form:
in the first case the form of romantic fiction, the heroine who swoons back; in this scene the form
of the game, the perfect form of tennis. And he says she did a perfect imitation of top-notch
tennis. This is on 231: "Her form was indeed an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely topnotch tennis, without any utilitarian results." It's perfect tennis, but she never wins. And he
reflects on 232: "Had not something within her been broken by me, not that I realized it then, she
would have had on top of her perfect form the will to win and would have become a real girl
champion." He reads the non-utilitarian quality of her form as the evidence of her broken nature.
But I would like to suggest that it's precisely that non-utilitarian quality that is the mark of her
wholeness in a certain way.
If aesthetic bliss is what Nabokov confesses is his ultimate aim for art in the essay On a Book
Entitled Lolita, something like that is what Lolita gives us in her perfect tennis form without the
will to win: the frankness, beauty, kindness, lack of deception. And, in that sense, it is also a
version of play, of children's play--not competitive play, which is a different kind of thing--but
pure play. And this gets us back again to that image of the chess problem that I was talking about
in my first lecture. The chess problem is not in the middle of a game. It's a puzzle, but it has for
its delight a kind of solitary quality, both of the composer and of the solver of the chess problem.
So, it's not in the course of competitive play, and--although he uses the language of competition
to describe the relationship between the composer and the solver--it's not in that sense a
competitive game, as chess would be: white against black. This kind of self-absorbed,
autonomous play of Lolita's tennis form is the kind of play that children have. It doesn't have a
point. It's all process and form.
If the threat to the work of art, to the novel, is something like convention, I want to think hard
about what the threat to this kind of play is in the novel. And I want to suggest that the threat to
this kind of play is parallel to the threat to children. The threat to children in the novel multiplies.
It is not just Lolita who is threatened, but all sorts of children.

So, let's begin with another of those scenes on 213 that Nabokov points out to us, the Kasbeam
barber. Why did it take him a month to come up with the Kasbeam barber? What's going on in
this tiny snippet that's so important? So here it is.
In Kasbeam, a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut. He babbled of a baseballplaying son of his, and at every explodent spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his
glasses on my sheet wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper
clippings. And so inattentive was I, that it came as a shock to realize, as he pointed to an easeled
photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ballplayer had been dead
for the last thirty years.
So, the barber is speaking about his son in such a way that he seems alive, but, in fact, he's dead.
So here is one dead child playing baseball, or the memory of him playing baseball is alive with
his father. If you look down at the very bottom of that page, you see "a young woman far gone in
the family way had seated a rapt baby on a swing and was rocking it gently, while a jealous boy
of two or three was making a nuisance of himself by trying to push or pull"--there is that word
play again coming back to us--"the swing board. He finally succeeded in getting himself knocked
down by it and bawled loudly as he lay supine on the grass while his mother continued to smile
gently at neither of her present children." And, if you skip over to 215, this image comes back of
this mother: "All cars had disappeared except his station wagon. His pregnant young wife was
now getting into it with her baby and the other more or less canceled child."
So, here are at least three examples of canceled children, and you can use that phrase, I think, to
characterize Lolita. She is a canceled child. Her childhood is stolen from her by Humbert. In this
scene, it is the mother's imaginative preoccupation, in a sense, that cancels her children, and you
can ask whether she is preoccupied with the idea of the new child within her. You get that sense
of pregnancy being an inner meaning or an inner significance, and perhaps it's a figure for what
preoccupies her, for the world of imagination and possibility. But she has that kind of distant
internal smile. This is the same kind of smile that Lolita is said to have--the beautiful passage
where Humbert remembers Lolita's famous smile that ranges around the room but doesn't seem
to engage anyone. It's as if her smile is the response to an internal imagined life, one that's
inaccessible to Humbert. He says of her he does not know what regions there were in her mind,
what "dim, adorable regions" there were in her mind, that he would never know, that he was
denied access to, as he raped her.
And so, children--which have this potential to play--are consistently canceled, over and over
again. There are other examples. On 223 we find out that Mona, Lolita's friend from the play, her
baby sibling--we're not told whether it's a boy or girl--dies, and we see it in one of those
parentheticals, 223. This is Mona's letter. "Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy
mess, mother's confinement (our baby, alas, did not live), it all seems a long time ago, though
practically I still bear traces of the paint." Again, that parenthetical elides the death of the child.
We're reminded in this scene of the death of Lolita's little brother. Remember, Charlotte Haze
speaks in her letter of a lost son who died at the age of two. The bodies of children pile up, but
other things happen to children too. Remember when Lolita and Humbert are partially
discovered having sex in a field by a mother and her children gathering flowers. They're
described as carved, bluestone children. And think about the name of that town, Elphinstone, of
which Nabokov again is proud: Elphinstone, a little child of stone, a small figure of stone. And
the elf-like image is something that he applies to Lolita over and over.
So, what you see is children dead, children turned to stone, and this is the dark side of that fairy
tale quality that we see in other parts of the novel that's been coming back in our lectures. These
are children turned to stone. And it suggests, if you go back now to that scene on 207-208, as

they set out for the second trip in the middle of the page (actually a little above): " I was toying
with the idea of gently trickling across the Mexican border. I was braver now than last year, and
there deciding what to do with my little concubine who was now 60 inches tall and weighed 90
pounds." The threat against Lolita is growing with her body; as she gets bigger, so he becomes
murderous towards her. And this is allied with his desire, in a sense, to crystalize what he has
taken from her. And here in the middle of the page a little ways down:
My love's striped black-and-white cotton frock, jaunty blue cap, white socks and brown
moccasins were not quite in keeping with the large, beautifully cut aquamarine on a silver
chainlet which gemmed her throat, a spring rain gift from me.
He has taken summer rain that the page before, we are told, gemmed her hair ("shook her
gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee")--"her gemmed hair"--takes
that rain, and ossifies it, makes it lapidary, turns it to stone in the aquamarine, and puts it on a
chainlet. And the diminutive "let" at the end of the chain doesn't really cover up the chain itself.
It doesn't really mitigate against the confinement he has perpetrated on Lolita. She is in chains,
and just because it's ornamented, just because it has the diminutive, doesn't mean that it's not a
chain. It's around her throat, that vulnerable place.
So, if art as play is something like performance, something like an embodied art, the art of the
tennis service, or even the art of theater or film, there is another kind of art that is gemlike, hard,
cold, equally formal but dead: "bluestone children." So, this is the other form that the aesthetic
can take. And I think that Nabokov is consistently concerned about these two valences of what
the aesthetic can look like. So, if it can look like the gem, it can last forever. As Humbert dreams
at the very end of the novel, he says, "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable
pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, as this is the only immortality you and I may
share, my Lolita." He thinks of his account as that kind of enduring stone-like object, and it may
give immortality, but it traps her there in immortality with him. He is then as immortal as she is
in the pages of this screed. And so--like the chainlet--it takes that stone-like distillation of life,
turning rain to stone, turning life to the representation by your tormentor. It turns into something
durable that will outlast them. So, the problem with art is in a sense that it is immortal. That's the
problem. If life is threatened over and over again in this novel by mortality--dead children, Lolita
growing up inevitably, painfully, putting her at risk. Her body grows; she can't do anything about
it--that's mortality, the passage of time.
This difference--between the art that's lapidary and the art that's living--is that the art that's
living, by very virtue of being alive, can also die. So, this is the problem with the autonomous
work of art. If your dream as a writer is to make an autonomous work of art that has, as we say in
a very colloquial way, a life of its own ["The book has a life of its own." We kind of will say that
about a great book or a great painting. It lives on after its author's death; we use that metaphor.],
but the problem is that there is something about life that's dependent on the possibility of its
negation. That's why on Valentine's Day you might give your lover real flowers rather than
plastic ones. It's the very potential to decay that makes them beautiful. And so, the problem here
is that Nabokov dreams of an art that's living, something like the butterflies that he was so
enchanted with in his life and work outside of fiction. And the butterfly does appear in just one
moment, and it's during the tennis scene. As Humbert and Lolita play, there is one butterfly that
flits between them. It's a mark of their equality as artists in that moment. The butterfly is the
perfect work of art because it is both a representation and alive. It has eyes on its wings. It looks
like a leaf. It is nature in its aesthetic form as imitation of itself, life as an imitation of life. Can
you make a novel, as he says in the essay, that will "sprout wings and grow claws" in secret in
his mind? That's an image taken from the metamorphosis of the butterfly within the chrysalis.

He wants his novel to be like that living butterfly, but the threat is always that it will be more like
the aquamarine. And I want to suggest to you that the aquamarine has an even darker personal
significance to him. When his family fled Russia, the only things of value that they brought with
them were some of his mother's jewels. These jewels were hidden in a canister of talcum powder,
later buried in the yard under a tree in Europe as they moved from place to place in their exile,
and they were gradually sold off one by one to fund their life. Those jewels, I would suggest to
you, carried with them the sense that they were the ossified remains of a radiant Russian life, and
so the image of the jewel is a kind of dead childhood, even for him as a writer. So, where is
Nabokov in here? I think that's one of the places where Nabokov is. It's Nabokov meditating on
this problem. I want to read that last passage on 308 that he mentions in the essay. Actually, it
starts on 307. This is Humbert standing on the lip of a ravine by the side of the road, listening to
the sounds of a small town rising up to him:
And soon I realized that all of these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these
came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away.
Reader, what I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was
the air that within this vapor of blended voices majestic and minute, remote and magically near,
frank and divinely enigmatic, one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost inarticulate
spurt of vivid laughter or the crack of a bat or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too
far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that
musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure
murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's
absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. This then is my story. I
have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it. And blood. And beautiful, bright-green flies.
The living voice is missing. What you get instead is the corpse of the novel, with marrow, and
blood, and flies. Dolly Schiller--aptly named of course for the German Romantic philosopher
who advocated play as a mode of the aesthetic, German Romanticist of the nineteenth century-Dolly takes on that identity as the Romantic figure, and she dies giving birth to a girl, to a baby
girl; she dies in childbed.
Remember I asked you from the preface, John Ray's preface, to figure out who Dolly Schiller is,
who dies in childbed. Well, by now you should know that's Lolita. So she dies giving birth to a
child. She has taken on the mantle of Romantic artist, but she dies giving birth to a live person:
two modes of creativity embodied in Lolita, in that one act, and in that name. She is giving birth
to a real, live thing--not a creation that is more like stone, but an actual person. And so, what you
see is not just the paradox of wanting your work of art to be a living work of art, to be
personified in that way or made animate that then exposes it to mortality--the Woolworth's
workers who don't read it and who think no one in the world ever reads it, that kind of risk. Your
book cannot live if it has no reader to meet it at the top of that mountain. But Dolly embodies
that other kind of creativeness: human creativity of the literal kind, giving birth to a child. I think
it's telling that this kind of creation is a failure; it cannot succeed in the confines of this novel.
Nabokov had a way of making an absence at a point of his utmost investment. For instance, in
his autobiography he notes the date of and the phone call that tells his mother that his father has
been assassinated. But he doesn't tell you until many pages later what it was that happened on
that date. He says, "On" whatever the date was; I think it was March 22 nd "when my mother
received a phone call." And then, it just goes on about something else, doesn't tell you what
that phone call was. It was his father's assassination. Like those absences in other parts of his
writing, I think this absence, this failure of any birth, it marks a sort of vanishing point of art, that
art somehow can't quite compete with the real inventiveness of nature and of human persons.
He's going to try. He's going to try to give us a living prose, but this is the end against which it

finds itself pressed. Next time, we're turning to a very different kind of writing, a writing equally
preoccupied with its relationship to the world, to life, but very differently approaching that
problem. So, try to think about that as you turn to On the Road.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 8 Transcript
February 6, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: So, today we find ourselves in a very different novelistic world
than we've been in for the last week and a half: On the Road. Did anyone take this course
because they love On the Road? Anybody? One, sort of ambivalently. Yes. Okay. Sometimes I do
get students who have just an image of this novel in their mind, or they read it when they were in
high school and have a sort of irrational, passionate love for it. And so, sometimes people
approach it in that way, and I think in a way it holds that aura around itself in our culture and in
the history of the novel in this period that we're studying together. I'm going to talk a little bit
about its publishing history, its compositional history, actually, at the end of my two lectures on
the novel. So, I would ask you just to reserve whatever curiosity you have about that. So, in a
way, I'm flipping my usual practice; I would tell you a little bit about its publication history at the
beginning. I'm going to do that at the end for this reason: that it has such a special place in the
imagination of our culture. And so, I'm going to talk about that after we have a better
understanding of what's going on in the book.
My point, at the end of my lecture on Lolita on Monday, was that Nabokov is trying to imagine
an autonomous work of art that has a life to it, that is in some sense animated or personified, and
that this desire to make the aesthetic something living introduces to the world of the aesthetic the
problem of mortality. It's mortality that gives it that sense of ephemeral value, but it's also
mortality that threatens to cancel it out altogether. The language that the Beats tried to imagine,
tried to write, takes up some of these problems that we saw in Nabokov. Unlike Nabokov, these
writers are not trying to make a language that is autonomous and separate from the world, so you
will not see the kind of artifice and the labored attention to form. You're not going to have a
writer spending a month on the representation of a barber from Kasbeam. You're not going to get
that in the Beats. Instead, you're getting something, a language that tries to come as close as
possible--not necessarily to life in all its facets--but to life as we experience it.
In a certain way, this is not a rejection of modernism and its desire for the autonomous work of
art, because partly, as I've shown, the desire for the autonomous work of art shades into the
desire to replicate life. There is that desire much more explicitly in the writing of Jack Kerouac,
the desire to replicate experience as you read, the feeling of having the experience that the writer
wants you to have and that the writer himself has had. That's always going to be important to
understanding this work. So, that's one aspect in which it shares something with modernism,
even though stylistically, and as a matter of craft and composition, it looks very distinct. The
other way it shares an ambition of modernism is precisely in that effort to communicate
experience, consciousness. So, if you've read at all in the novels of Virginia Woolf, for example,
or in James Joyce's novels, you know that part of modernist innovation, part of the stylistic
difficulty, is the effort to put on the page what happens in the mind, that sense of the mind
drifting from one idea to another that you get in Virginia Woolf's prose, so magically in Woolf's
prose.

So, that is something these writers share with modernism, but there is one big difference and I
want to exemplify that for you just by reading to you two parallel texts, one from the modernist
canon and one from the Beat canon. So, first I want to read to you the footnote to T.S. Eliot's The
Wasteland. Now The Wasteland was the first poem to have footnotes, and you have to ask
yourself: what do you have to think the poem is in order to think that it needs footnotes? So, I'm
going to say a little bit more about that, but let me just read to you, first, from the notes on The
Wasteland:
Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were
suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to
Romance(Cambridge)."
He has a little bibliography, there:
Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem
much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book
itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of
anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I
meanThe Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone
who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to
vegetation ceremonies.
And then there are particular notes for the different parts of the poem. That's the introduction to
the footnotes. What I want you to note there is the sense that the matter of the poem comes from
an archive, an archive of scholarly work, a body of knowledge that you read about. And I also
want you to note that language: "Miss Jessie Weston." It's a very mannered, decorous language.
Now I would like to read to you from the footnote to Howl, Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, that
for many people embodied at the time what it meant to be engaged in this new literary project.
So, this is footnote to Howl:
Holy! holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and
hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! Everybody's holy! Everywhere is holy! Every day is in eternity! Everyman's
an angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy! the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs
holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggar holy the hideous human angels!
A little different tone, don't you think? A few things I want to note about that besides the
obvious. The fount of poetic inspiration is not to be found in an archive. It is not to be found in
Miss Jessie Weston's book on ritual and romance. It is not to be found with a bibliography saying
"Cambridge." That's not where you find the fount of the great poem. The footnote to Howl says
that the source of Howl--that's what footnotes are; they're an indication of the source--it says that
the source of the poetry is that holy, lived experience, and a particular slice of lived experience:
the formerly rejected, the indecorous, the ecstatic.

I noticed that several of you were smiling, in a way, as I read, that suggested you were
embarrassed by the performance. Right? I did not elicit this by accident. Embarrassment is
something that the Beats value. When Ginsberg first read Howl, he was on stage, and there was a
little bathroom. It was--I think it was--in a book store. (I can't remember; I didn't reread my notes
on Howl.) And so, when the show started he was in the bathroom, on the pot with the door open,
and then he got up, and he hiked up his pants, and he waltzed out and he gave his reading
of Howl. This is indicative of the sense that he wants to lay bare, in a literal way, all the
seaminess of human life, all the aspects of what it means to be an embodied person, all the
ecstasies that come from that embodiment. And, of course, this is not at all original to Ginsberg.
If you read Walt Whitman, you will see much of the same ethos (and probably a lot better
poetry). So, Ginsberg is not the first to do this in the American tradition, for sure, but it's a very
important part of what the Beats revive. And I want to get at that question of embarrassment,
because it comes up very explicitly on page 36. Embarrassment is thematized in On the
Road, and it's assigned what I think is a very interesting provenance. So, this is Chad King
talking to Sal Paradise:
A quavering twang comes out when he speaks. "The thing I always liked, Sal, about the Plains
Indians, was the way they always got s'danged embarrassed after they boasted the number of
scalps they got. In Ruxton's Life in the Far West there's an Indian who gets red all over blushing
because he got so many scalps and he runs like hell into the plains to glory over his deeds in
hiding. Damn, that tickled me!"
The sense of embarrassment is the sense that the excess of--what?--joy, in this passage, the
Indian's bravery, his achievement, his success; all of that is in excess of the decorous presentation
of that experience, of that real world of life, of that excessive joy. And it's given here this sort of
clichd, noble origin with the Native American, the Plains Indian. So, there is a sense, in the
Plains Indian, that he is both the embodiment of a noble, restrained lineage; but also, deep in that
American past, is this sense of great excess. Embarrassment tells us we're in the presence of the
excess, and that's why Beat writers court it. That's why I courted it today for you.
The excess requires, for the Beats, a new kind of language. One aspect of their language which
maybe you've noticed in On the Road--it's not quite so pronounced in On the Road as it is
elsewhere, certainly--in the letters that these figures write to each other. Part of that is the
elimination of small words, "the," "and"; the abbreviation of certain words, "your" to "yr." There
are all kinds of little abbreviations they make, and it suggests that language has to be wrenched
out of its conventions; syntax can be set aside; language needs to move at the speed of
experience and at the speed of ecstasy. So, that's one small way in the language that they
practiced tried to imitate the experience that they were immersing themselves in. But there were
more formulated ways of capturing that experience in language. Jack Kerouac had a list of
essentials that he taped up on his wall when he was writing, and this is what they include:
Scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages for your own joy [and that's "yr," your
own
joy].
Submissive
to
everything,
open,
listening.
Try never to get drunk outside your own house.[Well, this is a piece of advice clearly he never
took.]
Be
in
love
with
your
life.
Be
crazy
dumb
saint
of
the
mind.
Blow
as
deep
as
you
want
to
blow.
Write
what
you
want
bottomless
from
bottom
of
the
mind.
The
unspenspeakable
visions
of
the
individual.
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you.

And then, my favorite one is: "You're a genius all the time." Now, try putting that up in front of
your desk: "You're a genius all the time." It will help you to produce a lot of writing; I guarantee.
Kerouac tried over and over again to write On the Road, and it was an effort to practice this kind
of free language that would be uninhibited and that would gesture towards some deeper,
bottomless part of the human experience, the human soul. Sometimes it was spiritualized. In this
sense, this is why I put this quote up on the board from On the Road: "We've got to go
someplace, find something." There is a relentless seeking sense that's at the heart of this work.
Now, for those of you who don't know, On the Road does document pretty closely the actual road
trips that Jack Kerouac took with Neal Cassady and a whole host of others, and I can do a little
decoding for you. Old Bull Lee is William Burroughs, and his wife, Jane, Jane Lee. [--Huncke: I
can't remember who Huncke is, now, in the book. These are some minor characters who lived
with them and went to Columbia with them, or were in their circle when these writers lived in
the neighborhoods in New York around Columbia University.] So, Allen Ginsberg is Carlo Marx,
and Ginsberg went to Columbia. He was kicked out of Columbia, and then sort of went back. He
was in and out of school. So, a lot of them were in this little community, and they picked up
wanderers and various people who wanted to learn from them. And that's what Neal Cassady was
to them at first, a kind of wanderer who wanted to be in their intellectual, but bohemian, circle.
So, you see the kind of language that Neal represents at the very beginning of the novel. First of
all, he's introduced in this very mysterious way: "First reports of him." This is on the first page of
Part One, the middle of that first paragraph: "First reports of him came to me through Chad
King, who had shown me a few letters from him, written in a New Mexico reform school." So,
his letters come out of this western land, New Mexico, and a land of criminality, the reform
school. So, he's exotic just from the very beginning, and it's an exotic language. It's the letters
that come out of this exotic place that first catch their attention.
I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to
teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one
point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean
Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jail
kid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to
New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
It's that passive sense: "There was talk." Who's talking? We don't know. That passive verb, "there
was talk," gives you the sense that there is this wide community passing word mouth to mouth of
the coming of a mysterious spiritual figure: "first reports of him;" "news came;" "there was talk."
So, language is this communal set of rumors spiritualized by its very vagueness and shared
quality. And then, it's just fascinating to listen to what Dean says. Now this on page 2. This is
how he talks:
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this. "Now, darling. Here we are in New York
and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed the
Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville Reformatory which
reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover
things concerning our personal love things and at once begin thinking of specific worklife
plans ..." and so on in, the way that he had in those early days."
His language is a sort of mishmash of poorly used academic locutions: "worklife plans." It
sounds almost like corporate speak, in a way. It has that dry quality to it. And then, on the top of
3, we get another example:

"In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be
fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans."
So, this is not yet that idealized speech that Kerouac is dreaming of when he writes the list of
Essentials for Spontaneous Prose. Dean's language is not that in these passages. His desire for the
intellectual download from Chad is not what's going to make him the figure of the new language
for Sal. Rather, it is another kind of language that he represents that will be that kind of germ of
what Sal is looking for. This is, you see, also on 2 at the beginning here:
I went to the cold-water flat with the boys and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was
jumping off the couch. Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen
probably to make coffee while he proceeded with his love problems for to him sex was the one
and only holy and important thing in life although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and
so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding like a
young boxer to instructions to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a
thousand "yes"es and "that's right."
There is this sense of enthusiasm, so his response is not an articulation of some thought, but an
effusion: "Yes; that's right." It's a visceral response, and you see it even more clearly on 4. So,
he's staying, Dean is staying with Sal, and Sal has been writing. And they're ready to go out, and
Sal says:
"Hold on a minute. I'll be right with you as soon as I finish this chapter," and it was one of the
best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls."
So, I'm going to skip along a little bit. ("I was" Oh, let's see. "As we"Actually, I am going to
read that part.)
As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel, we leaned on
each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly and I was beginning to get the
bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life and though he was a con
man he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and get involved with people who
would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it for room and board
and how to write, etc., and he knew I knew. This had been the basis of our relationship but I
didn't care and we got along fine. No pestering, no catering. We tiptoed around each other like
heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me.
As far as my work was concerned, he said, "Go ahead. Everything you do is great." He watched
over my shoulder as I wrote stories yelling, "Yes, that's right. Wow, man," and "Phew!"
"Wow" is Dean's word. "Wow" is the kind of word that means nothing, but it suggests the
immediacy of Dean's engagement. So, all that talking on the bus, and the way they're moving
their hands, the bug, that's all where this language is rising from. That's where the new language
is going to come from, and you can see how Sal assimilates that on page 35. This is just as he is
coming into Denver:
I said to myself, Wow, what'll Denver be like? I got on that hot road and off I went in a brandnew car driven by a Denver businessman of about 35. He went 70. I tingled all over. I counted
minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead over the rolling wheat fields all golden beneath the
distant snows of Estes I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that
night with all the gang and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the prophet who
has walked across the land to bring the dark word and the only word I had was "wow."

So Neal's--sorry--Dean's sense (I will do this and please forgive me. I will sometimes slip in to
calling him Dean because he, Dean nevermind. You know what I'm saying. I will sometimes
slip in to calling him Neal when his name is Dean.) Dean has already projected this mode of
language into Sal, so even as he's saying to Sal, "Teach me how to write," what he's doing is
teaching Sal how to write, how to write this kind of book, how to be the prophet of "wow." This
is all over the text. If you look at page 62, it's in these little stories:
Remi woke up and saw me come in the window. His great laugh, one of the greatest laughs in the
world, dinned in my ear.
And then, if you just skip up to the top of 63:
The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh I
swear on the Bible was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world.
The laugh is a lot like the "wow." It's that sound you make just because you're experiencing
something, just because you're having a response to what's in front of you, something someone
says. Okay. That's another example. And the last one I'll give you is on 55. This is when they've
gone up to the mountain pass after getting in fights in the bars in Denver:
In the whole eastern dark wall of the divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the
wind except in the ravine where we roared and on the other side of the divide was the great
Western Slope and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs and dropped and led you to
the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed
in our mountain nook, mad, drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of
America and all we could do was yell I guess across the night, eastward over the plains where
somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking towards us with the word and
would arrive any minute and make us silent.
Their yell at the top of the world seems to Sal something that calls for a replacement; it calls for
some other prophet to come walking ragged towards them and make them fall silent with his
word. But, in the meantime, what you have is the continual reproduction of that yell, that laugh,
that "wow," that "yes," that "that's all right," all those things that they say just to register their
existence and their relation with one another.
I want to note something else, though, about the first time that Dean and Sal meet and the
contextualizing of that meeting. When they first meet in that passage that I read to you, he's just
rising up from having sex on the couch with Marylou in someone else's apartment. He sent the
owner of the apartment into the kitchen so he could have sex with Marylou on the couch. In
other versions he says that Dean got up and was naked, not that he was in his shorts. There is an
immediate sexual sense that charges the relationship between these people. Those relationships
take place in the context of continual negotiations of sexual relationships, and so the book begins
with that explanation that:
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I
won't bother to talk about except that it had something to do with the miserably weary splitting
up and my feeling that everything was dead.
Dean's negotiations between Marylou and Camille in Denver--where he has his schedule, and he
has his exact time he has to get from one hotel to the other to sleep with each of them, and then
he has to meet Carlo Ginsberg, Carlo Marx, in the basement to have his conversations to get to

the "bottomlessness" of each other's mind--all those negotiations are absolutely crucial. It's what
they spend their time talking about, often. It's what they spend their time negotiating.
So, the search for the immediate language of experience is part and parcel of a very complex
negotiation of sexual ties between multiple people. And it's not just between the men and the
women. It's between the men and the men. And that moment when Sal meets Dean at the door,
and he's naked; it's reflected when he sees Dean with Camille. Camille opens the door to their
room when they're in Denver, and he finally sees Dean in Denver. He opens the door to the
room, and there is a picture that Camille has drawn of Dean: a portrait of him completely naked,
and it notes his penis in that picture. It's as if Sal's first experience of Dean is already, in that
scene, assimilated into the image of Dean: the disembodied, aesthetic image of Dean. But that
aesthetic image of Dean is all bound up in these negotiations. So, it's a picture that Camille has
drawn, and of course Camille doesn't know that he's sleeping with Marylou in another hotel on
the same day, and so on.
So, all of that is very palpable, and Sal's own desire for Dean is sublimated in those scenes, but
it's everywhere at the level of the language. And, if you note the repeated presence of that
question, where was Dean? Where was Dean? He's always missing. When Sal gets to Denver,
that's what he wants to know. When he gets back to New York, finally, at the end of this first road
trip, he has missed Dean. There's always the sense that Dean evades him, and I think part of that
sense of an evading object of desire is, again, the pursuit of sex in this novel; it's part of the
pursuit of sex.
You might think, given all this, and given the ultimate plot of On the Road, that being on the
road is about pursuing that kind of desire, and that it is necessitated by leaving home: you have
to leave home in order to pursue that desire. But I would suggest to you that home is absolutely
crucial to the production of this desire. And I want to point you to page 26. This is Sal's story
about Big Slim Hazard, a hobo that he once knew.
He was a hobo by choice:
As a little boy, he'd seen a hobo come up to ask his mother for a piece of pie and she had given it
to him and when the hobo went off down the road the little boy had said, "Ma, what was that
fellow?" "Why, that's a hobo." "Ma, I want to be a hobo someday." "Shut your mouth. That's not
for the like of the Hazards." But he never forgot that day and when he grew up after a short spell
playing football at LSU he did become a hobo.
Being a hobo is produced in this little vignette by the experience of seeing a hobo get pie from
your mother. Now, did any of you notice how often Sal eats pie? Let me just demonstrate the
litany of pie. Okay, page 15. Actually, let's start on 14, or perhaps on 13: "Along about three in
the morning after an apple pie and ice cream in a roadside stand." That's Sal. Top of 14:
I ate another apple pie and ice cream. That's practically all I ate all the way across the country. I
knew it was nutritious and it was delicious.
Fifteen, bottom:
I ate apple pie and ice cream. It was getting better as I got deeper in to Iowa, the pie bigger, the
ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des
Moines that afternoon. They were coming home from high school but I had no time now for
thoughts like that and promised myself a ball in Denver.

And if you look on 107, the first thing Sal does when he gets home is eat.
When I got home I ate everything in the icebox. My mother got up and looked at me. "Poor little
Salvatore," she said in Italian. "You're thin. You're thin. Where have you been all this time?" I
had on two shirts and two sweaters. My canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered
remnants of my huarache shoes in it. My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator
with the money I had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family.
There is a sense in which hunger, the hunger generated by the road, in Sal's case in this last
scene--he's been penniless; all he had was cough drops to eat at the very end--that the hunger
generated by the road exists in a necessary relation to the consumption of home. And I would
suggest to you that the consumption of home is driven by a certain kind of desire as well, that
desire to move up in the American class structure: "the first electric refrigerator in my family."
He's earned a little money on the road and sent it home. What it does for him is allow him to buy
his aunt this symbol of a middle-class American domesticity, and he is a happy participant in this
new purchase.
This is not exactly just what the women do while the boys are out on the road. The boys want the
pie. The boys want to become hobos because there's a kind of hunger that's generated at home;
it's satisfied at home, but it's also generated at home. And I want to suggest to you that part of the
misogyny of the novel--which I'm sure is palpable to all of us as we read--part of that misogyny
is connected to this consumptive ethos. So, when we talk about desire for something--"we've got
to go someplace, find something--the very vagueness of that desire is connected with the basic
hungers of the body for sex, for food, for sleep even. We see Dean sort of begging for sleep after
his conversation with Carlo Marx in the basement in Denver.
Those kinds of desires are connected also with that American habit of consumption. This is a
consumer society; in the 1950s it was already very much so. The mass production after World
War II had already taken hold. Supermarkets, as we saw in Wise Blood, are already something
one can be fond of, as Enoch was. And so, if this is a novel whose aura has always said to us,
"Be free, be countercultural," what I'm suggesting is that it's structured around a very deeply
embedded American cultural trait of consumption. It spiritualizes that kind of desire, and my
symbol for it is pie.
I want to show you one last thing about how the language works, and this is on page 49. To set
aside the critique of that search for a moment, I just want to move back into it in these spiritual
terms and see what we can see. When Dean and Carlo are talking to each other, there's a lot of
anxiety on either part about whether they have actually attained that thing that they were looking
for. On 48, their talk is described as business in the beginning.
Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed cross-legged and looked at each other. I
slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it,
reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events. Dean apologized
but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations.
And then, they have this very complicated back-and-forth about things that they remembered, or
didn't, and they hashed these things over:
Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the
bottom of his soul. "Why do you bring that up again?" "There is one last thing I want to know.'"
"But dear Sal, you're listening. You are sitting there. We'll ask Sal. What would he say?" And I

said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on
living in hopes of catching it once for all."
So, all this language is produced because you can't ever get to that last thing; you have to keep
hashing it over. But if you go to the next page you can see--or actually two pages over--you can
see that already Sal is taking what he can get from this language and transposing it into his
experience of reality. So Carlo had earlier--sorry to flip back and forth so much--had read earlier
his poem--this is on 47--to Sal. He had been reading poetry.
Carlo woke up in the morning and heard the vulgar pigeons yakking in the street outside his cell.
He saw the sad nightingales nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother. A
gray shroud fell over the city. The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the
west from any part of town, were papier-mache. The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and
extremely strange.
So, this is what Carlo represents in his poetry. Well, if you look, Sal, after witnessing what it
means--what their business is with one another, the way they try to get to the bottom of each
other's soul--he looks out, and he sees the world through Carlo's eyes. He's been awake all this
time listening:
"What were you thinking, Sal?" I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing maniacs
and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of a
watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud Pass and was yet made with the smallest works
of the most delicate watch in the world. They smiled. I pointed my finger at them and said, "If
you keep this up, you'll both go crazy but let me know what happens as you go along." I walked
out and took a trolley to my apartment and Carlo Marx's papier-mache mountains grew red as the
great sun rose from the eastward plains.
So, the poetry that is part and parcel of the conversation between Dean and Carlo--Carlo's
poetry--seeps out of that basement room. And there's a real spatial sense here, that it's being
generated at the base of the world, and it goes up and it transforms these mountains into papiermache. It makes them in one sense false; there is a falseness to the overlay that Carlo gives to
Sal, and through which he then sees. There's a falseness, a craftedness, but it's a kind of folk
craftedness. This is not the craftedness of modernism. This is papier-mache, a fairly crude folk
art. Anyone can do it. Get your strips of newspaper and paste them up. So, it has a quality that is
different from Humbert's elaborate world view through which we see or don't see Lolita. It's a
very different kind of crafting, but yet it does replace reality in a similar way, or it makes
demands on reality that push the real back.
And so, even though they can never get to the bottom of their souls--they can never get, as Sal
says, that last thing, that's what you can never have--even though that's true, it has this worldmaking power. To what end will that power be used? This is one question I want you to think
about as you finish this novel. What do these figures think language can be used for? What's it
good for? What can it do for them? What beyond that kind of economics of desire, that
accounting? If you look on 107-108, again at the very end of the section: "I had my home to go
to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in
there somewhere too." What are the losses? What are the gains? Is it just a representation of an
imaginative and desireful economy, or is there some other thing being produced here? What is
the something? What is the someplace?
So, in that relation, I'd like you to think about the representation of America in the novel. What
do you see there when you think about the America they're giving us, all these figures? So, that's

for your reading. In section please bring Lolita. I think you're going to spend most of your time
talking about Lolita. Section for On the Road will probably be next week unless your TF wants
to bring up some brief questions about it, but that's all for today.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 9 Transcript
February 11, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. I've put two quotations on the board for your
consideration. The first is from Norman Mailer. This is from Advertisements for Myself. He says,
"Jack Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty, and a sense of the novel." Of course, some
people might apply those adjectives to Mailer himself, but that's what Mailer said. "On the
Road"--this is from a critic named George Dardess; this is from a 1974 article about On the
Road--"is a love story, not a travelogue and certainly not a call to revolution." So, I put these up
here to sort of sit in the background of what I'm going to talk to you about today about the
ultimate payoff for Kerouac's effort and the Beats' effort, more generally, to imagine a language
that is the adequate analog to experience, a language that is itself a kind of experience, and
further, that is an ecstatic, mystical kind of experience.
Last time, in addition to introducing that idea of language to you, I conducted a reading of the
first part of the novel where I suggested that Kerouac tells a story that is not so much about the
escape from an American consumer culture of the postwar period as it is a story about the
absolute immersion in a culture of consumption. So, what Sal Paradise consumes on the road
extends from pie, as I demonstrated to you by the multiple references, the simple food that the
body needs and wants; to girls, all the women that he tries to sleep with and that Dean tries to
sleep with over the course of the novel; to money and the consumer goods that come with it in
order to build a middle-class American life with his aunt in New York--remember he buys the
icebox, the first electric icebox of their family, the first refrigerator of their family, when he
comes back from his first road trip--to a kind of mystical access to America, a history of jazz.
There's a whole set of mystical cultural artifacts that Sal Paradise and his friends consume over
the course of this novel.
So, I want to begin just by pointing to you, on page 297, a somewhat more complex example of
what this looks like toward the end of the novel. This is at the bottom of that page. They're
driving out of Mexico, Sal and Dean, and they meet indigenous people along the road.
As we climbed the air grew cooler and the Indian girls on the road wore shawls over their heads
and shoulders. They hailed us desperately. We stopped to see. They wanted to sell us little pieces
of rock crystal. Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours with such soulful intensity that
not one of us had the slightest sexual thought about them. Moreover, they were very young, some
of them eleven and looking almost thirty. "Look at those eyes," breathed Dean. They were like
the eyes of the Virgin Mother when she was a child. We saw in them the tender and forgiving
gaze of Jesus and they stared unflinching into ours. We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked
again. Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam. When they talked they
suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves. "They"ve only
recently learned to sell these crystals since the highway was built about ten years back. Up until
that time this entire nation must have been silent."

That's Dean. In this fantasy about the indigenous girls, what you see is a commitment to
language and the activity of selling, buying and selling, entirely entwined with one another. So,
the fantasy here is that it's selling and buying that produces in them a language that looks very
much like the language that's frequently attributed to Dean: frantic and silly, almost silly.
Remember, as the novel goes on and Dean gets more and more hyper, sort of "wigged out," his
language becomes more and more frantic, and more and more actually silly. So this is here
attributed to them. There are other fantasies at work here, obviously. One is that they are reading
a kind of Christian essentialism into these people, into their eyes. They see the Virgin Mary, and
they see Jesus. There is a whole mystical objectification of these people that's going on, that's
allied to the religious strains of this novel, which I'm going to pick up again a little bit later on in
my lecture today.
So, this is a more complex and, sort of, dense example of how that consumer, that push to
consume, that consumer sense drives and motivates the novel and plays out in what they see
when they are on the road. In that passage that I read to you when they're in the mountains in
Colorado drunk, yelling, they call themselves "mad, drunken Americans." Well, what does
America mean in this novel? And what does it mean to be an American in this novel? So, that's
the question I'd like to take up today first. Coming from Lolita, the vision of America in On the
Road looks quite different. In Lolita the vision of America is minute; it's detailed; it's concrete.
Remember, for example, the Komfee Kabins that Nabokov gives us as Lolita and Humbert tour
around: the painful, luminous, tiny detail of all that they see on the road. Think to yourself. Do
you see any of that kind of detail in this book? I see shaking heads. No. We really don't. What do
we see instead? What America do we see?
I'm going to look back to a passage I talked about in a different vein last time, on 26 and 27, just
for one quick example. This is, remember, when he's hitched a ride in this truck, and it's a truck
bed full of men who have hitched rides. And he's talking with Mississippi Gene. This is at the
bottom of 26:
There is something so indubitably reminiscent of Big Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene's
demeanor that I said, "Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard somewhere?"
And he said, "You mean that tall fellow with the big laugh?" "Well, that sounds like him. He
came from Ruston, Louisiana." "That's right. Louisiana Slim he's sometimes called. Yes, Sir. I
sure have met Big Slim. And he used to work in the east Texas oil fields?" "East Texas is right
and now he's punching cows," and that was exactly right, and still I couldn't believe Gene could
really have known Slim whom I have been looking for more or less for years.
In this scene Big Slim Hazard is an American type, just as Mississippi Gene is himself. Their
names tell you that they're almost cartoonishly American types. The fact that Mississippi Gene
knows this vague person, Big Slim Hazard, gives you the feeling that America is a tiny
community in which these types loom large, that anyone from anywhere--if he's the right kind of
American--will know the other members of that American tribe of types. So, Mississippi Gene
knows the America that Sal knows, and it's America populated by these larger-than-life figures.
The very vagueness of the description: "You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?" How
many people can we imagine who might fit that description? It's like telling your horoscope; if
you're general enough, you're going to make a match. So, Sal is convinced--he wants to be
convinced; he desperately wants to be convinced--that Mississippi Gene knows Big Slim Hazard.
Let's look at another example on page 59. This is something else Sal wants.
I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children--[That's Chad and Dean and
the other Denver natives they have among them in their gang] and in the sunny cherry blossom

morning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise, the
whole gang, and Dean ragged and dirty, prowling by himself in his preoccupied frenzy.
There is a nostalgia here, not for the past of the old West. It's important that Denver is in the
West. The nostalgia here is not for the old West, but for the young West. The West in On the
Road is an area of youth. It's always, in American lore, been an area of adventure and
imagination, but this is well after the end of Manifest Destiny. There is no border in the West. So
Sal has to reinvent one, and in some sense it's a border of time. It's a spring of youth that's
inaccessible, somehow, to Sal, that these men he's with who are so exciting to him as their own
kind of western American type, that they blossomed and grew in this particular place, and he
wants to have been there with them. So, in a way, by longing to be where they were when they
were children, by longing to inhabit that time, as well, he wants to become them. So, this is just
one of the ways that Sal longs to assimilate them to himself. The other big way, of course, is
through Dean's language, but this is another way. It's a vision of the West as a place of, generally,
male youth. When he's back in New York--this is on page 125--his New York friends meet his
road friends, and are delighted by them. This is one of his friends: "'Sal, where did you find these
absolutely wonderful people? I've never seen anyone like them.' 'I found them in the West.'"
So, there is that sense of the West as a source, and what he's going to do is take them back East.
So, the West is a fountain of youthful energy that Sal continually draws back to the East, to New
York. Sal is never really going to be gone from New York that long. He never really wants to
leave, and one sign of it is that icebox, but the other sign of it is that he continually returns and
takes these people with him. And part of the pleasure for him is to do that transaction, to enliven
the old East with the young West. These are all stereotypes of America, but Sal really believes
them and really inhabits them. Now look on 172. This is Sal in one of his major moments of
vision. He's in New Orleans, and he's on Market Street. Oh, sorry. He's in San Francisco, and he's
on Market Street. This is the middle of 172.
I looked down Market Street. I didn't know whether it was that or Canal Street in New Orleans.
It led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42 nd Street in New York leads to water and
you never know where you are. I thought of Ed Dunkel's ghost on Times Square. I was delirious.
I wanted to go back and leer at my strange Dickensian mother in the hash joint. I tingled all over
from head to foot. It seemed I had a whole host of memories going back to 1750 in England and
that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body. "No," that woman
seemed to say with that terrified glance. "Don't come back and play your honest, hardworking
mother. You are no longer like a son to me and like your father, my first husband, 'ere this kindly
Greek took pity on me." The proprietor was a Greek with hairy arms. "You are no good, inclined
to drunkenness and routs and final disgraceful robbery of the fruits of my 'umble labors in the
haberdashery. Oh, Son. Did you not ever go on your knees and pray for deliverance from all your
sins and scoundrel's acts? Lost boy, depart. Do not haunt my soul. I have done well forgetting
you. Reopen no old wounds. Be as if you had never returned and looked in to me to see my
laboring humilities, my few scrubbed pennies, hungry to grab, quick to deprive, sullen, unloved,
mean-minded son of my flesh. Son! Son!" It made me want to think of the big Pop Vision in
Graetna with Old Bull. And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always
wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows
and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm and the sensation of death kicking at my
heels to move on with a phantom dogging its own heels and myself hurrying to a plank where all
the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and
inconceivable radiancies shining in bright mind essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in
the magic mothswarm of heaven.

That language at the end there is pure Allen Ginsberg. So, that's that incantatory Beat mysticism.
It's a mysticism of emptiness, in the end, but what fills that emptiness as we lead up to that
moment is this fantasy of trans-historical existence, that he can somehow embody a whole
human story across time. Where's that story coming from? Well, this is a Dickensian mother. It's
Dickens in part, that stereotype of old London, of the urban working class, but it's not just
Dickens. Moby Dick is here too. If you look at that litany of streets that lead down to the water,
any of you who have read Moby Dick will recall that Ishmael talks at the beginning, before he
gets on the Pequod, he talks about how streets that lead to water draw you inevitably, and he
talks about all the streets in New York that end in water. And he has this long meditation on that
aspect of city geography. Well, here is Sal having that meditation, too.
So, what you see in this passage is not only a sort of mystical trans-historical fantasy, but a
literary one. He's getting his mythology not just from the cupboard of stereotypes that are proper
to American self-conception. He's looking back to literary stories, too, that he can assimilate into
his experience and read through, experience through, so that every little thing he experiences,
like this moment of abandonment. Dean has gone off with Camille; Marylou is off somewhere
else; he's starved; he doesn't have any place to go. But it becomes a moment of vision, and it can
be a moment of vision because he has these ways of layering over that experience with mythic
and literary significance. Finally, on 147, we have another example of this, and it shows us
something even a little different, or it pushes the point further. This is in New Orleans:
There was a mythic wraith of fog--[this is the middle of that big paragraph] over the brown
waters that night together with dark driftwoods and across the way New Orleans glowed orange
bright with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly, fog-bound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies
and ornamental poops, 'til you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden
and Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night. The same Negroes plied the shovel and sang.
Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deck hand. This made me think
of Mississippi Gene too and as the river poured down from mid America by starlight I knew, I
knew like mad, that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One. Strange to say,
too, that night we crossed the ferry with Bull Lee a girl committed suicide off the deck either just
before or just after us. We saw it in the paper the next day.
Here you get a dream, not just of trans-historical time, the old Spanish ships that turn out just to
be freighters from Sweden and Panama; you get another nod to Melville, Cereno ships (Benito
Cereno is one of Melville's famous novels). "That everything I would ever know was One." The
oneness that he is looking for is partly that oneness of mystical emptiness that we saw in the last
passage. But here we get the sense of the racial oneness that comes out in some of the other parts
of the novel: the Negroes plying the shovel and singing, another American type. But this is a type
with which Sal longs to merge. And this is how--on 179 and 180--this is how he images a way
out of himself. So this is on 179.
So, I'm moving from the question of "What does America look like; what's the mythic
vocabulary that Sal is using?" to, "How does he find his identity as an American?" So, first he
makes America mythic, rather than specific (if we compare him back to Nabokov), and then he
enters into that mythology through acts of identification. And here is one of the most important.
At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad, red earth. I passed the Windsor
Hotel where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the Depression '30s. As of yore, I looked
everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who looks like
your father in places like Montana or you look for a friend's father where he is no more. At lilac
evening I walked with every muscle aching along the lights of 27 th and Welton in the Denver

colored section wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not
enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.
He goes on in this vein for that whole paragraph if you just skim down.
I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night
wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.
Well, this is hugely stereotypical, hugely appropriative. Sal wants to take the entire life
experience of a group of people and suck it into himself. Now, you want to ask yourself: What is
the sadness that motivates this appropriation; why does he want to become the Negro? He says in
another moment, "I was Mexican." He's always trying to be more exotic than himself, than
simple Sal Paradise. Well, Baldwin had something to say about this. James Baldwin
characterized this passage as "absolute nonsense, and offensive nonsense, at that. And yet, there
is real pain in it, and real loss, however thin. And it is thin, thin because it [Let's see. Sorry. There
is a typo in my note here] It does not refer to reality, but to a dream." That's what it is: "It does
not refer to reality, but to a dream." And he says of his own writing, "I had tried to convey
something of what it felt like to be a Negro, and no one had been able to listen. They wanted
their romance."
Well, I think that's a pretty clear-eyed view, and a clear indictment, of what Kerouac is doing
through the character of Sal. Sal in this moment becomes so nave, nave of history, of actual
lived history of his own country. But, as you've seen, the mythic quality of America has pushed
all of that aside. So, it's not just the Komfee Kabins that we don't see; it's the whole history of
slavery. And when he goes picking in the cotton fields, he imagines that he could be a slave. And
then he makes some comments about how, well, he could never pick cotton fast enough; he's just
not able to do it as black men are. So, it's motivated by a huge blindness about the racial history
of the United States in any of its detail. That sense of the oneness, I think, points to why and how
he makes that illusion, the oneness. He felt that it was all one. The oneness is elevated from this
sense of appropriation, to a mystical level. So that oneness looks something like the Buddhism
that Kerouac studied for a time; it looks like something more than the effort for Sal just to be
something exotic. It looks like, by entering into that oneness, by adopting all these different
identities, that Sal participates into some larger mystical body.
But, what is that larger mystical body? We have been given one candidate: that it's America, that
it's somehow America. And I want you to keep this in mind and make a note to yourself. Think
about this vision of an American mystical oneness when you go to read Crying of Lot 49 'cause
you're going to see something quite similar there. There's actually a wonderful episode in On the
Road that is nearly a carbon copy of what you'll see later in Crying of Lot 49, where Dean looks
down on Salt Lake City at night, and he looks at the pattern of the lights down below him.
Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49 will sit up on a bluff overlooking San Narciso, and she'll look
down at the pattern of light. And it's an important moment in that novel, a moment of religious
revelation, but what's being revealed remains in Pynchon quite difficult to pin down. Here, it's
equally vague. So, on 5, back to that question. What can motivate this kind of effort? On page
181 he says:
There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows
nothing of disappointment and white sorrows and all that. The old Negro man had a can of beer
in his coat pocket which he proceeded to open and the old white man enviously eyed the can and
groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can too. How I died. I walked away from there.
[And then this wonderful transition] I went to see a rich girl I knew. In the morning she pulled a

hundred-dollar bill out of her silk stocking and said, "You've been talking of a trip to Frisco. That
being the case, take this and go have your fun." So all of my problems were solved.
Sal needs the rich girl to keep his vision fueled, but the white sorrows are part of what it pays for.
The rich girl provides him with---in a way--with these white sorrows; she funds them. You can
have white sorrows, whatever those really are. You can have white sorrows if you have the
hundred-dollar bill to send you off on one of these odysseys. You're not pinned down to a place
working for a living. I'm not going to talk about jazz, and the way it figures, but I hope that you
will have a chance to talk about that in section because that brings together several elements of
what's important in the novel.
I want to focus now on the sadness. I don't know if you noticed how often that adjective appears
in the novel. Did any of you notice that? "Sadnesssadnesssad night." One of the saddest
things, after Dean and Sal get into their only fight, really, is the uneaten food on Dean's plate, the
sadness of the uneaten food. What's sad in this novel, I think, is the way the specificity of
persons pushed back against that general collapse into mystical communing with one another.
What's sad: Dean's wife, Camille, and their baby. It's sad. He abandons them, and she is left with
them. All the women in Dean's life call him to the carpet and tell him of all his sins. That's a sad
moment in the novel, a moment of difficulty, a moment of specificity also. What else is sad? It's
sad when Dean leaves Sal feverish in Mexico. He's off. He has his girls to chase, his wife to go
back to, to divorce, whichever one is which. He has all of these machinations to attend to. The
friendship between the two, in the end, doesn't seem to mean very much, or, at least in that
moment it doesn't seem to mean very much.
If George Dardess is right that this is a love story, it's the love story between Sal and Dean. And I
hope, as you are reading, you notice that chapter opening where once again Dean appears at the
door when Sal shows up, and he's totally naked. I hope you noticed that. It's the third time that
we see that so there is an eroticism between them. And there is this heartbreaking love that Sal
has for Dean, and, if you track that through, the major turning points in the second two thirds of
the novel are moments when Sal makes it clear to Dean that he actually cares about him. And I
can point you to some of these pages. This is on 189. I'm not going to do them all, 'cause there is
something else I want to show you today. This is after Dean has been, sort of, called to the
carpet, and he says:
The -[This is on 188] the thumb became the symbol of Dean's final development. He no longer
cared about anything as before but now he also cared about everything in principle.
That's such a great encapsulation of not caring about any specific thing, but still being incredibly
invested. But this is mirrored by Sal's very specific investment in Dean, and this is on the bottom
of the facing page, on 189:
Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said. "Come to New York with me. I've got the money." I
looked at him. My eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now
his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship
when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles and he was
trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories.
So, he finally realizes that Sal actually has a specific love for him, not caring about him
somehow in principle, which is the way of course that Dean cares. So, this is the sadness of the
novel. It's this unrequited love; Dean is never capable of loving Sal in the same way that Sal
loves Dean. And, at the very end, when Sal has to leave Dean on the street, I actually love how
this works. He's in the back of a Cadillac. His friend, Remi, is taking him in a limousine to a

concert, a Duke Ellington concert [which is important by the way, and I'll leave you to think
about why that might be important]. Remi won't have Dean in the car, so the car drives on. Sal is
with a new girlfriend, Laura, about--to whom he's told all about Dean.
"Dean, ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he bought specially for the freezing temperatures of the
East, walked off alone and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes
on the street ahead and bent to it again. Poor little Laura, my baby, to whom I had told everything
about Dean, began almost to cry. "Oh, we shouldn't let him go like this. What'll we do?" Old
Dean's gone I thought and out loud I said, "He'll be all right," and off he went to the sa--and off
we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time
I was thinking of Dean and how he got back on the train and rode over 3,000 miles over that
awful land and never knew why he had come anyway except to see me.
In that moment Sal supplies the answer for why Dean came, "never knew why he had come
anyway," and then Sal supplies "except to see me," and his own pain and tears are routed through
Laura. It's Laura who cries at Dean's abandonment, while he maintains this composure, this
masculine composure: "he'll be all right." But, the sadness here is surely Sal's.
By the end, the language of experience--this is on 304--the language of experience that Dean
represents is completely exhausted. This is how Dean talks at the very end:
He couldn't talk anymore. He hopped and laughed. He stuttered and fluttered his hands and said,
"Ah, ah, you must listen to, hear." We listened all ears, but he forgot what he wanted to say.
"Really, listen. Ahem. Look. Dear Sal, sweet Laura. I've come, I've gone, but wait, ah, yes," and
he stared with rocky sorrow into his hands. "Can't talk no more. You understand that it is, or
might be, but listen." We all listened. He was listening to sounds in the night. "Yes," he
whispered with awe. "But you see, no need to talk anymore and further."
Dean's language has gone from this sort of quasi-academic gibberish of the beginning of the
novel, to this completely fragmented, broken version of the "yes"s and "ah"s and "wow"s of
those early, ecstatic days. So, Sal's language, by the end, has absorbed some of this, and yet gone
on to honor a kind of coherence that Dean cannot inhabit anymore, or maybe that Dean never
inhabited.
So, the last sentence of the book, which I want to read to you--I think I have time--just because
this is the language that Sal comes out of it with, or that Kerouac comes out with as, the payoff
for opening language, in the ways that Dean's language of immediacy represents. So this is one
sentence, page 307, the last paragraph.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old, broken-down river pier watching the
long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable, huge
bulge over the West Coast and all that road going, all the people dreaming and the immensity of
it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children
cry and tonight the stars will be out and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star
must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming
of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks, and folds the final
shore in and nobody, nobody knows what is going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags
of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never
found. I think of Dean Moriarty.
So, he's blasted open the syntax of that sentence, piled clause upon clause upon clause, phrase on
phrase, to include that whole road in the one sentence. So, if the dream of Kerouac's language is

to pour experience into language and make language immediate, this sentence is a very fine
example of the payoff. There is a kind of goofiness at the center of it, "God is Pooh Bear." What
does that mean? God is just a toy? God is a children's story? But then there is that lyrical,
elegiac, always sad sense of longing, and the excess of the end: "Dean MoriartyDean
Moriarty's fatherDean Moriarty." You can't just say it once. You have to try to fill that void by
saying it two times and by invoking his father a third time. So the excess and the longing are
there, each trying to drive or satisfy the other.
Now, if we have any doubts that On the Road is mythic in itself, I just want to show you quickly
two things. In 2007, On the Road had its fiftieth anniversary of publication. It was written in
1951 and it was published in 1957 by Viking. So last year we were treated to these two books.
One thing that fascinates me about them is that they are examples of how publishing houses rely
on known names for making money. So, Viking has On the Road in their backlist, so they can
make new copies. The pagination of this is exactly the same. All they did was bind; they made a
retro cover, and they bound the original book review from the New York Times into the front.
They just printed that in, and then they just reproduced the text again, so it becomes a sort of
keepsake book. I'm not sure that a lot of people are going to read this book, but a lot of people
might buy it as a keepsake.
This is the original scroll version. This is like the sop to scholars. This is for the scholarly buyer.
This is for people like me (or not like me). This is the original typescript put into pages, but, as I
think I mentioned in my first lecture, Kerouac wrote the manuscript for On the Road on one
long, 120-foot roll of paper. He just stuck it in the typewriter. No paragraphs, no nothing; he just
went. So, this book reproduces that, just breaking it as the pages demand (instead of actually
giving us a scroll, which would be pretty cool). But what else they do, is they lard it with
scholarly articles. There are--let's see--three scholarly articles, and then there is a note on the
editing of the text and there are suggestions for further reading. It makes it into a real literary
object, sort of like a modernist text. And what I love here is that, apparently, at the very
beginning of the scroll, Kerouac made a typo, and the editor says, "I read it. I let the typo stand."
Here it is, the editor, Howard Cunnell: "Because it so beautifully suggests the sound of a car
misfiring before starting up for a long journey, I have left uncorrected the manuscript's opening
line, which is 'I met met Neal not long before my father died.'" There is the fantasy that the
writing approximates the actual car trip, "met met." Oh, "it sounds like a car starting. I'm going
to leave that in there." So, the editors just buy--completely buy--the text's own mythology and
produce all this apparatus around it to help us believe it, too.
Now, the last thing I want to show you is on a less skeptical note. If you ever doubt that the
legend and the dream of On the Road is alive and is powerful in art, literary art and visual art,
today, all you need to do is look at a very recent work of digital art. This is Young-Hae Chang
Heavy Industries, which is a collaboration of an American man and a Korean woman who create
online digital artworks. And this is one of them from 2002 called Dakota, and I think you will
see immediately how and why it is related to On the Road. It's also related to Ezra
Pound's Cantos, but I'm not going to burden you with that right now. What I want you to do is
just think about this. It runs about six minutes, so I'm going to let that go now. [digital artwork
playing] All right. Okay. So, if you ever doubted that the dream of an immediate language that is
somehow the correlate to jazz and experience, that's your dream living on. Okay.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 10 Transcript

February 13, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: In light of the fact that I have just sent you paper topics, my
lecture today is going to do two things. It is going to give you a way into Franny and Zooey, but
it's going to actually give you more than a way into it. It is really going to give you a whole
packaged reading of Franny and Zooey. We have just the one day on this novel, and what I'm
going to be doing for you is modeling the way literary critics use evidence to advance an
argument. It's useful to you when you think about writing a paper to remember, if it's been a long
time since you've written an English paper, or even if it isn't a long time since you've written an
English paper, that the facts that we, literary critics, and you, writers on literature, the facts that
we deal with are the details of the text itself.
You may have noticed that I am very fond of reading aloud to you from these novels. I'm very
fond of reading out passages. I do it a lot. Why do I do it? Well, there are two reasons, one
because I want you to hear literary art. Literary art is a verbal art, and I think too often we only
read it silently; probably not since you were children that people read to you so much. So, to get
a sense of that, you have to have it in your ear and feel the sound and the rhythm and the quality,
the timbre, the expression of the voices that we have in these novels. Our writer for today thinks
so highly of that capacity of literature to embody the human voice that he imagines a whole
religious world around him. That's going to be the gist of my argument today. But then, there is a
second, sort of, less mystical reason, and that's that these are the facts of a literary argument,
these words that I give to you. It's like, if you're in an astronomy lecture, they're going to give
you some facts about the composition of a planet, or its atmosphere, or whatever. Those are the
facts for that field. For this field, these are the facts.
So, in your papers, if you find yourself writing and you get to the end of a page and you look
back, you scan back over your page, and you see that there are no quotation marks, you are not
using any of the facts of the novel to produce your argument, to support your claims. So, that's
like the eye test, the glance test. Are you supporting your claims? If you have very few
quotations, chances are you are not. So, think of this lecture, as I go through it, as a kind of
model. Pay attention to what I'm doing in using these textual bits and pieces and putting them
together and making claims for them. I do it every week. It just so happens that this argument is
more closed, more settled, in my own mind. It's less of an opening argument than it is something
that I want to convince you of. So, there's a reason for that and that is that I'm writing about this
novel. It's in the introduction to a book that I'm writing about the literature of this period, and so
it's very present to my mind as a sort of piece of a larger argument about religion and the
American novel in this period, so that's what I'm giving you.
When you approach any novel to make an argument about it, if you want to be ambitious, the
first thing to think about is well, what's obvious about the novel? What can you observe at first
glance about its style, about its form, about its setting, about its character, about its
presuppositions? In Franny and Zooey, what did you notice? Tell me what you noticed, at first
bat, if any of you have read it. What did you notice about the novel? Uh huh.
Student: It doesn't move around very much. It just stays in a limited space.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. Confined settings, very confined settings, absolutely.
Yes. What else? Yes.
Student: A lot of dialog?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Lots of dialog, yes. What else? Uh huh.

Student: [inaudible]
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a back story. You can feel
that back story to the novel. Yeah. What else? What else did you notice? Yes.
Student: There's a lot of focus on like little motions that people do, like picking up cigarettes
and dropping things.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. A lot of attention to physical detail and physical movement,
and that's connected to this point about confined spaces. It's the movement of bodies within
confined spaces that really preoccupies this novel. What about the style of the novel? You talked
about dialog. Is there anything else about the style that you noticed? Yes.
Student: There's a lot of italics.
Professor Amy Hungerford: A lot of italics. What does that connote to you?
Student: Trying to convey feeling.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Absolutely. A lot of emphasis, a lot of variation in tone, and
the italics are part of the representation of that. Yeah. What else? Yes.
Student: A lot of the dialog seems to be combative. There's arguing between two people.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. This is a book about arguments, absolutely. What are they
arguing about most of the time? All right. Well, that's where I will pick up. Oh, Sarah. Do you
want to say?
Student: There are a lot of abstract ideas.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. They are talking about abstract
intellectual ideas, often religious or philosophical ones, and that, plus its setting: I hope you
noticed the sort of New Havenish setting of Franny's breakdown. We're told that Lane isn't
exactly a Yale man, but he sure looks a lot like a Yale English major, dare I say, such an
unpleasant character, and so, so pompous.
What you do, when you write a paper or try to advance an argument, is try to write an argument
that will attend to all those things that you guys just said, that you take the obvious things, and
when you craft an argument, the best thing, the most ambitious thing, to do is to come up with
something where, in the end, you can say something about those major aspects. You don't have to
do it in the paper, but it should be an argument that has something to say back to those obvious
things. Why is the style this way? Why is the plot working this way? Why are these particular
characters behaving in this way? Why use those confined spaces?
So, my argument today is going to try to have something to say back to all those obvious aspects
that you pointed out so rightly. But I'm going to start from a much more pointed and local
question. And this is the other thing that a good short paper especially does, is that you don't get
at all that big stuff by, kind of, taking it head on. You have to come down to the facts that I was
talking about, the bits of text, the text itself, the words that author chose; that's where you begin.
And part of the genius of a strong paper is choosing the place in the text to begin that pointed
analysis. So, my choice for this is that odd introduction in-between the two stories, and this is on
48 and 49. This is, we come to find out, Buddy, Zooey's older brother, narrating the story, and

Buddy gives us a little preamble telling us how the real characters in the story, the real people
who are then characters in his story, how they felt about the story and what their objections to it
were (and this is on 48). We find out that Franny objects to the story's distribution in the world or
the movie, the prose home movie as Buddy calls it, because it shows her blowing her nose a lot.
His mother, Bessie, objects because it shows her in her housecoat. But Zooey has a more
substantive objection.
It's the leading man, however, who has made the most eloquent appeal to me to call off the
production. [This is in the middle of page 48.] He feels that the plot hinges on mysticism or
religious mystification. In any case, he makes it very clear, a too vividly apparent transcendent
element of sorts, which he says he's worried can only expedite, move up, the day and hour of my
professional undoing. People are already shaking their heads over me and any immediate further
professional use on my part of the word "God" except as a familiar, healthy American expletive
will be taken or rather confirmed as the very worst kind of name dropping and a sure sign that
I'm going straight to the dogs.
And then, he speaks back to Zooey. He says, "Well, I'm going to still distribute my story. I still
want to tell this story," and he does it in a kind of roundabout way. And this is on page 49.
Somewhere in The Great Gatsby, which was my Tom Sawyer when I was twelve, the youthful
narrator remarks that everybody suspects himself of having at least one of the cardinal virtues
and he goes on to say that he thinks his, bless his heart, is honesty. Mine, I think, is that I know
the difference between a mystical story and a love story. I say that my current offering isn't a
mystical story or a religiously mystifying story at all. I say it's a compound or multiple love
story, pure and complicated.
What Buddy does, in this passage, is set up this opposition between his own reading of his story
and Zooey's. Now, why are we given these objections? I think it's to give us a dynamic sense of
the family conversation going on between them, but it also addresses one of those obvious
things. They talk a lot, as Sarah said, they talk a lot about abstract questions, and this puts the
meaning of the story in that abstract register. Is it a love story, or is it a religious story, a
mystifying story? Which is it? I am going to argue that it's both. And I'm going to advance that
argument by going straight to the theological question that Zooey is so intent on solving when
Franny is having her breakdown in the living room. So, just to review: Franny has her
breakdown when she comes into what I suspect is New Haven to attend the Yale-Harvard
football game with her boyfriend, Lane. So, Franny when she sees Lane, affects great
enthusiasm, and so on, but this is what we hear about Lane from the narrator. This is on page 11.
Lane was speaking now as someone does who has been monopolizing conversation for a good
quarter of an hour or so and who believes he has just hit a stride where his voice can do
absolutely no wrong. [I always read this and I think, "I'm lecturing."] "I mean, to put it crudely,'"
he was saying, "the thing you could say he lacks is testicularity. You know what I mean?" He
was slouched rhetorically forward toward Franny, his receptive audience, a supporting forearm
on either side of his martini. "Lacks what?" Franny said. She had had to clear her throat before
speaking. It had been so long since she had said anything at all. Lane hesitated. "Masculinity," he
said. "I heard you the first time." "Anyway, it was the motif of the thing, so to speak, what I was
trying to bring out in a fairly subtle way," Lane said, very closely following the trend of his own
conversation. "I mean God. I honestly thought it was going to go over like a goddamn lead
balloon and when I got it back with this goddamn A on it in letters about six feet high I swear I
nearly keeled over." Franny again cleared her throat. Apparently, her self-imposed sentence of
unadulterated good listenership had been fully served. "Why?" she asked. Lane looked faintly
interrupted. "Why what?" "Why did you think it was going to go over like a lead balloon?" "I

just told you. I just got through saying this guy, Brughman is a big Flaubert man or at least I
thought he was." "Oh," Franny said. She smiled.
Franny is disgusted by his pomposity. This experience, combined with her experience in a
religion seminar with this man, Professor Tupper, at school, has convinced herself that the world
is superficial, that it's impossible to find anything meaningful in the academic discussion of these
pseudo-intellectual problems, the "testicularity" of one writer or another. And Lane's engagement
with literature, specifically, is all about his ego inflation. So, he can't wait to tell Franny that the
professor said he should try to publish it, and then my favorite thing: he wants to read it to her
over the football weekend. "Hey, come, let's read my English essay." Hello.
Student: Hi. Can I interrupt? We have a couple of singing valentines. Can we deliver them now?
Professor Amy Hungerford: No, you can't. Sorry.
Student: Thank you.
Professor Amy Hungerford: And I'm worried about e-mail! Talk about pricking my pomposity.
All right. So, she starts saying the Jesus prayer, which is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy on me, a sinner." Now, she has taken this prayer from a book called The Way of the
Pilgrim. It's a Russian Orthodox religious classic, a very old text, and it depicts the life of a
pilgrim. And we get the summary of this a little bit in the novel, as Franny explains it, or tries to
explain it, to Lane, who is entirely uninterested. It is about a man who tries to take seriously the
Bible's injunction to pray without ceasing, and the prayer for Franny becomes a kind of mantra.
She is trying to say it over and over again as she goes about in this world that is so disappointing
to her, feels so false to her. And so, finally, the strain of trying to hold out this kind of religious
awareness in the face of Lane and his English paper is just too much, and she faints.
Now, Zooey has a big problem with her use of this prayer, and this is what gives the book that
sort of combative tone that we were talking about a little earlier that somebody mentioned. So, if
you look on page 169, my question now is, in my argument: What is Zooey's critique of Franny's
use of the prayer? What constitutes that critique? What's wrong with it? So, on 169, he says to
Franny as she's sniveling on the couch:
"God almighty, Franny," he said. "If you're going to say the Jesus prayer, at least say it to Jesus
and not to Saint Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep Him
in mind if you say it, and Him only, and Him as He was and not as you'd like Him to have been.
You don't face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing facts is what got you into this
messy state of mind in the first place, and it can't possibly get you out of it."
And then, this argument goes on for a couple of pages, and I'm just going to pick up the end of it
here, on the bottom of 171. He is explaining who Jesus was.
"If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand His prayer. You don't get the prayer at all.
You just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly
important mission. This was no Saint Francis with enough time to knock out a few canticles or to
preach to the birds or do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm
being serious now, goddamit. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with
Saint Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, He'd have
picked him, you can be sure. As it was, He picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the
least sentimental, the most unimitative master He could have possibly picked. And when you
miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus prayer."

So, Zooey's critique is that Franny is not being specific in her use of the prayer. She's paying no
attention to who Jesus was and what it means to actually pray to that figure. But, to anyone
paying attention to the other things that Zooey says and the other things that he does in this
novel, this is kind of odd, and it's hard to square. So, my next kind of question is: How does that
very doctrinally specific understanding of the Jesus prayer relate to the whole religious education
that Buddy and Seymour gave him, and that he seems to be thinking so hard about as he reads
that letter in the bathtub? The letter in the bathtub tells us about that education, and let's look on
61. Sorry. That's not exactly the right page. This is 65. I'm sorry. In this letter Buddy explains to
Zooey what he and Seymour have been trying to do.
"Much, much more important though," [Buddy says in the middle of 65] "Seymour had already
begun to believe, and I agreed with him as far as I was able to see the point, that education by
any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for
knowledge at all, but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says
somewhere, that to be in a state of pure consciousness, satori, is to be with God before He said,
'Let there be light.' Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from
you and Franny, at least as far as we were able, and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting
effects--the arts, sciences, classics, languages--'til you were both able at least to conceive of a
state of being where the mind knows the source of all light."
So, the religious education that Zooey's response to Franny comes out of, is precisely not a
doctrinally specific Christian education. Rather, it's something more like a Buddhist tradition, a
syncretic, mystical tradition. The idea is that there is some state of being with God. Knowledge,
all the arts and sciences, literature, all of the religious writings of the world are manifestations of
that voice that at its origin is God saying, "Let there be light." It's the voice of creation. Seymour
and Buddy want Franny and Zooey to rest at that origin, undistracted by the manifestations of the
creation, and know some kind of consciousness of God in that place. So, Zooey, pretty much,
subscribes to these tenets, and you can see it especially on page 175, when he goes into his
brother's old room.
Now, let me explain a detail that I think is important, but I think a little lost to us in today's world
of technology. There's a phone in Buddy and Seymour's old room that is a private internal line,
and it just goes from one room to another in the apartment; it's not an outside phone line. And
what's interesting about it, and what indicates its importance to Buddy, is that Bessie gets on
about him getting a phone where he's teaching in upstate New York; he's teaching writing as a
visiting writer at a college in upstate New York. And Bessie, his mother, keeps saying, "Well,
why won't you get a phone, Buddy? You're paying to maintain this interior line in our apartment,
and yet you won't get a phone." For Buddy, the phone that's within the family compound, so to
speak, family apartment, is the more important line of communication. So, when Zooey goes
upstairs to use that phone, it's freighted with all the significance that Buddy has put upon it. But
there's a whole ritual involved in Zooey's entrance into this place. This is on 175.
At the far end of the hall he went into the bedroom he had once shared with his twin brothers,
which now, in 1955, was his alone, but he stayed in his room for not more than two minutes.
When he came out, he had on the same sweaty shirt. There was, however, a slight but fairly
distinct change in his appearance. He had acquired a cigar and lighted it, and for some reason he
had an unfolded white handkerchief, draped over his head, possibly to ward off rain, or hail, or
brimstone.
So, why does he do this? What's the meaning of this little detail of Zooey's appearance? Well,
one thing that a literary argument can do is take something small like this and try to give an
account for it, so that's what I'm going to do. He's venerating the room that Seymour and Buddy

occupied. He's covering his head in a traditional religious fashion, so in order to enter this holy
place he covers his head. (The cigar? I don't have an account of that. You guys figure that out.
That's the other nice thing about literary arguments. There are always little details that they don't
account for, and that's the loose thread that you can pull to make your own.) And so, what does
he find when he goes in to this holy space? Well, he finds two panels of beaver board, on 178,
179, and they have the quotations that Seymour and Buddy have collected from all their favorite
religious, philosophical, mystical, literary reading, and I'd like you just to think about one of
them. So this is the bottom of 178. This is from Sri Rama Krishna.
"Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and
pictures in the temple." Rama Krishna: "That's the way with you Calcutta people. You want to
teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves. Do you think God
does not know that He is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should
make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?"
This is, I think one, of the best examples of that syncretic view of religion, that basically all
worshippers are worshipping the same god. They may do it in different forms; they may make
mistakes; they may be mistaken about where God resides. But, in this view, God is so powerful
and so transcendent that God will know the heart of the worshipper. So, if you apply that back to
Franny, why does Zooey have this difficulty? Why does he have this difficulty in the specificity
of her prayer? What is it that is bothering him? Well, I think you begin to get an answer to this
tension between specific doctrine and syncretic religion when Zooey gets to the subject of acting,
which is what this second attempt at speaking to Franny, this time over the phone, is concerned
with. There is a detail here of course that Zooey, in making a second attempt to converse with
Franny about this, impersonates his brother, Buddy, on the phone. Now I'm just going to leave
that observation, remind you of that. I have a way to account for that, but it's going to take to the
end of my argument to do that, so I'm going to argue that that's significant, but I'm not going to
talk about why it's significant yet.
But let's look at that theology of acting. This is on page 198. This is coming towards the climax
of their conversation. Part of what's been bothering Franny is her frustration with acting, and
that's one of the things that Lane is so surprised she has given up; it was the only thing she was
passionate about. And we know--from reading Buddy's letter over Zooey's shoulder in the
bathtub--we know that Zooey had similar concerns about his own acting career, his own
commitment to acting that Buddy tried to persuade him out of.
"You can say the Jesus prayer" [Zooey says to Franny], "from now 'til doomsday, but if you don't
realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll
ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment, desirelessness, cessation
from all hankering. It's this business of desiring. If you want to know the goddam truth, that
makes an actor in the first place. Why are you making me tell you things you already know?
Somewhere along the line in one damn incarnation or another, if you like, you not only had a
hankering to be an actor or an actress, but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't
just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect.
The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God if you
want to, be God's actress if you want to. What could be prettier?"
Zooey has this understanding of the cosmos that suggests that strong, specific human desires
actually change the course of cosmic futures. So somewhere, maybe in pre-incarnational time
before Franny became Franny, she wanted to be an actress. The religious thing Zooey says is to
inhabit that, to honor that, to follow up on the results of that prior desiring. But why is it acting?
Why specifically acting and why this weird comment at the end, "What could be prettier?" What

does prettiness have to do with this? Well, if you look at the description, for instance, of Zooey's
face, there's a beautiful description of how his face is beautiful, in what way his face is beautiful.
We know that Franny is an attractive young woman. We know that she worries about beauty, and
especially in poetry. When she's trying to explain what's wrong, part of what's wrong is that
when she learns poetry in the classroom none of it seems beautiful to her; it all seems like some
other kind of production, not the production of beauty. So prettiness, beauty, the aesthetic is at
the heart of the spiritual practice that Zooey is urging upon Franny, the spiritual practice of
acting.
And I would remind you, looking back to that passage on page 65 and into the 66, that
specifically among the figures that Buddy mentions, the religious and literary figures, we find
Shakespeare. And I think Shakespeare in this train of figures represents the literary that is also
the dramatic. So, in our tradition Shakespeare is the literary name above all others. It's important
for Salinger that Shakespeare was a dramatist. It's important for this novel that Shakespeare was
a dramatist, not just because Zooey wants Franny to inhabit acting fully as her desire and as her
religious practice as opposed to saying the Jesus prayer. Acting has a deeper relation to the novel
and here's where we get back to that question of being in closed spaces and the lack of
movement.
If you think about this novel, it has the structures of drama. It takes place in small rooms. If you
begin to think about it, you can almost see the set changes: in the diner, on the train station.
That's about the most open place, on the train platform. That's about the most open place we see.
In the diner, in the apartment: all you do in the apartment is move from one room to another.
These are dramatic spaces. Moreover, the bathroom: completely a dramatic space. It even has a
curtain hiding Zooey from his mother. Acting becomes a religious practice for much more than
Franny, not just for Franny and for Zooey 'cause Zooey's an actor too. It's a religious practice for
the novel itself. And that, I would suggest to you, is where we can begin to bring some of those
obvious things: the prevalence of dialog, those enclosed spaces, the tone, the exaggerated tone,
the somewhat histrionic quality, the combativeness of that conversation, its sheer style. These are
great talkers!
But, I would suggest to you, Salinger is trying to balance something very carefully, that relates
back to this question of doctrine versus syncretism in the religious sphere of the novel, in the
religious thematic material of the novel. And, for this, I'd like to look at the very end of the
novel. Zooey finally suggests that it's attention to the audience that makes an actor really a
special actor, a religious actor, and he points back to advice that Buddy gave him about--sorry,
that Seymour had given him--about performing on a radio show. So, they were all radio show
whiz kids, and one day Zooey had not wanted to shine his shoes and says--this is on page 200-that:
"The announcer was a moron, the studio audience were all morons, the sponsors were morons,
and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they
couldn't see them anyway where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for
the Fat Lady."
Now, why the Fat Lady? It's this mythical, incredibly humanly embodied-- whenever you see a
fat lady in a novel, one of the first things you want to ask is: why does that person need to be
excessively embodied? That's what fatness is in a novel like this. It's excessive embodiment, the
human. That's what this woman represents, the human. Connect to the human audience; respect
the human audience. Act for them, to them. Don't act as if they are just some bunch of Philistines
out there who can't appreciate your art. And then he says to Franny:

"I'll tell you a terrible secret. Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't
Seymour's Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy, and all his goddamn cousins
by the dozens. There isn't anyone anywhere who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that?
Don't you know that goddamn secret yet? And don't you know--Listen to me, now. Don't you
know who the Fat Lady really is? Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy, it's Christ Himself, Christ Himself,
buddy."
This seems like a completely Christian answer to Zooey's problem, and we're back on the horns
of that dilemma. Is this a syncretic religious vision, or is it a Christian one? But look what
follows. This is not the last word.
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone even with both hands. For a
foolish half minute or so there was no other words, no further speech, then "I can't talk anymore,
buddy." The sound of a phone being replaced on its catch followed. Franny took in her breath
slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone of course followed the formal
break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it
were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself.
The dial tone is that state of awareness of the divine that Buddy speaks of when he says- when he
speaks of being with God before God said, "Let there be light." Zooey's voice breaking that dial
tone in the beginning in his phone call, and then the resumption of it afterwards, that dial tone
encases Zooey's voice, so that what Zooey says to her is one of the rays of light of God's
creation, one of those things, like Shakespeare, that is part of the whole created world, but what
Franny can tune into, after hearing his voice, is that very essential divine sound, meaningless
sound. And so, this is how Salinger balances the syncretic, the sort of empty mysticism of
Seymour and Buddy, with the embodied, doctrinal, specific insistence that we see from Zooey,
from the insistence on human specificity, the Fat Lady, the very material human fleshly person.
Salinger's own novel performs in this way, and that's how you would want to think about
moments like on the bottom of 180. This is describing the bedroom of Seymour and Buddy as
Zooey walks in.
A stranger with a flair for cocktail party descriptive prose might have commented that the room,
at a quick glance, looked as if it had once been tenanted by two struggling twelve-year-old
lawyers or researchists.
And then if you flip back to--let's see--172 describing Zooey's sweaty shirt, "His shirt was, in the
familiar phrase, wringing wet." And there are lots of moments like this, self-conscious moments
of style. So, "in the familiar phrase, 'wringing wet,'" he's saying, "I'm about to use a clich. Here
it is. There it is." He says someone with a flair for cocktail party conversation, a witticism, would
say this. He gives it to us, but he frames it as an affectation of style. So, what Salinger, I think,
shows us is that affectation, without something like love, is just affectation, and that's what Lane
represents. That's the affectation of literature without any human connection. That's why when he
talks on and on, it's as if Franny isn't even there listening to him. He's been going on a quarter
hour, and he's just hitting his stride. Franny, Zooey, Buddy, Bessie: they all try to speak directly
to each other. The family language is what makes them very human; they embody this very
specific family language.
And so, I would argue to you that Salinger imagines literature as a performance of this kind, a
performance of a language of family love that is nevertheless also an aesthetic language. And I
think, actually, probably the best image of that is in Seymour's diary. When Zooey sits down to
make that phone call, he opens up Seymour's diary and he sees Seymour's account of his
birthday celebration, where the family had put on a vaudeville show right in their living room.

Remember, his parents are vaudevillians. And that description, which I won't read just because
we're running out of time, it's on 181 and 182. You can look at it yourself. It's brimming with
pleasure and love. This is why Buddy really can't insist that Zooey is wrong about this being a
religious novel, because being a religious novel and being a love story are finally for Salinger the
same thing. It's the performance of human connection. That's the phone line; that's conversation;
that's letters. The performance of family conversation is like acting, and that is why Zooey
impersonates Buddy; he's acting. But Franny can hear the specific voice, and this is when you
know that Franny is not just a sort of empty air head. She may be mistaken about who she's
praying to in the Jesus prayer, but she damn well knows the timbre of her brother's voice and his
particularity of speech. And so, when he tries to imitate Buddy, she finds him out very quickly.
And this is when you know that Franny really does benefit from Seymour and Buddy's religious
education in the same way that Zooey has.
And so, if we step back for a minute now from my reading, there are a couple of things I want to
say. First of all, I hope you can see, using that as a model, how I went from big claims about the
novel into specificity to support those claims. That's the structure of any good literary argument.
The attention moves from the very small to the large and back again. There is a kind of rhythm to
that, that folds in those obvious parts of the novel to a more thematic set of concerns, in this case
about the religious philosophy of this novel. So, as you think about writing papers, go through
that two-step process of thinking about the large picture of what a novel is doing as a piece of
literary art, and then thinking about a focused set of concerns. And, in the final development of
your paper, making sure that those two can relate to one another.
The second thing I want to say is less about paper writing, and more about the trajectory of this
course and what we're seeing in common between these novels. So, you can read this very
closely to On the Road. If Dean cared for "nothing but for everything in principle," you could
say, conversely, that Salinger cares for everything in particular, and in principle, nothingness. It's
nothingness that is the mystical state rather than everythingness. And it's interesting to think
about whether those two are really opposites. I think these novels imagined them to be opposites,
but it's something for you to think about, about whether they really are. So, Zooey's specificity is
the specificity of doctrine, but it's also the specificity and more importantly the specificity of
person. So that's the everything that he cares about, person. I will stop there, and please bring
both On the Road and Franny and Zooey to section this week. And, by the way, one last thing: If
you've been sketchy about your section attendance, I suggest that you try to pull up your socks
and go. We will be talking about papers in the section. It will be helpful to you, and it will also
give you a chance to talk about these books, so please do go.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 11 Transcript
February 18, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Let me ask you a question first about John Barth and the stories
that I asked you to read. Which of them was your favorite? Some cackling I hear. None of them?
Which of them was your favorite?
Student: "Night-Sea Journey."
Professor Amy Hungerford: "Night-Sea Journey." Why?

Student: I thought it was the profoundest joke I'd ever read.

Professor Amy Hungerford: Ah ha. Yes. Okay. Very good. Yes. 'The profoundest joke she has
ever heard." Who else? Your favorite story. Yes.
Student: "Lost in the Funhouse."
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Why is that?
Student: I really liked the tricks that Barth played with vocabulary.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Yes. Okay. What else? Other favorites? Did anyone have
"Ambrose His Mark" as a favorite? Only one--two of you. That's extremely surprising. Why was
"Ambrose His Mark" not your favorite? What did you not like about it? Anyone? Yes.
Student: I actually thought it was hard to understand, just what was happening, the action part of
the story. It might have been that I read it too quickly.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Harder than "Menelaiad" to understand?
Student: No.
Professor Amy Hungerford: No. Oh. Okay. Anyone else on "Ambrose His Mark"? Comments?
When I ask this question, typically, especially when I've had students read the whole thing,
"Ambrose His Mark" is almost always the favorite story. And the reason for that, I think, is that it
is a technically perfect short story. It has wit; it has developed characters; it has a coherent
narrative. Even if it has some difficulties, that's probably more due to things like dialect. There's
a German immigrant dialect that some of the characters speak. It's full of little tropes, little
consistencies, little images, the bees, even the word play, "skep" and "skeptical." There are words
that mirror some of the major themes of that story about naming. Barth, by offering us a perfect
short story in that story, is demonstrating what traditional structures of narrative have always
offered us. And the fact that it's not your favoritemaybe we're at a watershed moment, that
even traditional narrative can justyou guys are so well beyond that seduction. Maybe
it's Lolita that we read. Maybe it's that you got so seduced by Lolita, or you were so well trained
to be skeptical of narrative seduction, that now nothing can faze you, nothing can seduce you.
Maybe that's it. Give yourself that credit.
John Barth is a teacher, through and through. He actually taught at my alma mater, Johns
Hopkins, for over thirty years, in the writing program. And I once got from him a handout that he
would give to his fiction classes, and it had on it all the traditional tricks and structures of the
short story form. It was three or four pages single-spaced, typed: things like, "if there are five
pistols hanging on the wall, by the end of the story, they all have to go off," these totally
structural observations about how to write a piece of short fiction. It's so appropriate: in my
various moves in my life, I lost this piece of paper, and I have never been able to find it. And I've
tried to be in touch with him about it, and I couldn't get it from him either. So, this is one of the
sad things about teaching Barth for me. He was such a teacher. I think this story collection is
very much a teaching of us about narrative. I'm sorry that I can't now produce that, as your
teacher, for you.
I want to do something that might seem odd as I begin. [Begins to cut the first page of the book]
Does this shock anyone? Do you have a visceral sense, "oh, don't do that"? If you do, you were
probably taught, like me: "never, never damage a book." Getting in trouble: in our house if you

damaged a book you were in big trouble. Okay. So, what I'm doing is, I'm taking the mobius strip
from the beginning, and I am matching the letters here, capital A--let's see how does it go-capital A overlaps with small A, capital B overlaps with small B, tape it together. Okay. There we
go. "Once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began
once upon a time." Okay. So, you get the point. Why does Barth put this in the front of his story?
Well, I think there are several reasons, and I'm going to name about three of them. One is that
language is material. I think we have a visceral response, sometimes, when you cut a book,
because somehow we don't want to be reminded that a story is in a material container. But he
invites us to do this to his story. So, that's the first point: It's material. The second point is that
narrative has a form, and that it can be constructed, built. It's like a craft. I had my little tape and
my little scissors, my little project, my craft project. So, stories are a craft. They get built of the
material of language. Last point: form is both endless and closed. It is both repetitious and
endlessly filled with possibility. Because, when you read this in its mobius strip form, you're
repeating a beginning over and over and over again, it gives you that feeling of possibility, but
it's also boring. This is not an interesting story. It doesn't tell us anything.
John Barth runs a certain kind of risk in this story collection, and it's the risk of difficulty. If I had
had you read the whole thing, you would see even more the kind of risk he's running. Some of
the stories are self-consciously, boringly metafictional. They sound like all those stories we have
about somebody writing a story about themselves, about themselves writing a story who is also
writing a story about themselves writing a story. It's very boring. There's no kind of life in it. It's
all about that endless regress. So, Barth is taking a risk that this little craft project emphasizes
[holds up the mobius strip] and that the stories in the book act out. Why is it worth it to him to
take that risk? What's he trying to teach us about narrative and about language that makes it
worth this risk?
Now, let me just make the last point I want to make about this, and that's that because language is
material, it has form, it has both closedness and possibility, it's susceptible to the workings of
craft, it's also unpredictable. [Tosses mobius strip on floor.] What's going to happen to that now?
Who's going to find it? It's going to sit there. It's going to blow from place to place. Again, in
other stories that I didn't have you read, the theme of the message in the bottle returns over and
over again. The sense that language is material means that it can be separate from people and
have a kind of life of its own. Now, one question for us is: is the life of its own that Barth dreams
of for language similar to that life of its own that Nabokov dreamed of for his language? So,
that's a question I want you to keep in your mind. Is this the same dream, or is it somehow
different? So, I'm going to leave that there. And maybe some--I don't know--some chemistry
class will show up in here, and someone will wonder what that is, and Barth will have done his
work, or we will have done Barth's work for him. Now, let me ask you another question. Who is
the narrator of "Night-Sea Journey"?
Student: A sperm?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. A sperm. Did everyone get that? No. Okay. The narrator of
"Night-Sea Journey" is a sperm. Now, why have a story with a sperm as a narrator? Well, I think
there are a couple of points, a couple of reasons why Barth wants to do that, and actually related
to your initial point about why you liked this, that it was-- how did you say that?--it was the
most-Student: Profound joke--

Professor Amy Hungerford: Profound joke. It is a parody of all the meanings of life that
philosophy has offered up to us over the ages, so it kind of runs through them in the voice of our
narrator sperm's pal, who is now gone and dead before him. So, we get a kind of wisdom in a
parodic form. There are other points, however, and if you look on page 4 we can see just a little
example of one of them. This sperm has gained quite a vocabulary, and it includes this line: "I
have seen the best swimmers of my generation go under." Now, where is that from? Of course
it's from Howl: "I have seen the best minds of my generation." The point of making a sperm
who quotes not only Allen Ginsberg, but also hosts of other prior literary texts, is the point that
the tradition precedes the individual speaker. The individual speaker believes that he has an
original voice. He believes he's speaking in his own voice, but, lo and behold, his words are not
his own. So, just as this is a redaction and a compression of all the various meanings of life that
Western philosophy has offered up, it is also a demonstration of how literary tropes, literary
language, little packaged bits of literature, quotations, allusions, lard the language that is
available to this creature. His final reflections on page 12 suggest his ambition as a speaker, and
it looks a lot like a modernist ambition. The bottom of page 12:
What has fetched me across this dreadful sea is a single hope, gift of my poor dead comrade: that
You may be stronger-willed than I, and that by sheer force of concentration I may transmit to
You, along with Your official Heritage, a private legacy of awful recollection and negative
resolve. Mad as it may be, my dream is that some unimaginable embodiment of myself (or
myself plus Her if that's how it must be) will come to find itself expressing, in however garbled
or radical a translation, some reflection of these reflections.
It's a dream of changing the tradition, of having that individual voice added to the tradition, to
have it become part of the official heritage and yet at odds with it, casting a different light back.
This is precisely that modernist dream specifically articulated by T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent" that the contribution of the individual adds to and changes the tradition in one
swoop. Is this going to be Barth's ambition, too? This is a question for us, again, that I want to,
kind of, keep up on the shelf in your mind. In some way it's a parody of that modernist effort,
when it comes in the voice of a sperm, because this whole story is a parody. So, you have to ask
that question and be somewhat skeptical. For all that Barth looks like, he embodies that
traditional modernist ambition of difficulty, of working with tradition and so on. He looks like a
classic late modernist, but is he, really? This is the question. "Ambrose His Mark" purports to be
the story of the birth of that being when the sperm from "Night-Sea Journey" is united with the
egg. So, this is Ambrose's conception that we see the preamble to. And in "Ambrose His
Mark," if you look on page 19, you will see that Ambrose has, in some sense, inherited some
aspect of that sperm's remarkable linguistic facility. He says: "All that winter." This is the
middle of the page:
All that winter, as I grew in mother's womb, grandfather fretted with his scheme [to get Willie
Erdmann's bees]; when the spring's first bees appeared on our pussy willows, on our alder
catkins, he was off with Hector and Konrad, saucepan and cheesecloth. Their researches led them
through fresh-marsh, through pine-woods, over stile and under trestle--but never a bee-tree they
discovered, only swampy impasses or the hives of some part-time apiarist.
He's narrating in great detail what happened while he was in the womb. Where does this
knowledge come from? It's as if his knowledge of his own conception, his own birth, his own
babyhood, is a natural knowledge. But we must know that it had to come from someone, from
someone telling stories. The stories then become part of Ambrose's own account of his own
naming, an account of the origin of his identity. That name, "Ambrose His Mark," is a reference
to Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick, when Queequeg signs on to the Pequod, he makes a mark, because
he is illiterate, in place of writing his name, signing his name, and in the novel it says

"Queequeg, his mark." That's what's written underneath it on the contract. With that mark
Queequeg signs on to the whole trajectory of Ahab's mad pursuit of the whale. We can think of
that in another way, as well, though. With that mark, Queequeg signs on to the whole trajectory
of the nineteenth-century novel, that whole narrative excess that Melville offers, and that whole
sense of destiny that is bound up with Ahab's story. What does Ambrose sign up for with his
mark? Well, the first thing to notice is that, unlike Queequeg, he does not sign that mark. The
mark, here, is what he's marked by, not what he marks with. And so, it's as if the whole tradition
comes out and grabs him and names him. And so, Uncle Karl's efforts to interpret the incident of
the bee and its relation to the mark on his face suggests the way that certain kinds of tradition-that Uncle Karl has been reading, probably in the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia that he sells
door to door (he's a sort of scholarly guy)--that that tradition has named him. He has no agency
in this trajectory he's entering upon.
The effort to take the story of his birth and tell it as if it were natural knowledge is the effort to
fight against that lack of agency. He takes those stories and he makes them his own. That's an
effort at gaining control over what he cannot know about his own origin and what he cannot
choose in his own origin. I think that's also why Barth chose to write this story in the perfect
short story form. And that form is also given to us in Lost in the Funhouse, on page 95, when we
get the diagram of Freitag's Triangle. So, if you look at it here on 95, we're told in the course of
the story about Ambrose and Magda and the family:
The action of conventional dramatic narrative may be represented by a diagram called Freitag's
Triangle: A, B, C--[And remember those are the letters from the mobius strip as well]--or more
accurately by a variant of that diagram, A, B, C, D, with A, B representing the exposition [and
so on and so forth.]
If you read on down in that paragraph, you will see that Ambrose in his frustration--in his effort
to control the story that is always, in this story, spinning out of control--he wants to be able to
use Freitag's Triangle to prop up what has become an uncontrollable narrative and give it a
shape. He retellseven from one sentence to the next, he changes his mind. He says, "This can't
go on much longer. It can go on forever." He died telling stories to himself in the dark." He's
dreaming about what will happen to him in the funhouse.
. . . years later when that vast suspected area of the funhouse came to light, the first expedition
found his skeleton in one of its labyrinthine corridors and mistook it for a part of the
entertainment. He died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark; but unbeknownst,
unbeknownst to him, an assistant operator of the funhouse, happening to overhear him, crouched
just behind the plyboard partition and wrote down every word. The operator's daughter, an
exquisite young woman with a figure unusually well developed for her age, crouched just behind
the partition and transcribed his every word.
He changes the story from one sentence to the next. Freitag's Triangle won't help him at all. So,
just knowing the form that the story is supposed to take, and then knowing that language has
grabbed you, all these formulaic little phrases, "a figure unusually well developed for her age,"
these little stock phrases. They are what he has to work with, even though they are what defeat
him in his effort to make sense of this experience with Magda.
And it is the experience with Magda that produces the problem in the first place. And so, if we
look at page 84, you can see the, sort of, primal scene of this problem. This is when he and
Magda were having a sort of erotic game one summer in the shed. They were playing slaves and
masters, and he was the master, and she was the slave. So, he's imagining their future and talking
about it with Magda when they're older. I'm going to start sort of in the middle of the page.

He would be quite famous in his line of work. Whether Magda was his wife or not, one evening
when he was wise-lined and gray at the temples he'd smile gravely, at a fashionable dinner party,
and remind her of his youthful passion. The time they went with his family to Ocean City;
the erotic fantasies he used to have about her. How long ago it seemed and childish! Yet tender
too,n'est-ce pas? [That's a Humbert moment. That's Humbert.] Would she have imagined that the
world famous whatever remembered how many strings were on the lyre on the bench beside the
girl on the label of the cigar box he'd stated at in the tool shed at age ten while she, age eleven.
Even then, he had felt wise beyond his years; [Another stock phrase.] he'd stroked her hair and
said in his deepest voice and correctest English, as to a dear child, "I shall never forget this
moment." But though he had breathed heavily, groaned as if ecstatic, what he'd really felt
throughout was an odd detachment as though someone else were Master. Strive as he might to be
transported, he had heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am
experiencing it. Many of the digger machines were out of order in the penny arcades and could
not be repaired or replaced for the duration. Moreover, the prizes, made now in U.S.A.
It goes off in this strange digression. It seems like his mind has simply wandered, as it does, from
one version of the story to another. But the mention of the machines is not incidental. Narrative
becomes a kind of machine. You put your penny in the slot and it works to produce the narrative.
And that's that first part that I read, where he's looking back fondly with Magda from his
eminence, later in life, and it seems safely past and something that can be talked about. But the
problem is that, even if he could produce that kind of comforting narrative, the problem it
produced at the level of identity will never be repaired.
Self-alienation, in Barth's work, is the product of desire. Desire, love: that's the moment when
you're supposed to be perfectly present. And what happens to Ambrose? That's the moment when
he is perfectly, distressingly alienated from himself. And, it's the moment when language comes
in and is the product of that alienation, or perhaps when language comes in and causes that
alienation. So, he can't experience an erotic moment without also experiencing it through the
screen of language, and what he ends up doing is experiencing language instead of sex. So, this
is the problem that's never solved in Lost in the Funhouse, and it has all kinds of ramifications.
This is on 83, just the page before. Remember, this whole story takes place under the aegis of his
alienation from himself. He's thinking about what he'd like to do in the funhouse.
If you knew your way around in the funhouse like your own bedroom, you could wait until a girl
came along and then slip away without ever getting caught, even if her boyfriend was right with
her. She'd think he did it! It would be better to be the boyfriend, and act outraged, and tear the
funhouse apart. Not act; be. "He's a master diver," Ambrose said. In feigned admiration. "You
really have to slave away at it to get that good."
He's playing with Freudian slips. Of course, what he's thinking about all the time is the masterslave game, and so here it comes out, when he's talking about his brother's diving: "He's a master
diver. You really have to slave away at it." He can't control the emergence of his desire, his
memory of the desire, back into his daily speech. So, he can't control that Freudian slip, and he
also has to correct himself, remind himself, that what he wants to do in the funhouse is actually
not act like the outraged boyfriend but be the outraged boyfriend. This is always the problem for
Ambrose. He can't just be something; he is always conscious of inhabiting a performance. And
it's usually a verbal performance.
These are the problems that plague Menelaus so terribly in that final story that I asked you to
read. So, one of the problems with narrative, I said earlier when we talked about the mobius
strip, is that it's repetition. This suggests a kind of exhaustion of language and Ambrose's use of
these packaged phrases in Lost in the Funhouse suggests the impossibility of using all that

tradition, all that stock of language, to adequately encounter what daily life will bring you, and
especially to adequately inhabit something like desire. Barth wrote a famous essay just the year
before these stories came out all in one volume. They had been written over a series of years,
about five years, in the '60s. And he wrote a very famous essay--got a lot of exposure--called
"The Literature of Exhaustion." And there, he criticized a lot of the work that was being done,
and these are the terms he uses. He said there were two kinds of artists: ones who are
"technically up to date," and ones that are not. Those who are not write
turn of the century-type novels, only in more or less mid twentieth-century language and about
contemporary people and topics. This makes them less interesting to me than excellent writers
who are also technically contemporary, Joyce and Kafka, for instance, in their time, and in ours
Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges.
What exhausts language is the failure to keep technically up to date, and that means in
innovation in form. "Menelaiad" is where Barth really stakes his claim for innovation: those
nested layers of narrative that are so off-putting on the page that I have to send you a handout to
help you over the weekend. (Otherwise I worry that people will be really lost.) It's very offputting, but it's precisely those nested stories that allow him to do some of the really pleasurable
things that he can do in that story and, I would say, get at some of the very deep questions raised
by the earlier stories that he finally, kind of, gets hold of (to use his own words) in this last story.
So, I want to begin by thinking about Menelaus's predicament with Helen, and this is on 146. So,
he spares Helen's life in Troy and brings her home, and this is the story that he has been telling.
So, he says, "I decided that I would spare her life and accept her groveling for forgiveness
instead." So, this is the story he's telling himself:
. . . I forbore, resolved to accept in lieu of her death a modest portion of heartfelt grovel. Further,
once she'd flung herself at my knees and kissed my hem I would order her supine and mount
more as one who loves than one who conquers; not impossibly, should she acquit herself well
and often, I would even entertain a plea for her eventual forgiveness and restoration to the Atrean
house. Accordingly I drew myself up to discharge her objection--whereupon she gave over
cleaning her nails and set to drumming them on one knee.
""""""Let your repentance salt my shoe leather," I said presently, "and then, as I lately sheathed
my blade of anger, so sheath you my blade of love."
"""""I only just came aboard," she replied. "I haven't unpacked yet."
""""With a roar I went up the companionway, dashed stern to stem, close-hauled the main,
flogged a smile from my navigator, and clove us through the pastures of the squid. Leagues
thereafter, when the moon changed phase I overtook myself, determined shrewdly that her Troy
chests were secured, and vowing this time to grant the trull no quarter, at the second watch of
night burst into her cubby and forgave her straight out. "Of the unspeakable we'll speak no
further," I declared. "I here extend to you what no other in my position would: my outright
pardon." To which, some moments after, I briskly appended: "Disrobe and receive, it for the sake
of pity! This offer won't stand forever." [And of course there are lots of phallic jokes here, so I
hope you're getting those.] There I had her; she yawned and responded: "It's late. I'm tired."
""""Up the mast half a dozen times I stormed and shinnied, took oar to my navigator, lost sight of
Nestor, thundered and lightninged through Poseidon's finny fief. When next I came to season, I
stood a night slyly by while she dusk-to-dawned it, then saluted with this challenge her opening
eyes: "Man born of woman is imperfect. On the three thousand two hundred eighty-seventh night
of your Parisian affair, as I lay in Simois-mud picking vermin off the wound I got that day from
cunning Pandarus, exhaustion closed my eyes. I dreamed myself was pretty Paris, plucked by

Aphrodite from the field and dropped into Helen's naked lap. There we committed sweet
adultery; I woke wet, wept. . ."
""""Here I paused in my fiction to shield my eyes and stanch the arrow-straight tracks clawed
down my cheek. Then, as one who'd waited precisely for her maledict voice to hoarsen, I
outshouted her in these terms: "Therefore come to bed, my equal, uncursing, uncursed!"
""""The victory was mine, I still believe, but when I made to take trophy, winded Helen shook
her head, declaring, "I have the curse." [She has her period.]
""""My taffrail oaths took Triton's stamp-ground; I fed to the fish my navigator, knocked my
head against the mast and others; hollered up a gale that blew us from Laconic Melea to Egypt.
My crew grew restive; when the storm was spent and I had done flogging me with halyard, I
chose a moment somewhere off snakd Libya, slipped my cloak, rapped at Helen's cabin, and in
measured tones declared: "Forgive me." Adding firmly: "Are you there?"
He's pathetic! He runs through all these stories about himself, and as each one fails to win him
back into Helen's cabin, he comes up with another one. This is a certain kind of exhausted
narrative. It's the failure of any of these stock narratives to have the effect of restoring love and
desire, but it's more than that. It's playful. It's funny. Barth's effort at showing us the exhaustion
of narrative produces a kind of new pleasure in narrative. So it's by pointing it out, and then
parodying it, that he begins to renew the resources of fiction.
There are deeper and more difficult issues at stake, though, and this is in 155. We get a more
serious version of the scene with Magda and the problem of self-alienation. And this is what is
really at the heart of Menelaus's story. So, remember that the story is that he is obsessed with this
question of why Helen chose him among all her suitors: why did she choose him? And, when he
asks on their wedding night, she gives him an answer that only makes him more obsessed with
the question. So, at the top of 155, he's asked his question. "'Speak,' he commanded. She
whispered, 'Love.'" Now, the problem with that is that answer; it's a verb and a noun. And
Menelaus doesn't know how to take it, so here it becomes a verb:
He held her fast; she took him willy-nilly to her; I feel her yet, one endless instant, Menelaus was
no more, never has been since.
This is like that moment of erotic play with Magda for Ambrose. It eradicates identity, eradicates
sense of self. It's gone forever, and you can see the change in pronouns. "She took him willynilly to her." He's telling a story about himself, seemingly, but who is the "I," then, that's left
over? "I feel her yet." There is some residual identity left over that can still have a sense of
embodiment.
. . . In his red ear then she whispered, "Why'd I wed you?" Less what than who, et cetera?"""""
"""My very question."
"""""""Speak," Menelaus cried to Helen on the bridal bed," I reminded Helen in her Trojan
bedroom," I confessed to Eidothea on the beach," I declared to Proteus in the cave-mouth," I
vouchsafed to Helen on the ship," I told Peisistratus at least in my Spartan hall," I say to whoever
and where- I am and Helen answered:
"""""""Love."""""""
!
""""""He complied. He complied as to an order. She took his corse once more to Elysium, to fade
forever among the fadeless asphodel; his curious fancy alone remained unlaid; when he came to
himself it still asked softly: "why?""""""".

And don't I cry out to me every hour since. . . .

So, that self-alienation causes him to lose his love. We're told later that he stops sleeping with her
because he just can't get it out of his mind. He'd rather sit and wonder. His curious fancy is more
active than his desire. Or, you might say, his desire to know is more active than his desire to love.
But there is yet a complication to this problem. It's not just about Menelaus and what he chooses
to do with his desire. It's also about Helen and her action and her answer. On 156 he reflects.
Seven years of this, more or less, not much conversation, something wrong with the marriage.
Helen he could hold; how hold Menelaus? To love is easy; to be loved as if one were real, on the
order of others: fearsome mystery! Unbearable responsibility! To her Menelaus signified
something recognizable, as Helen to him. Whatever was it?
There is that sense that the other person looking at you, loving you, assures you somehow of
your reality, that you're real, that you're not an imaginary being. So, it's a way of reminding you
that you're not really alienated, but this is what Menelaus cannot get his head around. He cannot
understand that he could be loved for no reason and Proteus sort of gives us a sense of how we
could understand this. This is on 161.
Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without
question and watch your weather change. Let go.
It's a failure of faith in Aphrodite. So, to accept love is to accept your being and to have faith that
love affirms it, affirms that being. Remember that self-admonition: not act like the boyfriend
but be. This is what Menelaus has to ask forgiveness for. He didn't have enough faith in love just
to be and to accept the affirmation of his being that Helen's reasonless, causeless love embodies.
Barth is asking a really serious question about the compatibility between life and voice.
Remember that in "Ambrose His Mark" Ambrose is saved from the bees lighting on his mouth
because his mouth is on his mother's breast. He's asleep there having nursed. It's as if the bees
which signify eloquence if they land on your mouth, they land on his eyes and on his ears
instead. He can't have both that connection with his mother and that kind of eloquence. It's one
or the other. You can't have love and language somehow, and this is a very Freudian
understanding of how language works. He tells a story about a child playing what's called the
"Fort-Da" game: here, away. He has a little ball. A little two- or three-year-old kid has a ball. He
throws it away and then retrieves it, he throws it away and retrieves it, and Freud theorizes that
he does that and he says, "Fort, da, fort, da." He does that because the language is a way of
controlling his mother's absence and the ball stands in for the mother. It disappears and then it
comes back. It disappears and comes back, and at that time his mother, who is actually Freud's
daughter, was going out to work for the first time on some days, and the boy was getting used to
letting her go.
So, language arises from that loss. And Ambrose is only named once he's separated from his
mother and no longer nurses as a result of the bee incident, and he also only gains a male name at
that time. And so, I think it's important that the masculinity of language asserted with a talking
sperm at the very beginning of this collection is consistent with this sense that you become male
when you enter into language. Somehow when you're unnamed you're not part of language;
you're still connected to the mother. And he actually had a female name. Remember he's called
Christine for a while. So he becomes a boy after he's separated from his mother. Menelaus's
problem with Helen suggests that incompatibility of being connected to the other, and here
across the line of gender, connected with the other and somehow being able to be assimilated

into language, and the silence of the oracle on the question, "Who am I?" This is on 158, and you
just get that blank, silence, and you can see it enclosed in all those quotation marks.
This is Barth's effort to enclose the silence into something readable, to contain that impossibility
in the structure of the story. So all the quotation marks suggest human voice. I want to suggest to
you finally that Barth is interested in the oral tradition above all other traditions in this book.
He's using Greek epic as the source of his literary canon, here, and his canon of stories, of
narratives, because it's oral tradition that brings the human voice and the human being, the fact of
a person, together most closely. That's what fascinates him about the spoken word, as opposed to
the word you read. And in other stories in this collection Barth experimented with recording
them with tape. So, these are stories, some of them for voice and tape, and he'd do readings
where he'd go and he'd put a tape recorder on the podium and he'd stand next to the tape recorder
as his voice read the story from the tape recorder. And it was all to dramatize the problematic
relationship between voice, story and person.
But I think the dream of Menelaus is that somehow that voice can be residual, that somehow it
can survive. And, in that sense, I think it has something in common with Nabokov's fantasy of
the living artwork. But, unlike Nabokov's fantasy, it requires this concept of love, because love is
what makes being into narrative. It takes two, and it takes desire. Desire moves narrative. And so
at the end, the comic ending of "Menelaiad," which echoes the comic ending of Odysseus' trip
back home, of The Odyssey, he says:
Menelaus's story itself in ten or ten thousand years expires, yet I'll survive it [Who is this "I"?], I,
in Proteus's terrifying last disguise, Beauty" spouse"s, odd Elysium: the absurd, unending
possibility of love.
If you think that Barth in all his heady, intellectual, canonical difficulty is uninterested in the
world outside of his fiction, I think you could argue that it's on this notion of desire that he stakes
his work's connection to the world. And the echo of that desire is, I would say, pleasure:
something like, in this case, Nabokov's aesthetic bliss, but here it's more funny than that. It's not
even so much the transportation and the nostalgic quality of Nabokov's description, sometimes.
It's that wit, that pleasurable wit, the pleasure we get reading, being absorbed by something that
we have to work hard to read, and yet repays us with that pleasure. When you read Crying of Lot
49 I'd like you to think about what that novel represents in the relation between language and the
world. Is it similar? Barth and Pynchon are often talked about as part of the same metafictional
movement in this couple of decades, '60s and '70s. Are they assimilable to one another in these
terms? Think about that as you read.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 12 Transcript
February 20, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. I'd like to begin. Hello. Before launching into Pynchon
today, I thought I would just take a few moments to look back over the books that we've read and
talk about the visions of language that they have offered us, and also just to reflect for a moment
on the relationship imagined between those visions of language and what is happening outside of
fiction in what we might call the real world. We started this course talking about Black Boy and
the way that a whole world of pressure--political pressure, racial tension--pushed on the borders

of that work and actually changed its very material form. After that, I began a series of readings
of novels that emphasized more what you might call the history of literature, the history of
literature's forms and ambitions. And so, beginning that series we had O'Connor embodying a
new critical craft of fiction that comes out of modernism, imagining nevertheless that the craft is
reflective of a transcendental order in the world, a religious order. When we moved on to
Nabokov, we had an author trying to imagine a work of art so autonomous from the world that it
could be something like an autonomous form of life. That, of course, I argued in those lectures,
opened it up for the threat of mortality. If you imagine your artwork is living, it can also die. It's
a kind of hauntedness that surrounds Nabokov's vision of aesthetic bliss as one's response to that
autonomous artwork.
Kerouac represents a whole group of writers, the Beats, who reject the formalism embodied by
both O'Connor and Nabokov. They reject that formalism as an impediment to language's access
to the real, and to our access to the real through language. They dream of an unmediated
relationship between experience and the word. They don't think so much of language as a
mediating force as an expressive force. I argued in my second lecture on On the Road that, in the
end, that dream looks quite deflated when Dean can't even speak in a coherent sentence, and he
has to be rejected by Sal as Sal drives off to the jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. Nevertheless, that
dream is spiritualized. It's a way of becoming not just close to the real, but also part of some
mystical unity. That thread of the mystical quality of language at its extreme of literary power is
what I drew out of Franny and Zooey. So, Salinger, too, has the dream that the artifice of
literature, of literary language, the performance of language in the style of his novels, can
somehow be the essence of the human soul, that it can somehow communicate the truth of the
universe just through its form: its human, distinctive form. It's a way of thinking about form that
has more to do with individuality than it does with convention. Remember that way that Franny
can identify the timbre of her brother's voice very specifically: it's like no other. So, Salinger
imagines that the literary art imitates that kind of voice, and in that way it is a sacred practice, a
sacred art.
Barth rejects the idea that language is an unmediated form of access to the real: absolutely
impossible for Barth to countenance that idea. He sees life as continually, always already
mediated by language. Now, I should say, as someone from the class who came up to me after
lecture and asked me about this, that Barth's understanding of language as preceding human
understanding, preceding any sense of ourselves, in a sense always slipping out of our control, is
very much in concert with what was going on at very high-level language theory at that time. So,
the work of Jacques Lacan in France in the 1950s and '60s and of Jacques Derrida who brought
deconstruction to the United States, actually to Johns Hopkins first of all in the 1960s where
Barth was teaching. He presented that work in a very famous lecture in the late '60s. This is all
part of a way of thinking about language that became very powerful through the next decade and
a half, and we're going to see it some too next week when we read Morrison and Maxine Hong
Kingston. So, this is part of a larger intellectual trajectory. Barth is not alone in thinking these
things about language.
I argued that Barth tried to counter that sense of helplessness at the hands of language by
imagining that the human effort at connecting with another person through the mechanisms of
love and desire always renewed the possibility for language to do new kinds of work in the
world. So, if language seems exhausted because it's always preceding you, everything has always
already been said, there's no new plot to be had, the world is full of stock phrases, how do you
use them to embody an experience that seems fresh to you? How do those stock phrases alienate
you from the very experience you hope that they can describe? He thinks that following out
desire can renew language, and Menelaiad, I think, is his attempt at doing that. So, now we
arrive at that tension, and I want to suggest that Barth was still dreaming of a pretty autonomous

version of the literary art, even though in his 1987 preface to Lost in the Funhouse--I don't know
if any of you read it--he says about these stories, which were published throughout the '60s:
The high '60s, like the roaring '20s, was a time of more than usual ferment in American social,
political, and artistic life. Our unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations, race riots, the
hippie counterculture, pop art, mass poetry reading, street theater, vigorous avant-gardism in all
the arts together with dire predictions not only of the death of the novel but of the moribundity of
the print medium in the electronic global village: those flavored the air we breathed then, along
with occasional tear gas and other contaminants. One may sniff traces of that air in
the Funhouse. I myself found it more invigorating than disturbing. May the reader find these
stories likewise.
It's a very interesting little comparison he makes at the end. He takes that whole foment of 1960s
politics and counterculture, and essentially he says, "I found that invigorating as I hope you will
find these stories invigorating," as if the stories in this very--almost, seemingly, hermetically-sealed literary world that he offers us are somehow meant to have the effects of a whole decade
of foment, social foment.
If Barth only gestures towards that world, the politics of that decade, Pynchon actually lets us see
it. And if you look on page 83, this is just one of many, many examples. But I choose this one
just because it's so obvious. Oedipa is going to Berkeley looking for Emory Bortz, and she
comes on a summer weekday in the mid afternoon.
No time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came down the
slope from Wheeler Hall through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with corduroy, denim, bare
legs, blond hair, horn rims, bicycle spokes in the sun, book bags swaying, card tables, long paper
petitions dangling to earth, posters for undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the fountain,
students nose to nose in dialog. She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a
stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative universes
it would take for she had undergone her own educating at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat
not only among her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and ahead of
them [that whole world of government and social life].
Oedipa is in a different generation, of a different generation, but we can see the social foment
just in that little snapshot of the Berkeley campus. I don't know all of the acronyms. I don't know
what the FSMs are, but the YAFs are the Young Americans for Freedom. The VDCs are the
Vietnam Day Committees. The Vietnam Day Committee organized a 24-hour teach-in in 1965
against the Vietnam War. There is a little anecdote from that teach-in that I want to share with
you, that I think embodies some of the tensions in this novel. They invited Ken Kesey to come
and speak at the convention, at the teach-in. Now, Ken Kesey, some of you probably know, was a
sort of performer, writer, not really an activist. He was a purveyor of street theater and most
famously the advocate of LSD, and he and his Merry Pranksters would ride around the country
doing street theater, advocating the use of LSD and marijuana. Who, in 1964, do you think drove
their bus, which was called Further? Who do you think drove their bus? Neal Cassady drove
their bus. When they came to the Vietnam Day at the Berkeley campus, Kesey addressed the
assembled people saying, "Turn your back on the war. Look at the war, turn your back on the war
and say 'fuck it.'" This is a group of people he was addressing who were intent on doing
something to stop the war, and this was Kesey's response.
That moment, for me, embodies this tension right at the center of the 1960s, a tension between
countercultural self-development and an ethos of play, "drop out, tune in," and (I can't remember
Kesey's little motto). Essentially, leave the institutional life of America--that means schools,

government, politics, all those traditional sources of order--and create disorder. And do that as a
way of finding what's true about yourself; do it in the company of others. It had this communal
aspect, for sure. On the other side, you have a growing political movement among young people,
and of course it's legendary. By 1964, the Civil Rights movement had accomplished amazing
things. As a result of the Freedom Rides, they had integrated interstate transportation, at great
cost to the volunteers who rode those buses. They were beaten. Some were killed. Civil Rights
workers were murdered in various states. It had come to a kind of crescendo with voter
registration drives and the Voting Rights Act of 1964. At the same time, Lyndon B. Johnson was
ratcheting up the Vietnam War, so the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964, which
authorized bombing raids on Cambodia. This was a new turn in the war, and it promised to
escalate it, and this really galvanized--especially student--resistance. So, this was a time of major
political stakes, and young people at universities--primarily at universities, but also people out
doing the March on Washington, in the South, in small towns--were really changing the face of
America and its role in the world.
So, Ken Kesey, on the one hand, is looking for that internally directed, playful response to the
oppressive order of the world. And then there is this very political response. Pynchon lets us see
both. And he's parodying both kinds of response in this novel, so in that sense, the novel is very
much of its time. Now, I want to pause for a moment there and ask you a question. I want you to
think about what kind of protagonist Pynchon sends out into this world. What do you think of
Oedipa Maas? How does she strike you as a character? How would you describe her? Yeah.
Student: Desperate.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Desperate. Okay. How else? Yeah.
Student: Powerless.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Powerless. Uh huh.
Student: Very confused.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Confused. What else? Those are all pretty negative adjectives.
Does she bring any resources? Yes.
Student: She's especially attractive.
Professor Amy Hungerford: She's attractive. Yes, she is. What else? What other resources does
she bring? Yeah.
Student: She's curious.
Professor Amy Hungerford: She's curious. Yeah. What else? Anything else?
Student: She's determined.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Determined. Uh huh. When this book first came out, critics called
her a lightweight. Was that a word that ever occurred to you? Did anyone think, "this is just a
fluff character"? I would suggest to you that the difference in your response and the critics' is the
difference that feminism in the '70s made. In the 1960s, to have a protagonist go into the world
and discover this incredibly complex set of patterns, and to have that protagonist be a housewife,
was very much playing against type. So, Pynchon took a certain kind of risk by choosing to

make his protagonist a housewife. So, the question is, why did he do that? I want to suggest to
you that he did that because a woman is expected to occupy certain conventional roles at this
moment, and we see her in one at the very beginning of the novel. She has just come back from a
Tupperware party where the hostess put too much kirsch in the punch, so she's a little drunk. So
you get this image of her as this stereotypical '50s housewife going to Tupperware parties. And
then she makes salad, she does the shopping, she picks herbs from the garden, she makes
lasagna, she mixes drinks so that they'll be ready when Mucho comes home, when her husband
comes home: very typical.
So, this is the moment in which she discovers that she's been chosen, or named, as the executrix
of Pierce's will. It's that conventionality that then allows her to occupy multiple roles. And let me
just detail some of those. You see it almost in language of aside. This is when she first meets
Genghis Cohen. Yes. Now the names in here, we have to think about them at some point. One
thing you can say about them is that they are funny. A second thing you can say about them is
that they seem redolent of meaning. I can't tell you how many scholars have come up with
different readings of what Oedipa's name means. That's just Oedipa, and then there are so many
hundreds of others. They are redolent of meaning. What are we to do with that fact? It's a
question for you. Three: they declare that language is always mediated, always mediating, that
your experience of people is never clear of some set of meanings that someone else has assigned
to it. Your encounter with the world is always mediated.
So, these names drag associations with them, and one question I want to ask is: what to do with
those? But I'm going to set that question aside for a moment, and note that, at meeting Genghis,
"Oedipa felt at once motherly." Now, this may seem like a small aside, but if we look also on 73,
when she meets Mr. Thoth, she says (on the very top; he's telling Oedipa his dream, and she sees
in it clues to the Thurn and Taxis mystery):
Oedipa, sensitized, thinking of the bronze marker, smiled at him as granddaughterly as she knew
how and asked, "Did he ever have to fight off desperados?"
And then, of course, she gets a major clue for figuring out what the whole story is behind the
Tristero and the post horn. "Granddaughterly." It's a role she occupies with great ease. A last
example, on 122. This is when she's going to meet Emory Bortz:
Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student-like twist,
went easy on the makeup.
These are her resources: makeup, clothes, hair. With them she can occupy all these different
roles, and in doing so she has access to certain kinds of knowledge. Her roles are as fluid, in
some ways, as Pierce's were. Remember that when Pierce calls her, he's always impersonating
someone. So, he was speaking with his Lamont Cranston voice the last time that she spoke to
him. The difference between the way Oedipa occupies these various roles, and Pierce did it, is
that Oedipa's roles have a kind of traction in the world with other people that Pierce's voices--or
even Dr. Hilarius's voices--simply don't have. These male versions of it are all so apparently
performances that they can't get much out of them, except to annoy Oedipa. But Oedipa jumps
right into these conventional roles, and in that act comes to know more about the world in a way
that these men cannot.
Oedipa is--even from the time she was a child--a reader, and we find that out on page 14 when
she has her religious instant. And I hope you remembered that scene of Sal looking down on Salt
Lake City, the birthplace of Dean, from On the Road, very similar structure. He looks down, and

he sees the little city laid out below him. So, this is Oedipa in one of the first instances of her
becoming a reader:
She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight [this is when she first sees San
Narciso], onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together like a well-tended crop
from the dull, brown earth, and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace
a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets from this high
angle sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.
Though she knew even less about radios than about southern Californians, there were to both
outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There
had seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her if she had tried to find out.
So, in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her
understanding. Smog hung all around the horizon. The sun on the bright, beige countryside was
painful. She and the Chevy seemed parked at the center of an odd religious instant, as if on some
other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even
to feel the centrifugal coolness of words were being spoken. She suspected that much. She
thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job. Was it something like this he felt
looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and
cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might
be for a holy man yet really tuned in to the voice, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by
it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to? Did Mucho stand outside Studio A looking in
knowing that even if he could hear it he couldn't believe in it? She gave up presently as if a cloud
had approached the sun or the smog thickened and so broken the religious instant, whatever it
might have been.
Here, the cloud becomes the obscuring of this sense of intent to communicate or a sense of
meaning's pattern. But it still retains--as it did in Flannery O'Connor--that spiritual sense that the
divine is always shrouded around by some Cloud of Unknowing. But here we see her with the
desire to know. And the difference between her as a child and her in this moment is that she had
not bothered to find out. If she had tried to find out about the radio circuit, she would have
learned something. She did not try. This time she will try. So, she's a reader who notices patterns
even from a young age. And at this moment she is called upon--and she rises to the occasion--to
figure out what the pattern will mean.
And, of course, she progresses through a kind of education as a reader. She goes from being a
reader who can listen, for example, to the ambiguities in the Wharfinger play. She can hear when
the ambiguity creeps in between the words, and that tells her that she needs to find something
out. That's what causes her to have the curiosity to go backstage. She becomes a critic. She
moves from interpretation to actually finding the history, and the intertextuality, and the
variations of these editions of the play. She learns history, of the U.S. and of Europe, about the
mail systems. She learns the history of Inverarity's enterprises. So, she becomes a scholar in a
certain way, an amateur scholar. She's not just a reader; she's someone who actually performs
research.
Where does all of this get her? Well, I think, what we're led to believe, is precisely nowhere, in
terms of revelation. Does a revelation ever happen? Of course, the book ends with her waiting
for the anonymous bidder to reveal himself. Whether that would ever happen, if Pynchon had
decided to let us in on the secret, I don't know. Pynchon, instead, chooses to end the novel before
that moment, and so we're left with a kind of emptiness. We're left with the multiple options that
she laments. If you look on 146-147, she rehearses all the possibilities of meaning, and her
conclusion, finally, is this:

San Narciso was a name, an incident among our climatic records of dreams and what dreams
became among our accumulated daylight, a moment's squall line or tornado's touchdown among
the higher, more continental solemnities, storm systems of group suffering and need, prevailing
winds of affluence. There was the true continuity. San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew
yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself weeks ago to making sense of what Inverarity
had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.
And then, I'm going to skip down a little bit:
Though she never again called back any image of the dead man to dress up, pose, talk to and
make answer, neither would she lose a new compassion for the cul-de-sac he'd tried to find a way
out of, for the enigma his efforts had created.
What we don't get here is a sense of whether there really is an alternate secret postal system that
serves a sort of underground of private networks. We don't ever get a sense of whether these
stamps and the signs that she sees everywhere in San Francisco when she travels through the city
in the night, whether these things are a coherent meaning, or whether they are her fabrication. We
don't really know and she never really can say. All she has is the sense that there is this pattern.
Now, there are two things that she is left with, in the passage I just read: that sense of San
Narciso being all of America, and, moreover, of it being constituted of "storm systems of group
suffering and need." So, remember all of the little subcommunities that she interacts with have
some sort of pain or loss associated with them: the Inamorati Anonymous for example, people
who don't want to love. It's all comedy, but then there is a heart, a kernel. And if we look on page
101-102, we can begin to see what that heart or kernel is that recuperates what I would call the
sentimental. So, this is when she's in San Francisco, looking around the city. She's come there
hoping to escape the network of symbols that she has seen--all those post horns--and instead
she's immersed with a new network of them. We're told:
Just before the morning rush hour she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in
the red downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she
looked terrible, knuckles black with eyeliner and mascara from where she had rubbed, mouth
tasting of old booze and coffee, through an open doorway. On the stair leading up into the
disinfectant-smelling twilight of a rooming house, she saw an old man huddled, shaking with
grief she couldn't hear. Both hands, smoke white, covered his face. On the back of the left hand
she made out the post horn tattooed in old ink now beginning to blur and spread. Fascinated, she
came into the shadows and ascended creaking steps, hesitating on each one. When she was three
steps from him the hands flew apart and his wrecked face and the terror of eyes gloried in burst
veins stopped her. "Can I help?" She was shaking, tired. "My wife's in Fresno," he said. He wore
an old double-breasted suit, frayed gray shirt, wide tie, no hat. "I left her so long ago I don't
remember. This is for her." He gave Oedipa a letter that looked like he'd been carrying it around
for years.
And he tells her to drop it in the "W.A.S.T.E., lady," can. W.A.S.T.E. We're not allowed to say
"waste," remember. And then she is gripped with--as she says, "overcome all at once"--by a need
to touch him, as if she could not believe in him or would not remember him. And she reflects,
just above that, on the mattress that he must sleep in, and this is one of those great Pynchon
sentences. This is a question, but it comes in the declarative form, too.
What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained
foliage, candle stubs lit to rotate in the air over him prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must
fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by

the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless
overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream like the memory bank to a
computer of the lost.
It's a sort of aria of description, and Pynchon can string those clauses together like no one else.
There are even longer examples in the book, and I'm sure you noticed them. Oedipa needs to
actually touch the man, and when she finally, sort of, takes him in her arms, the position she
assumes looks like that of a mother with her broken son. And the image is much more
specifically of Michelangelo's Pieta. And remember the Lago di Pieta figures prominently in the
novel, both as the site of the rout of GIs in Italy, and the lake from which their bones are taken to
make charcoal filters for cigarettes. So, the Pieta, the image of Mary with Jesus' body broken
from the cross on her lap, is repeated, and here Oedipa comes to inhabit that position. It's not a
social role in the way that she could be granddaughterly or motherly on those other occasions.
It's a religious image. It's also a gendered religious image; it's also an aesthetic image. But here,
it's infused with her compassionate approach to this man.
And remember, in the passage that I read about Inverarity's escape, what she left with, as her
final understanding. She has a kind of compassion for Pierce and the way that he had surrounded
himself with this network of holdings that he had tried to escape from in some way. So, if you
cannot, finally, have a pattern resolve into a clarity of truth or meaning, what you can do instead
is inhabit a role where you will be in contact with the very material of social life. And that's what
that mattress is: totally imbued with the bodily detritus of a human life, actually of many human
lives. She reflects, later, on the set of all men who had slept on that mattress. Pynchon wants to
imagine a very physical repository for the social, and especially for the human, affective
dimensions of the social.
That's why Oedipa has all these men stripped away from her. Remember, she says that, as she is
growing more and more desperate at the end, that her men were being stripped away from her
one by one. And so, when she comes to be isolated in this way, she can finally see and meditate
upon, in a new way, all those systems of communication. And she has that vision of the
telephone wires, and she looks up at them as she has just doubted all of the possibilities for
making sense of the post horn and the Tristero. She looks up at the telephone wires, and she
thinks about all the messages, unintelligible, full of human longing, going back and forth across
those wires. So, if Pynchon gives us the pattern of meaning, rather than meaning itself in this
novel, he also gives us a vision of what it means to embody that pattern.
This is very different from Nabokov's idea of embodiment as a kind of alternate or rival
creativity. Remember, I argued that Lolita has a dead child, and she dies in childbirth, in a way,
because it's a kind of creativity that Nabokov wants to cancel, or that Humbert wants to cancel.
In this novel, it's not a rival creativity. It's what creativity has to be, in the literary sense. Now,
Pynchon was a student of Nabokov for a couple of years at Cornell University in the early '60s,
so he took courses with Nabokov. I don't know how close they were, but he certainly learned a
few things from Nabokov. This is something he revises from that old teacher. He is imagining a
literary form that is soaked in the stuff of social life. So, if you only get a sniff of the tear gas in
Barth, here you get a whole draught full of it. And what I think he is rejecting: if you look on
page 95 (oops. That's not the one I want. Yes, it is 95. If you look on page 95) there is a
different vision of what the artwork could look like that I think we're meant to put next to that
vision of Oedipa with the suffering sailor. This is when it first occurs to her that the whole world
is being organized around her:
Nothing of the night's could touch her. Nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough,
without trauma, as well, perhaps, to attenuate it, or even jar it altogether loose from her memory.

She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high
balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding time among the beasts in a zoo, any death wish that can be
consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing
it would be lovely beyond dreams, simply to submit to it, that not gravity's pull, laws of
ballistics, feral ravening promised more delight. She tested it, shivering. I am meant to
remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for
permanence, but then she wondered if the gemlike clues were only some kind of compensation
to make up for her having lost the direct epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.
This is a meditation on both the joy and the loss of literary substitution for the real or for the
truth, the substitution of abstract pattern for something like comprehensible meaning. So here,
she's kind of enthralled with the idea that these gemlike clues--that's a very Nabokovian
moment--the gemlike clues that are gathering around her would be a compensation for the loss of
that real access to revelation. And this has this religious sense to it. It's not just the religious
instant of looking down at San Narciso; it's the religious sense of the capitalized Word that
comes back a couple of times towards the end of the novel, the epileptic Word. The "Word,"
capitalized, always refers back to the beginning of the Gospel of John, where John describes
Christ as the Word made flesh: "The Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word
was made flesh and came to dwell among us." So, Pynchon is using that religious vocabulary:
not just the religious imagery of the Pieta, but the religious vocabulary of the capitalized Word.
So, you can have a kind of system of symbols that's gemlike and pleasurable and that calls you to
submit to it as it does here for Oedipa, but in the end there is something more that her search will
produce, and that is the moment of compassion. And, I would submit to you that tears are just all
over this novel. I don't know if you noticed it, but there are many, many examples. I'll just give
you a few. First of all, there are the tears that accumulate in her bubble shades when she's in
Mexico looking at Remedios Varo"s painting of the women in the tower embroidering the long
tapestries that become the world. So, that sense of isolation in the tower makes her weep. On 117
you can see another example. This is Mucho talking about the Muzak:
"Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it's a flipping miracle." His eyes brimming, reflecting the
color of beer.
113, this is Dr. Hilarius, crying: "Tears sprang to Hilarius' eyes. 'You aren't going to shoot,'" he
says. 146, in her moment of desperation when she loses her connection to the Inamorato
Anonymous, or when she's about to talk to him: "She waited, inexplicable tears beginning to
build up pressure around her eyes." Back on 108. This is the nurse who has just escaped from Dr.
Hilarius: "'He thinks someone's after him.' Tear streaks had meandered down over the nurse's
cheekbones."
It's not just that we could explain any of these moments of tears. It's that Pynchon describes them
all, notes them all. So, this is a novel that's full of people crying, which is an odd thing to think
about when you think back to Pynchon's reputation as a metafictional novelist, as someone
preeminently preoccupied with the formal aspects of fiction. What you find when you actually
open up Pynchon's novels is an incredibly rich world of human detritus, of history. In Gravity's
Rainbow he did enormous amounts of research in newspapers from the Second World War in
London where some of the novel is set, so that you can go to newspapers and find the ads that he
talks about in the novels. So, he combines this very attentive set of details, which are not always,
and often are not at all, the aesthetic details with which Nabokov filled Lolita.
Remember, when I asked you about the specificity of America in On the Road, and I asked you
to think about whether there was anything there at all? In On the Road, there isn't anything. In

Nabokov there is, but it's usually aesthetic: how things look, the look of a hotel, the look of a
field, the look of a child, the look of a woman. In Pynchon, often, these are somehow social
details about people talking to other people, political things, places, and how houses are
arranged. But there is a sense that these are social worlds, not just patterns, even though at the
beginning that's how Oedipa sees them. As she goes further and further in to her search for
knowledge--and finally her abandonment of that search of knowledge--she sees more and more
that this is not just pattern, that it's these storm systems of suffering and need.
So, I think this is what Pynchon brings to the string of meditations on what language can do, and
what the novel is for, that I began my lecture today with, just recapping for you. He's trying to
imagine a novel that meditates both on these structures of meaning that imbue the real world,
such that there is no name that isn't already saturated with associations, and that within such a
world, if you enter into it, you can come to encounter the real. And the real is that sense of
suffering, and that the novel can make you feel things, both the pleasure of humor or the pleasure
of beauty, but also that sense of compassion. And I don't know about you, but I feel compassion
for Oedipa. I feel like she's a real character. I think she is a character that you can--if not identify
with--at least, you can understand and be interested in.
So, Pynchon offers us that, and in our next reading, when we start with Toni Morrison and also
Maxine Hong Kingston, what you're going to see is a kind of shift. So all these meditations on
language, these different ways of thinking about how language interacts with the real, and what
you can do by messing with language, are almost, I would say, taken as read, taken as the starting
point from which a writer like Morrison or Kingston will begin to rethink how those things can
be used in relation to the real world. So, that's where we'll start when we think about Morrison
next week. Let me just also say there are a thousand things to talk about in this novel, so I hope
you'll get to some of them in section. And if you want to write about this, it's a very rich novel
for writing your papers.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 13 Transcript
February 25, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: So, today we will talk about The Bluest Eye. This novel has a lot
to do with the questions that John Barth was thinking about, in a very different register, in Lost
in the Funhouse.This is, of course, the story of a little girl who is totally remade by a story that's
told to her, and I just want to point this out to you, on page 182 of The Bluest Eye. This is the
letter that Soaphead Church writes to God explaining his action. He has, remember, tricked
Pecola in to thinking that if something happens to the dog that he sends her out to feed, it will be
a sign that God has answered her prayer for blue eyes. And, of course, what he has given her to
give to the dog is poison. So of course the dog dies, and this convinces Pecola that her prayers
have been answered, and it pushes her over the edge in to something like schizophrenia. But
Soaphead is very satisfied with his work, and this is how he describes that work:
"I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her. I played You," he says to God, "and it was a
very good show. I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her two blue eyes, cobalt
blue, a streak of it, right out of Your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes, but she
will, and she will live happily ever after. I, I have found it meet and right so to do."

That last line, "meet and right so to do," is from the Anglican liturgy, or may also occur in the
Catholic liturgy. It refers to the Last Supper; "It is meet and right so to do" to commemorate
Christ's last supper with his disciples through the sacrament of the Eucharist. So, he makes that
story he tells her, one, into a sacramental story, as if he is giving her God's gift. But it is very
patently a story, and we get that because he says "she will live happily ever after."
So, what he has invited her to do is to fully inhabit the dream of the white aesthetic that her
mother has absorbed through the movies and has used in naming her. Remember, in the novel
we're told that Pecola's name is close to a name from the 1934 movie Imitation of Life, which has
a complicated story. But it's about race relations, and it features a little girl named Peola who
ends up passing for white because she so hates the blackness of her mother. So, Pecola's mother
absorbed that white aesthetic, projected it on to her daughter, and her daughter finally so longs to
inhabit that story that she goes to Soaphead Church. And this is how she ends up, and the cost of
inhabiting that story is derangement.
If John Barth's characters inhabit stories, stories that precede them in the world-- Remember, this
is why it's important that the narrator of the first story in that collection is the sperm. The sperm
comes already stocked with the phrases and patterns of prior literature. Well, Toni Morrison
advances an analysis that is not so different. Pecola came into the world, essentially, through her
mother and the society that surrounded her, stocked with the story of white aesthetics, the story
that told her that she and her family were ugly and irredeemable. The quality of Morrison's
fiction could not be more different from the quality of Barth's fiction, and I want to suggest to
you that that's because in Morrison's fiction--this is her first novel begun in the early '60s,
published in 1970--in this novel, she is absorbing something from that '60s culture, reflecting on
it, that Barth kept very much at arm's length. So, the abstract question of what kinds of narratives
produce the identity of a person becomes for Morrison a political question.
Remember that divide I was describing in the 1960s political world, where some activists by the
mid '60s began to drop out of activism because they were convinced that it was more important
to know themselves than to actually go and try to promote a positive program in the world. And
there was the counterculture gaining steam, advocating a playful engagement with the world that
would be uninterested in questions like the Vietnam War. "Turn your back on the war," says Ken
Kesey. Drop out. Drop acid; that's the thing you should be doing. Well, the cultural politics of the
late '60s try to merge these two kinds of resistance to convention. So it merges the cultural focus
of the counterculture--that's why it's called the counterculture; it produces a culture against the
prevailing culture--and that politically activist body of thought coming out of the Civil Rights
movement and the Black Power movement in the '60s. So, this produces a cultural politics, the
cultural politics of the late '60s and into the '70s, and I would say even up through the culture
wars of the 1990s.
This is the legacy of the 1960s in literature. So, Morrison takes the insights of Barth, and she
turns them to political purpose. One of our questions today is going to be: Why does Toni
Morrison, in 1970, sit down to write a novel, instead of a tract? Why is she interested in
literature, as opposed to something like sociology? She has such a strong and passionate desire
for justice for African Americans. Why is literature her chosen venue? Now, I'm sure there are a
thousand reasons, but we're going to--I'm going to--bring some of them out of the novel that we
can read right there. Just without going into biography or psychology, we're going to think about
how the novel presents itself as doing a kind of work in the world that Barth's writing never tries
to do. So, that's where I'm going to go today.
Let me also point out that, like Pynchon, Morrison wants to imagine the novel as a medium that
can hold the human within it. So, a second question that I want to get at today is, given that

commonality--Remember, I ended my lecture on Pynchon by arguing that sentiment remained

important in Pynchon's work; despite all that word play, all that self-conscious irony of the story,
all that humor at the level of names, what really finally mattered was not that search for meaning,
but the moment when you could touch another human being. And Pynchon is interested in
certain kinds of essences--like dandelion wine, or tears, or the sailor's mattress--that hold in
them, in suspension, the cycles and movements of human life.
Morrison has that same desire to hold the human in her fiction, and so this is one reason why
Morrison chooses the novel. This is the first of the reasons: to hold the human in suspension in
the novel. Now it takes a very particular form, and if you think to the passages about Pauline,
there is the section on Pecola's mother, Pauline, where we see large blocks of italics of her voice
coming to us. This is a very obvious example of how that works in Morrison's fiction. This is an
effort to let the voice of the unheard speak through her fiction. So, why write a novel instead of
writing a tract or becoming a sociologist or a politician? One reason, for Morrison, is that the
novel allows the voices of the oppressed to speak in a way that they could not otherwise. This
entails a certain assumption about her own position as a writer. She writes from within a black
community she knows well. This novel is set in Lorain, Ohio, her hometown, and so she takes on
that task because she feels she is equipped for it; she can speak in a communal voice or she can
make her voice available for the voices within the community that she knows.
Now, how many of you have read Beloved? Ah, great. I usually don't put it on the syllabus
because I assume most people have read it. But, if you recall, this effort to recover the voice of
the unheard is absolutely central to Beloved; it is the premise of Beloved. Toni Morrison found
an account of a woman in a newspaper in the mid nineteenth century who tried to kill her
children instead of allowing them to be recaptured into slavery, and she thought about what kind
of story that woman would have to tell about her life, or what kind of story could be told about
that woman that the papers, that historians, would never know and would never be able to
recover. Fiction, because it is imaginative, gives you a way to get at what academics of the
traditional kind cannot transmit about the past, but also, in this novel, about a life that is closer to
her current moment, the moment of writing.
So, by including Pauline's voice, she allows Pauline to begin to tell her own story of how she
became married to Cholly Breedlove and how she evolved in to the fairly hateful woman that we
see her to be when we see her as Pecola's mother. You might find, and I have to admit I myself
find, that particular example quite clunky in a literary sense. Why did Morrison suddenly turn to
those italicized blocks? And, I don't know if you read the-- I think you have the postscript, the
afterword, that Morrison appended to this edition of the novel. If you haven't read it, I would
suggest that you do. It's quite interesting. She notes there that she herself is very unhappy with
that section of the novel. She herself finds it clunky from the perspective of twenty years later.
She writes the afterword in 1993. So, it's unsatisfying to her, but there are more successful
versions of it. And you see that, for example, when the women are gathered around Aunt Jimmy's
bed, and they're talking as she is in her final sickness. And they're talking with one another about
their aches and pains. That's one example of how those voices come into the novel. There are just
many dozens of these examples, so any time you hear a character begin to speak, you have that
sense that you're hearing something that you wouldn't otherwise hear if Morrison was not there
to open your ear to it and to embody those voices. It's one of the great strengths of her writing is
that ability to embody the voice. So, that's one reason why you write a novel instead of being a
sociologist.
Another reason is to push the boundaries of what's credible, to push those boundaries so far that
you can see the abject very clearly in front of you within a literary form, and so she chooses
Pecola as the ugly child. She seems to have no redeeming intelligence. She has no one who

really loves her, except maybe a few whores who live above her house. She has no conversation
that we really recall. She doesn't say anything particularly witty. Probably what we remember her
for is simply that desire to have blue eyes. We don't really get inside her head, even, and so this
is a place where Morrison's desire to speak for those who can't speak for themselves runs up
against a wall. But she's very interested in what happens when the imagination hits up against
that wall. How far can we go towards inhabiting the subject position of an abject person? That's
what she's testing in this novel. And she herself speaks of a silence at the heart of it, and that
silence is in part the silence about Pecola's experience of the rape, when she's raped by her father.
We don't really get a sense of what she thinks, what she experiences. If you think again back to
Barth, remember that quotation of silence at the very center of Menelaiad. So, Morrison is again
engaging a problem that other writers are engaging at this time, but she's setting it in a very
specific historical moment with very specific historical and political connotations and
implications coming out of her examination.
So, silence is at the heart, but it's hedged around so that we can see it as a silence. So, extremity
does that for her. I would argue that the third reason she uses the novel instead of a tract is to
generate sympathy. And this, again, I was arguing, is part of Pynchon's project. Usually, someone
like Morrison is separate in people's categories of contemporary fiction from writers like Barth
and Pynchon. I am going to argue that they actually occupy much of the same space. What does
sympathy look like in Morrison? Well, she sets herself a task that, I would say, is almost as hard
as the task that Nabokov has set himself, and in fact maybe it's even harder. Nabokov set himself
the task of making us like Humbert Humbert. Now how many of you liked Humbert in the end?
He's getting less popular as the weeks go by. More of you seemed to like him when we were in
the throes of reading his seductive voice. But Nabokov set himself the task of seducing us with
Humbert's voice.
Morrison, as part of this novel, sets herself the task of making us sympathize with a drunk who
has no verbal capacities who rapes his own daughter. Now, does she succeed? Well, let's take a
look. On page 146, we're a little ways into the story of Cholly Breedlove, and this is in the scene
where he has just left the funeral of his aunt with a girl named Darlene. And they're playing and
flirting and making out in the field. She's gotten her clothes dirty:
"You ain't dirty," he says to her. "I am too. Look at that." She dropped her hands from the ribbon
and smoothed out a place on her dress where the grape stains were heaviest. Cholly felt sorry for
her. It was just as much his fault. Suddenly he realized that Aunt Jimmy was dead, for he missed
the fear of being whipped. There was nobody to do it except Uncle O.V., and he was the
bereaved too. "Let me," he said, and he rose to his knees, facing her, and tried to tie her ribbon.
Darlene put her hands under his open shirt and rubbed the damp skin. When he looked at her in
surprise she stopped and laughed. He smiled and continued knotting the bow. She put her hands
back under his shirt.
These little gestures that Morrison grants to Cholly in this scene--tiny gestures of tying the girl's
bow, leaning over her, concerned for her looks as she goes back to her mother, telling her-reassuring her--that she's not dirty, and in a novel that is so full of demonized cleanliness his
gentle assurance that her dress though stained, is not dirty in the moral sense--this is a mark of
kindness, the mark of humanity. So, Morrison begins with small details like this to build up our
sympathy for Cholly. It gets more intense when he meets his father in the city. This is on page
155. This is when he first sees him playing craps in the alleyway:
A man in a light-brown jacket stood at the far end of the group. He was gesturing in a
quarrelsome, agitated manner with another man. Both of them had folded their faces in anger.
Cholly edged round to where they stood, hardly believing he was at the end of his journey. There

was his father, a man like any other man, but there indeed were his eyes, his mouth, his whole
head, his shoulders lurched beneath that jacket, his voice, his hands, all real. They existed, really
existed, somewhere, right here. Cholly had always thought of his father as a giant of a man, so
when he was very close it was with a shock that he discovered that he was taller than his father.
In fact, he was staring at a balding spot on his father's head, which he suddenly wanted to stroke.
While thus fascinated by the pitiable clean space hedged round by neglected tufts of wool, the
man turned a hard, belligerent face to him. [And then assumes that Cholly has come at the behest
of a woman that he's slept with to squeeze money out of him.]
So, in this scene, we once again see that humane touching impulse. He wants to touch his father's
head, touch the sign of his father's mortality, the fact that his father is growing older. He sees in
his father's body his own face, hands, voice, and we can feel that with him. And then, when he
flees from that scene, finally, and soils himself, he becomes another one of those abject
characters. And he goes to hide under a pier, finally bathes in a river at night. This kind of detail
gives us two things: both the beginnings or another iteration of the reason why he becomes who
he becomes, the drunk, the rapist, but it gives us more than that. It gives us a sense of his
complexity. It makes us want to like him, and, in fact, by this point I would argue that probably
most readers do like him at this point in the novel. Can Morrison sustain this to the very end?
Well, in a way I want you to be the judge, but if we look on 206, I would argue that we're
beginning to see that effort. This is at the very end of the novel, speaking of Pecola:
Oh, some of us "loved" her [and that "love" is in quotations] the Maginot Line and Cholly loved
her. I'm sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her,
give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled
the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love
wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone
possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's
inward eye.
For one thing, Morrison endows these sentences with a lyrical quality that makes us feel their
power. But there's one line she uses to describe Cholly that I think trumps all the others, and
that's this one about the love of a free man: "The love of a free man is never safe." Safety is not
exactly of value in this novel. If it were, the safe white household in which Mrs. Breedlove
works would look a lot more appealing than it does. There is a certain safety for Frieda and
Claudia in their intact household, but there, too, it is fraught with suffering. Their mother is cruel
to them. She yells at them. Safety is not really to be had there, and the safety that is had comes at
great cost.
When Cholly is described as having freed himself, earlier in the novel, part of that story which
we don't get explicitly is that he has learned to turn his hatred, finally, against the white men,
symbolized by the white men who discover him making love to Darlene in that earlier scene.
We're told that initially he hates her instead of the white men, because hating the white men
would undo him to such an extent he was not ready to see that oppression for what it was. Later
in his life, we're told, he kills three white men. We don't know the circumstances, and at that
moment, we're told that he's a free man.
Freedom, when applied to a black man, cannot be a wholly negative quality. In the context that
Morrison evokes, of a society still plagued by the remnants of slavery, to call Cholly free can't be
to dismiss him. It gives a certain honor and weight to his anger. And to re-evoke that word, to
come back to that word, in describing his love for the daughter he rapes, I think, is quite
controversial. It suggests that there was some value in the thing of himself he gave to her. Now,

this is not exactly what you'd want to call a feminist position, although Morrison certainly is I
would say a feminist writer in the largest sense of that word. But what she has tried to do here, in
keeping with the challenge that I think she must have set for herself, is to make us see Cholly
complexly enough to sympathize with him even after he commits this crime. So she takes a
certain kind of risk, but that's why she does it. She wants us to see him in a sympathetic light.
This is what a novel can do. It requires that lyrical quality of voice; it requires the buildup of
history, and it requires, in this scene, the return to that precise language. So, a very common
literary technique--we see it all the time in the things that we read together--is to return to the
terms you used in an earlier moment to ring the changes on those terms again, to use that word.
Well, that's what Morrison uses to produce this sense of value in Cholly at the end of the novel.
In this sense it participates or is in conversation with a tradition of the nineteenth-century novel
in America. So, one of the most prestigious novels of the nineteenth century is of course Harriet
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a hugely successful novel, abolitionist novel whose aim
was to create a sense of the slave's humanity for white readers so that white readers would
become inspired to the abolitionist cause. What was repulsive about that novel to someone like
Morrison is the starched white virtue and the starched white culture to which the African
American characters in the novel were recruited. So, in that novel, their humanity and the
sympathy that that would evoke from the reader depended on their looking as white as possible,
and therefore there was this great privileging of the light-skinned black in that novel and a sense
of Christian value redeeming the darker-skinned characters. They needed it--more, it seems, than
the light-skinned characters--so the darker your skin is in Uncle Tom's Cabin the more religious
you are. So it's a whitewashing of the African American figure. So, Morrison takes something of
the sympathetic project ofUncle Tom's Cabin and that tradition of the nineteenth-century novel,
but she transforms it by making us sympathetic to someone like Cholly who Harriet Beecher
Stowe would put so far outside the pale of humanity we wouldn't- he wouldn't even be visible on
her screen. So, this is her project.
Sympathy, however, relies on some darker and more ambiguous techniques that Morrison is also
committed to, and one of those is what I'm going to call negativity. Morrison is very careful--in
this novel, especially--to talk about what people are not. And you see an example of this on page
55, when she's describing the prostitutes. This is after she's been telling stories--Miss Marie has
been telling stories--to Pecola about her husband.
They did not belong [This is at the bottom of the page]. They did not belong to those generations
of prostitutes created in novels with great and generous hearts, dedicated because of the horror of
circumstance to ameliorating the luckless, barren life of men, taking money incidentally and
humbly for their understanding. Nor were they from that sensitive breed of young girl gone
wrong at the hands of fate, forced to cultivate an outward bitterness in order to protect her
springtime from further shock, but knowing full well she was cut out for better things and could
make the right man happy. Neither were they the sloppy, inadequate whores who, unable to make
a living at it alone, turned to drug consumption and traffic or pimps to help complete their stream
of self-destruction, avoiding suicide only to punish the memory of some absent father or to
sustain the misery of some silent mother. Except for Marie's fabled love for Dewey Prince, these
women hated men, all men, without shame, apology or discrimination. They abused their visitors
with a scorn grown mechanical from use: black men, white men, Puerto Ricans, Mexican, Jews,
Poles, whatever. All were inadequate and weak. All came under their jaundiced eyes and were
the recipients of their disinterested wrath. They took delight in cheating them. On one occasion
the town well knew they lured a Jew up the stairs, pounced on him, all three, held him up by the
heels, shook everything out of his pants pockets and threw him out of the window. Neither did
they have respect for women who, although not their colleagues so to speak, nevertheless
deceived their husbands regularly or irregularly. It made no difference. Sugar-coated whores they

called them, and did not yearn to be in their shoes. Their only respect was for what they would
have described as good Christian colored women, the woman whose reputation was spotless and
who tended to her family, who didn't drink or smoke or run around. These women had their
undying, if covert, affection. They would sleep with their husbands and take their money, but
always with a vengeance. Nor were they protective and solicitous of youthful innocence. They
looked back on their own youth as a period of ignorance and regretted that they had not made
more of it. They were not young girls in whores' clothing or whores regretting their loss of
innocence. They were whores in whores' clothing, whores who had never been young and had no
word for innocence.
"Whores in whores' clothing." That's the negativity, one version of the negativity. It refuses all
those conventional stock stories of what whores can be in the novel. So, the very first instance of
it singles out the novel: "They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels
with great and generous hearts," and so on. But all those other versions are equally fictional
types of prostitutes. So she rejects the stock literary cupboard of stories about prostitutes. "They
were whores in whores' clothing." There is an assertion of their opacity right there. They are
opaque to literary embellishment. They are what they are; they just are whores. But the
negativity, the repeated "nors"--neither were they this, nor were they that, they were not this,
they were not that--it is a kind of engine of narrative. And it limns the place where they might
come to stand in and of themselves, without embellishment. So, the effort to help us to
sympathize with marginal characters--Cholly Breedlove, prostitutes--is an effort at limning a
space where they can stand in and of themselves, and it creates narrative for us to sympathize
through. It creates a credibility for her voice; it creates a sense of where they can occupy a space,
these characters. What's more, Marie, as we know, is the one person who really tells stories in
this novel. So Morrison also gives her a special gift as a character, a gift that Morrison's own gift
echoes. She's allowed to tell stories for Pecola's delight. She's the only one who does that sort of
thing for this child.
Pecola herself, though, is the ultimate negativity, and this is on 205. You can see how this works.
This is in the middle of that page.
All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed, all of our beauty which was
hers first and she gave to us, all of us, all who knew her, felt so wholesome after we cleaned
ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity
decorated us. Her guilt sanctified us. Her pain made us glow with health. Her awkwardness made
us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her
poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used to silence our own nightmares and
she let us and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters
with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
Pecola is the embodiment of the negative, so she represents all that the community does not want
in itself: the excess blackness, the ugliness that the white aesthetic says can't be changed or
redeemed. She represents the poverty that they all strive to escape, or at least keep a bit at bay.
So, Pecola as the negativity is--through the whole novel, in the structure of the whole novel--the
absence that keeps the narrative engine working. It has to keep working because she's always
there as the negative pole waiting to be touched--even in the least bit--by the narrative's
revelation.
So she embodies that, the desire to know another person, which, in Menelaiad, if you'll
remember, is Menelaus's undoing. He diddles on and on, his voice asking, "Why? Why? Why'd
you choose me, Helen? Why? Why do you love me?" He can't take any answer, and it makes him
ridiculous and it ruins his marriage. That effort to know another person is much more than a

diddling on, in Morrison. That effort to know another person isn't by definition put off limits, in
Morrison. The effort at trying is far more honored. The alienation from self which produces a
kind of irony and a pleasure in humor in both Barth and Pynchon, that self-consciousness that
you see in both novels, is not a source of humor in Morrison because the alienation is produced
by an unjust society. It's not a laughing matter. It's not so much the universal human condition as
it is in Barth, to be alienated from yourself. The self-alienation that Pecola embodies as the
negative is the product of oppression, racial oppression. If there is an opportunity for humor in
Morrison's work, it's not going to come from that fountain of irony.
So, is irony dead in Morrison? Well, maybe. If we see irony in Morrison's work, it's in the
specific local language of the characters, and I would submit to you that where we see something
funny, it's always with a tinge of darkness, as in Claudia and Frieda's mother when she
complains. I don't know if you remember this scene when she complains about Pecola drinking
all the milk. She goes on and on and on in this baroque aria of indictment and it's funny, and
what we're told about this mother is that on her grumpy days this is what she does. She
complains about the whole world until she's got everything covered, she's covered every
complaint she could possibly have, and then she sings. And the fact that she turns to singing after
having done that suggests a kind of continuity, that there is an operatic, artistic quality to the
complaining. And Morrison gives it to us in her voice, and that is the kind of pleasure that
Morrison's novels give us; that's the kind of humor that her novels give us. It's not going to be the
funny, sad situation of the perpetually alienated Ambrose. It's going to be a woman in her kitchen
who's out of milk now, doesn't know where she's getting the next quart, and yet, and yet, uses
that verbal facility to make something in its place, in the place of the milk that's not there,
something to entertain her daughters as they listen.
So, there is a deeper, even darker side, I would suggest, to the generation of sympathy in
Morrison's novels. And that's the last point I want to make for you today, and I think we can see
it most--well--I'm going to show you one example, and then quick flip to the more important
one. On 176, when Soaphead reaches for his ink to write his letter to God, a bottle of ink, we are
told, was on the same shelf that held the poison. Writing and poison are extremely close in this
novel, and--what's more--something like reading and being raped are very close to one another.
And you can see this on 200. In the conversation between Pecola and her alienated other self,
that other voice keeps prodding her about a second rape, the second time, keeps saying "the
second time." We are not shown that in the narrative, so why is this something that enters in to it
here? The other voice says to her:
"I wonder what it would be like," [referring to the rape.] "Horrible," [says Pecola's voice.]
"Really?" "Yes. Horrible." "Then why didn't you tell Mrs. Breedlove?" "I did tell her." "I don't
mean about the first time. I mean about the second time when you were sleeping on the couch."
"I wasn't sleeping. I was reading."
This is a weird moment. You could read that as an odd detail. She really means that there was a
second rape and it happened not when she was sleeping, although she had said that before, but
when she was reading on the couch. But I think there is a darker meaning to this, that it's actually
the act of reading that is folded into the act of being raped. And this is not, I think, foreign to the
whole setup of this novel, that reading of that little passage, because of course, as you will have
noticed, you have the Dick and Jane primer at the beginning of each chapter made into nonsense
by being run together. So, remember in the first few pages of the novel you have "Here is a
house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty" and then mother, father, Dick and
Jane. This is the white aesthetic embodied in the primer. The message is that when you learn to
read you are imbuing yourself, imbibing the white aesthetic. If you are a young black girl
learning to read, you are bringing into yourself a deadly kind of poison, and it's the poison that

destroys Pecola's mother and Pecola herself in her desire for the blue eye. The primer is run
together so that we can see how it becomes nonsensical in the context of Pecola's life.
But there is a profound indictment of reading, and so you have to ask yourself what kind of
reader does Morrison want? And this, I think, has a complex answer. It is not just that Morrison
wants to indict a certain kind of reading on the Dick and Jane model. It's deeper than that. In her
Nobel-Prize-winning speech, she writes about her ideal reader. Actually, I think it's either in one
of her essays, or in that speech. She writes about her ideal reader being what she calls "the
illiterate reader." By that she means the reader not stocked up already with the imaginative
inventory of the Western canon, a reader who instead has some sense of an oral tradition. But
there is more to it than that, to imagine a reader who is that poorly prepared to meet a novel of
the ambition that Morrison's novels embody. If you read Beloved without knowing how to close
read the way we do in class, it's extremely hard to get a lot out of it. There are very difficult
passages in that novel. She learned a lot from Faulkner. That's one of the ways that she learned to
incorporate voices into her novel in a way that they would sit by themselves, seemingly
unmediated by a narrator. She learned a lot from Virginia Woolf. She wrote her MA thesis on
Woolf and Faulkner, on suicide in Woolf and Faulkner, so she herself is highly educated, deeply
trained in the modernist avant-garde, and yet she looks for a reader that has rejected all of that
that she calls on so skillfully.
Reading is such a vexed activity for Morrison that she represents both reading and writing as
something like the equivalent of being the victim of rape. That pushes the idea of sympathy into
another register altogether. It's a text that is essentially theorizing itself as reaching out to you-not in the sense just of making you feel like Cholly's an okay guy, that he's human and not some
monster--but actually reaching out to you and doing to you what Cholly did to Pecola. That's an
odd thing to do to your own book, so I want you to think about the kind of reader that Morrison
imagines, and what her novel is trying to do with and to that reader. I will come back to some of
these themes when we talk about Woman Warrior on Wednesday.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 14 Transcript
February 27, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: It is the seventh week of term, and in this class, if you have kept
up, you have read nine novels in seven weeks. So, if you kept up, I want you, right now, to pat
yourself on the back. Oh, I don't see a lot of patting. Okay: if you just missed one novel. Okay. I
don't want to look. Do your patting later. Let me say that you have broken the back of the course,
not to use too violent a metaphor. It's the seventh week. We have six weeks left. In those six
weeks we have five--count them--five novels. That's it, and one of them you get to choose. So,
instead of doing two novels in a week, you'll have a week and a half for one novel. This is a
much more humane pace. Why are you laughing? It's not funny. You also, of course, have Spring
Break. If you use Spring Break wisely, read, in a somewhat leisurely way, in Myrtle Beach, as
you're relaxing on the beach, Blood Meridian--excellent beach novel--you'll be in great shape.
You'll be riding high through the rest of the term, easy-peasy, okay. Why did I do that to you
these last three weeks? Why did I do that? Well, one reason, as I said at the beginning of class, at
the beginning of the term, is that I did not want you to be crushed after Spring Break. I wanted
you to be crushed now, so it'll be better later. But there's another reason.

So, why didn't I just drop one of those novels? Well, my lecture today is, in part, an answer to
that question. A syllabus is not a parade. It's not a succession of novels that passes by, and we
wave, and we catch whatever candy or beads they throw at us, and then we go home at the end of
the day with sore feet from standing too long. It's not like that. A syllabus, at least in this kind of
class and with me teaching it, is an argument. It's an argument about a whole historical period.
It's an argument about a chunk of literary-historical history. It's an argument about the evolution
of an art form in a particular place and time. In order to preserve that quality of a syllabus, you
have to read quite a bit. Reading quite a bit means that you can begin to see the lineaments of
larger trends and movements in that historical period. It allows you to amass enough evidence to
build an intellectual understanding of what's going on in this period. If I had dropped a novel,
there are certain kinds of arguments I would not have been able to make, and the argument that
I'm going to make for you today would not be as compelling as I hope it will be.
So, as in the Franny and Zooey lecture, I tried to demonstrate for you in a very self-conscious
way how literary scholars make local arguments that take into account an entire novel, its major
features, and use the evidence of detail at the level of text to support those kinds of claims. Today
I'm going to make a much broader argument of the kind that literary scholars are often interested
in making. I'm going to make an argument about a major trend in this period, and to do that I will
use evidence, and I'm going to call on you to help me put together the evidence for broader
claims that cross novels. An argument of this kind has a different quality from those more local
arguments about individual novels that I've made each week. It's different in the sense that I
want, and most literary scholars want, such arguments not to be totally counterintuitive in the
way that you can sometimes take pleasure in making a reading of a local novel counterintuitive.
For the big arguments, you want to be able to account for what is obvious about the period, but
perhaps has not been justified as an analysis of the period. So, you want a sense of inevitability,
that this argument you're making explains all kinds of things that people have always noticed
about that period. In the same way that, when I lectured on Franny and Zooey, I asked you what
was obvious to you about the novel and then my argument went around and spoke back to those
things at different points. So this general argument aims to speak to those obvious parts, but it
speaks more strongly to those obvious perceptions, and so I'm launching into a different kind of
argument.
What I want to talk to you about today is a particular narrative form and convention, and I'm
calling it the Identity Plot. Certainly, I am not the first scholar to think about identity as a form of
narrative in this period, and it's precisely because I am not the first that I can give it this sort of
name. There is so much work that's been done excavating how identity works in the novel in this
period that it has become something we know a lot about. What hasn't been said before is that it
has this particular name, and I use this name because, for me, the Identity Plot, which I will
explain in a few moments, fulfills much the same function in fiction of this period as the
Marriage Plot did for the Victorian novel. So, any of you who have taken the Victorian novel
class, Professor Yeazell's course, or have studied or just read a lot of Jane Austen novels, Dickens
novels and so on, you will know what the Marriage Plot is. The Marriage Plot is that engine of
storytelling that makes novels hang on a structure of a couple and the question of whether they
will get together or not. Now, there are all kinds of stages in that development, the development
of that narrative. Are the couples from the same social class? Are they from geographically
contiguous places? Do they have personalities that match? Do their parents agree? Are they
related to each other secretly (always a problem)? There are all kinds of things that can go wrong
for a couple trying to get together, and the Victorian novel was very good at generating narrative
from all those kinds of complications. Then, there are different kinds of outcomes that you can
have in the novel governed by the Marriage Plot. One is the comedy. That's when you get
married at the end, the couple gets married. Then there's the tragedy: They don't, and they should
have, and we all know it. So, Pride and Prejudice would be an example of the former kind; Anna

Karenina perhaps an example of the latter kind, even though that's a novel really about adultery.
It totally depends on the conventions of the Marriage Plot. The Identity Plot works in much the
same way.
So, what is the Identity Plot? I am going to give you an unusual sight in my class now, and that is
Power Point. I think I'm sort of surprised and delighted by this myself, so we'll see how it works.
So, if you're taking notes, which I encourage you to do, you will find there are bolded words that
you can copy down. The Identity Plot: Narrative Form in Post-1945 Fiction. Isn't that snazzy?
Okay. (Oops. I've already made my first technological mistake. There we go.) Six elements of
the Identity Plot. Make sure you capitalize "Identity" and "Plot," please, and also give me credit
in the footnote of your notes for that phrase. The narrative of the Identity Plot novel revolves
around the question of how to define and understand a character's identity (big surprise there).
And, number 2: the character needs to be a member of the minority within a larger society. I am
not going to ask you to volunteer examples of these, because it's just too obvious that our last
three or four novels each feature one of these characteristics, or all of them. The third one is
absolutely crucial to the development of the Identity Plot, and that is that the character is also at
odds with the minority group of which he or she is a part. This is important, because without it,
the Identity Plot gets really boring. It doesn't have a lot of complication. If all you have to do is
realize, as you're going about your life, "wow, I am a member of X or Y group. Great. I know
who I am now. Done." that is a really short story, actually, and it's not a good short story, either.
There is just not enough resistance to the evolution of the plot, so it's really important.
The drama of the Identity Plot depends upon this. Furthermore, the character in question needs to
be conflicted about his or her difference from the majority and about his or her difference from
the minority group. Can anyone think of an example of this? Can anyone think of an example?
Yes, Eli.
Student: Woman Warrior.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely, yeah. So in case you didn't hear Eli, Woman Warrior is
a great example of this. Maxine (that's what I'll call her when I'm talking about
the character Maxine Hong Kingston) Maxine feels alienated from Chinese culture because of
the misogyny she perceives in that culture, but she also turns to Chinese culture as a way to
identify herself and to give her a positive self-image, as in that story of the woman warrior
(which I actually didn't ask you to read, but there are other examples in the stories that I did ask
you to read, chapters that I did ask you to read, to give her that sense of grounding as a person).
Other examples. How about in The Bluest Eye? Yes.
Student: Franny and Zooey.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. I think Franny and Zooey really does fit this model. Yes.
There are lots of different ways of conceiving what it means to have a minority group at work in
these novels, and I think Franny and Zooey definitely imagines a minority group as the Glass
family. They're big enough to be a group. There are lots of children, so you get that sense that
they're a clan; they're sort of a tribe of themselves. They have this peculiar quality, their
intellectual sort of complexity, and also their artistic gifts, especially their gifts in language. And
there is a conflict between Franny and Zooey, and Zooey is really held out as the custodian of the
Glass family identity, so it's he who instructs Franny and brings her finally back in to the fold,
and that's an example of the comic ending.
Other examples from other novels. Can anyone do this for Bluest Eye? How might Pecola be an
example of this? Okay. Let me do it. Pecola goes up to the whores' apartment and finds there a

kind of love and acceptance from those women that does not judge her for her ugliness, that
surrounds her with a rich verbal culture as well as a culture of affection. It is a group that has
seceded from the black community itself but still maintains a certain tie. Remember the
prostitutes' admiration for the good Christian woman. That ties them to the prevailing norms of
the black community. So, Pecola finds an ideal black community within that small apartment, but
she is alienated from that positive black self-image that she sees in those women by her desire to
identify with white beauty, to have blue eyes, and so that's how she would embody this. Frieda is
also an example of this, Frieda and Claudia. So, actually, if we take the example of Claudia,
Claudia wants to be like, remember the girl they called Meringue Pie, the light-skinned girl? She
wants to be like her, but at the same time she recognizes a certain insipid quality to this girl. She
doesn't have the kind of strength that Claudia and Frieda, with the addition of Pecola, have as a
little group that doesn't pass judgment on their own blackness. So that, again, between Claudia,
Frieda and Pecola there is another small idealized black community, but Claudia is somewhat
conflicted, both about her membership in that little group, and her difference from the influx of
white blood into that community, and white aesthetic into that community. So, she echoes, in a
less dramatic way, the same kinds of conflicts that you see in Pecola.
The fourth quality of the Identity Plot is that authenticity and origin are always at stake in the
character's quest for personal identity, even when those things are absent. So, in the Woman
Warrior, we have an excellent example of this, in the beginning of the last chapter that I asked
you to read, after she tells the whole story of Moon Orchid and Brave Orchid going to find Moon
Orchid's Chinese husband and confronting him with Moon Orchid's status as the first wife. After
you get this whole richly imagined story full of dialog, the next chapter begins:
What my brother actually said was "I drove Mom and second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt's
husband who got the other wife." "Did she hit him? What did she say? What did he say?"
"Nothing much. Mom did all the talking." "What did she say?" "She said he'd better take them to
lunch at least." "Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat?" "I didn't go. The other wife
didn't either. He motioned not to tell." "I would have told. If I was his wife I would have told. I
would have gone to lunch and kept my ears open." "Oh, you know they don't talk when they eat."
"What else did Mom say?" "I don't remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would
come." "There must have been more. Didn't Aunt get in one nasty word? She must have said
something." "No. I don't think she said anything. I don't remember her saying one thing." In fact,
it wasn't me my brother told about going to Los Angeles. One of my sisters told me what he had
told her.
The layers of inauthenticity in the origin of this story are deep. There is no sense that the story
we have just been told in great detail has any basis in fact, and yet this is a book that is patently
autobiographical. It plays up the inauthenticity and the unreliability of this voice. We know that
we cannot trust the details of what is given to us, and yet the narrative tries to seduce us with
them, tries to persuade us by their very dramatic quality, and their detail, and by the way these
stories embody the voices of their characters, that these are real stories. So, the voice in Kingston
that purports to be a source of identity formation--she's going to write herself into being--is an
inauthentic voice.
Now there was a controversy about Maxine Hong Kingston. Actually, it's been going on for
many decades. It goes on today. There is a scholar of Chinese American literature named Frank
Chin. He's also a novelist himself. He has accused Kingston and a few other writers, in the
starkest terms, of being fakes and of being against Chinese culture and of being puppets of white
culture. Kingston's use of Chinese literature has come under particular attack from Chin, and this
happened in one of its incarnations or one of its iterations of this feud between the two. It
actually happened at a conference, face to face, and I know you must think that academic

conferences are always a thrill a minute. It's not really usual that they are, but I guess in this case
it was. So, Frank Chin, I guess, shouted her off the stage. I don't know all the details, but it was
very exciting, I'm sure. Nevertheless, the argument is serious. It's an argument about authenticity,
the authenticity of Kingston's use of Chinese literature. So, imagine someone saying to John
Barth, "Wait a minute. You changed the story of The Odyssey. You're a fake." That's essentially
what Frank Chin says to Maxine Hong Kingston. It has a kind of traction to a certain audience,
because the purity of an origin of that kind matters, if you think that that's where authenticity of
an identity resides.
So, if it's a cultural identity at stake, the authenticity seems to matter in a different way. Now,
Barth can give us a different kind of example of this. Authenticity: Is Menelaus' voice in The
Menelaiad really his own? Is there some being left over that's apart from that voice? He says,
"My voice diddles on." Well, who's the "my"? Is he just reducible to that voice? Is he Proteus? Is
Proteus him? Has his identity been lost in his wrestling with that changing god? The question of
authenticity haunts Menelaus. It haunts Ambrose when he is in the throes of passion and he feels
alienated from himself. "This is passion. I am experiencing it." That's a kind of inauthenticity. He
can't be grounded in the origin of identity that we think of as the body. So, a lot of these novels
make a problem out of authenticity. When it doesn't seem like a problem, a novel is making a
certain kind of claim about identity right off the bat, and that's that authenticity doesn't matter.
But in the context of the Identity Plot you know that it's on the radar screen even if it isn't
something that is in the novel itself; it's there by its negative.
Finally, there are comic versions and tragic versions of the Identity Plot, just as there are of the
Marriage Plot. So, the comic version gives us characters that come to peace with their identity.
My favorite example of this is actually a novel we're not reading in this course, although I could
have added it, couldn't I? I could have done ten novels in the first seven weeks. I won't ask you
to read it. It's Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven. In this novel, this is the most extreme
example I know. I can't remember the full details, now, but in that novel there is a native
American woman. There is a native American child who's adopted, forcibly, in the forcible
adoptions, by a white family. I think this is how the story goes. And, eventually, after the Indian
family tries to get that child back, it is discovered that the adoptive mother was, in fact, a
member of that tribe by a very diluted blood line. And the adoptive mother marries the child's
full-blood grandfather: perfect, perfect comic ending for an Identity Plot novel. I would say
that The Bluest Eye is our tragic version of this, where Pecola will never be at peace. She is in
fact deranged by her conflicted relationship to identity.
Now, here is where we need a distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction. Now, I could
get in to lots of trouble for these claims. They're fairly broad, and ideally I would want to give
them more nuance, but I think it's useful to think about this distinction. Incarnations of these
kinds of narrative conventions that we think of as literary use those structures of narrative as
something to play off of or something to inhabit while they do a whole bunch of other things.
Think of the ways that Humbert and Nabokov use the conventions of Romantic language to
make us believe that Humbert really loves Lolita. There is something operatic about the
extremity of the situation we're given, the extremity of the use of those conventions
in Lolita. Well, in this case some of our Identity Plot novels use that plot to say something about
language, about literary history, about tradition. Some of them simply give us aesthetic pleasure,
like the pleasure that we can get from watching Barth use words, make them funny, be clever
with them. So, they may deliver an artistic satisfaction that has nothing to do with the Identity
Plot itself.
Then there are incarnations of it that don't reflect on any of those aesthetic issues, don't reflect on
the history of the literary tradition, don't engage questions about language, that deliver instead

conventional, predictable satisfactions of the genre, and these we would call genre fiction. And,
if you recall, Nabokov talks a little bit about pornography as genre fiction that gives you that
predictable mechanical frissonof pleasure at the predictable place, and he describes Lolita as
rejecting the convention of pornography. You can think about his description as applying also to
the Identity Plot, that sometimes it functions, and I think the Kingsolver novel really is a good
example of this, where there are predictable pleasures of the child being enveloped by a loving
family after all the complications of her identity, finally it can all be resolved, or there's a kind of
pleasure in that feeling that it could never be resolved, that tragic feeling. So, there's genre fiction
that can end that way too. So, other examples of genre fiction: of course, the detective novel is
another. My argument today is not to say that this is the only convention that our novels are
working with. The detective genre is present in Crying of Lot 49. That's something that you can
think about productively when you think about Oedipa's search for knowledge and clues. There
is a way that Pynchon is playing off that convention as well. To make the distinction is not to
reject one for the other, so literary fiction and genre fiction are both part of what literary scholars
use to make especially these kinds of broad-scale arguments.
So, it's not really enough, if you want to argue about a whole period of literary history, to only
skim off the very most literary works. Your argument doesn't have a lot of historical purchase if
you do that. If your ambition is to talk about more narrowly the evolution of an art form, that's a
very legitimate move to make, to skim off just those literary examples, but if your ambition is to
say something through your discussion of literature about culture, about politics, about any other
set of issues, philosophical, historical questions, you want to be able to demonstrate that the
things you're seeing in literary fiction have a wider purchase and have grabbed hold of the
imagination of a larger set of people than the people who read high literary novels. So, you can
make different kinds of claims depending on what combination of these kinds of examples you
use.
The Identity Plot obviously has infinite variations. I mentioned just a few to get you thinking
about them. The character seems to be a member of the majority group. This is actually, in one
sense, Franny and Zooey's case, as you mentioned. It seems like they are much more in a
majority. They're white; they are from an upper-class section of New York; they're distinguished
by their family's intellectualism. Similarly, Ambrose could be said to be in the majority group,
and certainly by the definition of someone like Morrison or Kingston, that fiction--they're
members of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage, the members of Ambrose's family. But, if
you recall, in Ambrose His Mark the family is eccentric. They, too, are marked by their
difference from the churches in town, the independence of their thinking, the skill with which
they carve; they have artistic skills. The character does not seem to be conflicted about his
membership in the minority group. This can happen. Where do you get the drama, then? Well,
sometimes you get the drama from the efforts of the majority group against that piece. Will that
person betray their group or not? So, that's where the narrative tension can come, if you see this
variation. The character resists the whole idea of having an identity that's stable. You might think
of Kingston as an example of this, although I think you can argue it both ways. Certainly, she's
not going to think you can have an identity that stays still. All those self-revisions, even just from
that little passage that I read about where her story comes from, that's a suggestion that she's
committed to an identity that's changeable.
As this period moves on towards the end of the twentieth century, that variation is much more
common; it gets more and more common. The critique of identity in theory, in the world of
literary theory--think of the work of Judith Butler for example in the late '80s and stretching into
the present--very influential on undermining the idea that you could have a stable identity at all.
And that's where that term "essentialism," identity essentialism, comes from. That's a very
negative idea by now, by this point, but in the 1970s, and I would argue that in Morrison's work,

you see still a commitment to the idea that you can really be in a peaceful way African American,
and that that's a stable, grounded identity, or even that you can be white as a stable, grounded
identity. So, I think some writers earlier in the period persist in that idea, even while most have
gone to the sense that identity is not stable. There may be multiple characters whose identities
are at stake in the novel, and some subplots might end up as tragedies, some as comedy. You can
have a variation with fiction based on fact. We've seen that both in Richard Wright, and now in
Kingston. It raises the stakes of the fiction, and it suggests its purchase on the real to write a
fiction that is sort of autobiography, based partly in fact or mostly in fact. It suggests that what's
going on in the fiction is actually very close to what we live, and that's a kind of claim for fiction
in and of itself.
And this is an example, this last one: Identity is not based on race or ethnicity. When we think
about identity, we usually think of race or ethnicity but sometimes minority status is going to be
claimed or identity is going to be claimed on religious or philosophical grounds or just on the
grounds of personality difference, someone who's strange. Salinger is sort of fond of
this. Catcher in the Rye is an example, I think, of this, where Holden Caulfield is at odds with his
world because he just sees things really differently. One of the kinds of claims that you have to
be prepared to make, if you're making these broad period-based claims, is that your claim is
specific to your particular time period. Now, you have to define your time period. I am dealing
with post World War II American literature, somewhat arbitrary cutoff for some scholars. I think
there are reasons to think that it is a real cutoff, having to do mostly with the changes in the
American cultural mass market in the years after World War II. There are Identity Plots all over
in the history of literature. So, the plot of mistaken identity is a staple of Renaissance comedy.
Think of Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. Secret identity is a staple of Gothic fiction.
This happens a lot in Dickens, other kinds of Victorian fiction. Artistic identity. Think of Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's novel about the artistic formation of a person. That's
especially important to Modernism. And you could also say that Woman Warrior is an example
of that version of artistic self-creation. Racial identity.
There is a wonderful book called Our America by Walter Benn Michaels. He argues very
persuasively that there are whole ranges of genre fiction in the 1920s that are working out the
logic of race, of a nativist logic of race in the early twentieth century, that these novels are
governed by that logic. So, you have to be prepared to explain how your feature is different from
other incarnations in the history of literature. My contention is that the Identity Plot, as I am
describing it, becomes a preoccupation of both literary and genre varieties of writing in this
period, so that suggests its scope, that it's not just the concern of a few writers; it's the concern of
lots of writers. It's different in the degree of its presence. So, while Walter Benn Michaels argues
very persuasively for the racial logic of popular Westerns, for example, or for its relevance to
Willa Cather's work, it doesn't sit at the center of the plots of those novels in the same way. He
can tease out the logic, but it's not because that logic is what the whole novel's drama hangs on.
Some of the drama hangs on that, but in the novels I am talking about in this period, it has risen
to the level of formula such that you can hang the whole plot on that structure, and it's
recognizable, immediately recognizable.
So, that's what I mean when I say in the next bullet point that it achieves a kind of solidity of
formulaic structure. And finally I want to argue, as I have been doing in passing in the last few
lectures, that these novels are working very closely with things that are happening in the culture
in general: so, that tension between activism and personal growth in the 1960s as modes of social
action, the question about whether you can intervene in politics through culture, is everywhere in
the 1960s. And you can see it come to a head in the 1990s with the culture wars, when both
liberals and conservatives begin to fight over, especially over, the syllabi of courses like this. So,

if you think that it's worth fighting a political fight over the syllabus that we all read, you are
already committed to a cultural politics.
So, the end point of this is a very widespread argument in the 1990s about where politics
happens, and that argument revolves around novels that feature the Identity Plot 'cause those are
the kinds of novels that people thought of as either advancing or resisting the hegemony of a
white Western tradition that was oppressive to minority people. By the way, this final incarnation
of the Identity Plot is going to be very important to us when we read The Human Stain. That
novel is deeply embedded in that final iteration of it. How else do you know it's a dominant
convention? Well, it has an end. This is another way you can locate its historical specificity. So,
it has its limits, and you can see it coming to its end when you see more elaborate embellishment
and variation on that formula, that writers of ambition have to push it further and further. Even
writers of the genre fiction versions have to address an audience looking for the familiar
pleasure, but with just enough difference. You can think of those Hollywood chase scenes. They
all look so much alike, but the new ones always have to have just that little bit more interesting
special effect, or that much more dramatic car flying off some high parapet. Same thing with any
narrative formula.
And there comes a time when writers of ambition simply change the subject. And I'm going to
argue that even though Roth is still thinking in these terms, the other novelists that we're
reading--starting next week and into the end of the semester--are beginning to change the
subject. So one subject that comes up very powerfully in those novels is the subject of history.
It's not unrelated to identity, but it is distinctly different. And so, in Cormac McCarthy for
example, there is a palpable engagement with history. And in Edward P. Jones, in a novel that
really seems like a classic outgrowth of the Identity Plot novels, especially of Toni Morrison, is
really much more about the terror of history than it is about the dramas of identity. So, we will
see how that subject gets changed. When we read the Woman Warrior we might feel that it is
very, very conventional because it does so much of what I have just described that the Identity
Plot does. I think, in a way, that would be shortchanging it. Some novels look dated or look
formulaic because they have been incredibly successful, and I think The Bluest Eye and Woman
Warrior are examples of those kinds of novels.
Woman Warrior, and this is one of Frank Chin's quarrels with it, is widely, widely taught. I
always think hard about including it on my syllabus. Sometimes that's a reason to include it on a
syllabus, as evidence in an ongoing, unfolding argument; sometimes it isn't. In this case I have
decided pretty securely that it is; it belongs here as a piece of evidence in this unfolding
argument about what's happening in the historical period. Woman Warrior is widely taught. It is
one of the foremost examples of this kind of identity writing. It has some literary satisfactions.
Some of those stories are really compelling. She's very good at limning a character. She's
wonderful at reproducing the dialog. She reflects on the quality of writing. She is self-conscious
about the construction of her narrative. And so, we can see an artist telling the story of her own
coming to being as an artist in the way she tells these stories. There's all kinds of things you can
close read in here. I'm going to run out of time. Let me just show you one thing. This is at the
very end at 207. This is when she is told the story about her grandmother taking the family to the
opera, and how bandits tend to rob the houses that have been abandoned while families are at the
opera. Instead, in this case, the bandits attack the audience. In the experience the family's all
broken up in the attack:
By daybreak, when my grandmother and mother made their way home, the entire family was
home safe, proved to my grandmother that our family was immune to harm as long as they went
to plays. They went to many plays after that.

The grandmother's logic is completely twisted here. It's turned upside down. It doesn't make any
sense. They got attacked when they went to the play, so they go to plays in order to stay safe
because they happened to survive that attack. The reason why we're given that logic is that this
book is full of stories about insanity. And remember, from the story about Moon Orchid, insanity
in this story is defined as telling one story over and over again, insisting on the same story. She
becomes paranoid, essentially a paranoid schizophrenic. That means that sanity, healthiness, is
found in multiplicity, illogic. It's a kind of contradictory claim about the status of sanity and
storytelling. So, the illogic of this little moment at the very end of the book reaches back to all
those other examples of illogic and insanity that we see throughout: classic new critical
technique for building the meaning of a certain trope across the writing.
The other thing, also, of course, to think about, is the fact that this takes place around plays, that
it's art that's held out as being the lucky thing. It's art that's at the center, and this of course,
especially the play, reaches back to Maxine's descriptions of her childhood drawings where she
painted page after page after page of black, worrying her teachers, but for the young Maxine
what she saw in a black page was the curtains of a theater ready to open, endless possibility. So,
it's that very appreciation of the play, of the dramatic, shared by the grandmother, repeated even
in this inarticulate artistic creation of the child that builds the sense of artistic identity as an
inherited one. So, I'm not going to go on with this, but I just show you that little passage and
suggest some of the ways that it's built up over the course of the book to show you that
Kingston's novel or autobiography--even though it fulfills the convention so completely that it
looks like genre fiction--if you locate it in 1976 when it was first published, it's not at the end of
a long line of these; it's at the beginning. So, it is one of the first popular books to bring together
Barth's insights with those of the identity politics beginning in the '60s.
So, Morrison and Kingston, both, are some of the first to take modernist self-consciousness
about writing and combine it with this interest in identity. So, that's why I think it sort of doesn't
do her justice to see this as genre fiction, as too predictable, because it was one of the early
versions of it. So, next week we're going to start reading Housekeeping--just hold on one sec-and I want you to think about whetherHousekeeping fits the Identity Plot model, and, if it does,
how it does, and if it doesn't, how it doesn't. That Identity Plot model was very influential in its
early reception, so I want you to think about how that worked. Thank you.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 15 Transcript
March 3, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Today I wanted to begin with that question I left you with: What
does Housekeeping have to do with the Identity Plot? Did you see elements of the Identity Plot in
this novel? Who did and what did you see? Yes. What did you see?
Student: Oh
Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh. Now you have to make good. Yeah.
Student: Well-Professor Amy Hungerford: I can come back to you.

Student: Would you?

Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, I would. I would be quite happy to do that. Is someone else
more ready to say what this novel has to do with the Identity Plot? Yes.
Student: Well, outwardly speaking Ruth struggles with her own identity and how to fit it into
societal conceptions of what it means to be a normal person, to have a home and function in
society.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. And what details, for you, most mark that conflict in
Ruth? Where do you see that happening?
Student: Well, you see it a lot in her hair and in her dress.
Professor Amy Hungerford: In her hair and her dress. Yes. So, by contrast with Ruth, you see
Lucille doing a lot of work on her hair, trying to make clothes, become close with the home
economics teacher, chiding Ruth for not looking normal when they walk down the street. So, you
really do see it in that dynamic, especially between the two sisters, and, as you say, in clothes and
hair. Where else do you see this? That sense of being at odds is one part of it. Where else do you
see it? Okay. You're not talkative today. Let's try something easier. I'd like to read the first
sentence of the novel: "My name is Ruth." What can we say about that sentence as the opening
sentence of a novel? Any thoughts or observations about it? Yes.
Student: It recalls Moby-Dick.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. It absolutely does. And what's the first line of Moby-Dick?
Students: "Call me Ishmael."
Professor Amy Hungerford: "Call me--" Oh, in chorus. That was beautiful. So, you may have
read Moby-Dick, even if you didn't read this. So, "call me Ishmael." Okay. Absolutely. Marilynne
Robinson, as is going to emerge in my lecture today, is very much preoccupied with the
nineteenth century. She is very interested, especially, in these classic American writers of the
American transcendentalist school--and that's Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau--also very
interested in Dickinson, Emily Dickinson. She has a sensibility that maps very closely with
theirs, and I'll get into that towards the end of my lecture today. But, just as a narrative strategy,
how is "Call me Ishmael" different from "My name is Ruth"? Anyone have ideas about that?
What's different about those two sentences? Yeah.
Student: Well, "Call me Ishmael" sounds like it's more of a choice on the character's part to
identify themselves, where Ruth is something that was given to her, and it wasn't something that
she chose for herself.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Very good. Yeah. So, Ishmael says, "Here's what I want you
to call me," and Ruth says to us, "This is what people do call me." Yes.
Student: One is interactive and one is declarative?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. Yes. So the "Call me" implies a "you." It reaches out
of the text and uses that implied second person "you", "Call me Ishmael." "My name is Ruth,"
simple declarative sentence. It gives you that sense that Ruth is more separate from you, perhaps,
as a reader, than Ishmael is. Ishmael wants to enter into dialog with you, wants you to reach out

towards him. Ruth offers you herself as something like the objective contemplation of a stranger,
as a stranger. That's what a stranger says to you: "Hi. My name is Amy." That's the kind of
address a stranger gives you. What else do you notice about those two sentences? Any other
differences you can think of, or similarities, even, between the two? What about those names,
Ruth and Ishmael? Yes. Is your hand up? Your hand is, yes, dangerously floating. Yes, you.
Student: Both biblical names?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Absolutely. Both biblical names, and they have certain
similarities, too. Yes.
Student: Well, both Ruth and Ishmael were sort of strangers in the cultures that they lived in.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. Can you explain more about that?
Student: Well, Ishmael was the first son of Abraham, but he was not really brought into the
family, and eventually he was left in the wilderness. The story is that from him sprang up the
Arabic tribe.
Professor Amy Hungerford: That's right. So he's Hagar's son. He is the son of Abraham's--or
Sarah's--serving woman. So, Abraham is unable to conceive a child with Sarah, so he sleeps with
Hagar and Hagar bears him a son, Ishmael. So, he's from the family of Abraham, but he is
outside that family. Now what about Ruth? Do you want to continue? Yeah.
Student: Ruth married into a Jewish family. She herself was not from a Jewish family. She was
from another genetic tribe, but, when her husband died and her father-in-law died, instead of
returning to her own people she stayed with her mother-in-law.
Professor Amy Hungerford: That's right. So she stays with her mother-in-law, Naomi, and they
go back to the land of Judah, and there she becomes known as a righteous woman, a humble,
loving and righteous woman. She is a daughter to her mother-in-law, Naomi. She in fact stays
with Naomi because she loves her, and there is this beautiful line, when Naomi urges her to go
back to her own mother and stay in Moab, her own land. She says to Naomi, "Where you go, I
will go." It's probably a line you've heard, and it goes on. It's a very beautiful--I actually meant to
bring my Bible with me but I seem to have forgotten it--a very beautiful line. So, it highlights her
faithfulness. It's faith to Naomi that brings her into the realm of Judah under the protection of the
God of the Israelites and causes her to become married to Boaz, who is of a noble family. And
Ruth, finally, is the great-grandmother of King David. So, she is an alien, a stranger, who comes
into the Israelite fold and ends up being in the lineage of their greatest king. And, in the New
Testament, of course, that also means that she is of the House of Jesus, because Jesus is of the
House of David. So, in Christian teaching, the story of Ruth is about the foreshadowing of the
gentile inclusion of the Jewish redemption. So, the Jewish messiah is the world's redeemer, and
the presence of the alien, the stranger, in his bloodline suggests that expansion of the promise.
So, Ruth is a very important character. She is identified both by her status as a stranger and by
her absolute centrality to a strong identity, either as Israelite or as Christian, in these two versions
of this story of lineage. It is no accident that this is the name that Robinson has chosen for this
character. Lots of elements of that story enter into Ruth's story. So Ruth, like her namesake,
cleaves to a woman relative, and this is Sylvie. She cleaves to and becomes faithful to Sylvie, her
aunt, in place of her own mother. So, there is an exchange, as in the biblical story, between the
mother that she has lost, in this novel through the mother's suicide. She is replaced with an aunt.
There is also that sense that she follows the aunt into a wandering life. So, in the biblical story,

the wandering has a very clear end. It's a wandering back to the mother-in-law's land, back to
Judah. You will have to think about, as you get to the end of this novel, whether there is an end to
the wandering in Housekeeping, or whether it is an unmitigated wandering.
Related to that question is another one about narrative, and that is: where does this voice come
from? What account of this voice are we given? Who is speaking to us and from what position in
the world? This is a question I will get to. By the end of this lecture, we will come to an
understanding of that question. So, the biblical reference, as well as the Melvillian reference,
suggests wandering. And it suggests a complex picture of identity, and I think that's what you get
in the novel that connects it to the conventions of the Identity Plot. So, there is one element,
which is the whole theme of Lucille and Ruth, which I was talking about, coming from your
comment. That's the simple version. There is a more complicated version that I just want to show
you on 96, 97. This is when Lucille and Ruth are playing hooky from school. They've made their
summer very long, starting at March. I don't recommend this, by the way. And they are walking
around by the railroad tracks, and they come upon some hobos. This is the top of 96:
We in our plaid dresses and Orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with
the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some
lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some sleek train
[That's an Ishmael reference right there. Ishmael is the only person to escape the Pequod to come
back and tell the story, so there's an element of that Melville reference right here, too.] some
flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family
off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai and they might have been touring legislators or members of
a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes,
wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling
them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were
born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected a train to leap out of the water,
caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward and then to continue across the bridge. The
passengers would arrive sounder than they departed, accustomed to the depth, serene about their
restoration to the light, disembarking at the station in Fingerbone with a calm that quieted the
astonishment of friends. Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my
grandmother and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold
hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with
her whiskery lips and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather,
youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation like a difficult memory or a ghost.
Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times and make
sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.
There's a lovely movement in that passage. So, first she moves from a fantasy that would make
the hobos and Lucille and Ruth part of comprehensible wholes, comprehensible social groups,
going to identifiable places, moving through spaces that made sense. So, if they were legislators,
members of a dance band, or the girls were part of some large family, if they were all on some
pleasure craft, it would explain the inappropriateness of their clothes and how they were ruined,
if there had been a disaster. All these are ways of imagining a stable and socially legible identity
for all the people in the scene, hobos and girls alike. Then it slips into this moment where the
difference between Ruth and Lucille and the hobos is insisted upon when she says, "As it was, I
thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long
before we were born." By turning to the hobos, and in her mind addressing them, she pushes
them further away from her and Lucille, and begins to craft a distinction between them. They,
Ruth and Lucille, are rooted in Fingerbone by the very weight of their family lying at the bottom
of the lake. So, it gives them a rootedness to the place that the hobos can't claim. The hobos'
transience is highlighted by this imagined address to them.

When she further dreams of the resurrection of the whole train, all the family at the bottom of the
lake, it allows her to imagine herself and Lucille in this warm, coherent embrace in a more
fulsome way. So, the family, then, isn't just imagined to distinguish them from the hobos, but to
imagine a more fully alive presence to her, a family that will restore her identity and her
legibility to herself, not just to the hobos or the town. And I love this repeated structure, verbal
structure, "say": the proposition, "Say that Helen lifted our hair," a very intimate gesture, "Say
that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips," so that it invites us in to the
sensual commerce of a family, and that's what she uses her imagination to do. But then, how it
ends, you can't miss this: "Lucille and I could run off to the woods." The restoration of the
family, the resurrection, is precisely what then will liberate them to do exactly what they're doing
now, running off to the woods, being truant. So, in this beautifully crafted passage, where we see
Ruth's imagination moving from one fantasy to another, you see how the act of trying to restore
her own legibility through this narrative, through that repeated "say," the propositions, finally
gets her back to where she was before. So that the restoration of a secure identity in a family is,
in fact, what then propels her out, to imagine once again her separateness from it.
So, what Robinson gives us, I think, in this version, not so much in the story of Lucille and Ruth
and the difference between the two of them, which parses the problem as being those who
conform and can be legible to the world and those who are not and have to be separate from the
social world. Lucille goes to the home economics teacher. Ruth goes with Sylvie. That's a very
simple split. This passage, and the way Ruth's mind works, makes it much more complex, so that
it's the identity that allows for the final alienation. The identity or the security in the family is
what allows for the finding of one's separateness in the woods. So, there are two kinds of identity
at issue, the single and the communal, or you could say the contemplative and the social. I think
it's ultimately the contemplative, or the singular person, that interests Robinson even more.
But I will say that in the initial reception of this novel--because the Identity Plot is so fixed in the
pattern of literary work in this period and also fixed in the concerns of critics--early readings of
this novel really were all about that simpler version of identification. People read this as a
feminist novel that was really all about women being liberated from a confining domesticity and
finding their individual identity out there in the world some other way, so that housekeeping and
its rejection were the major terms of the criticism. And, if you've ever seen the film "Thelma and
Louise," you can sort of see the way it chimes with a lot of what was being thought in popular
culture on these questions. You can think of Helen sailing off the cliff into the lake, which was
seen as empowering, in her car.
It did not take long for readers of this novel to abandon that, because of the predominance of the
themes that I'm going to talk about next, and that's the question of: how can you be a coherent
person in this world? What does that look like? Ruth is very troubled by this quality. It comes
though in tiny ways, like on 78, with other characters. Lucille, we are told, is caught cheating, by
her teacher, on a test:
Lucille was much too indifferent to school ever to be guilty of cheating, and it was only an evil
fate that had prompted her to write Simon Bolivar and the girl in front of her to write Simon
Bolivar when the answer was obviously General Santa Anna. This was the only error either of
them made and so their papers were identical. Lucille was astonished to find that the teacher was
so easily convinced of her guilt, so immovably persuaded of it, calling her up in front of the class
and demanding that she account for the identical papers. Lucille writhed under this violation of
her anonymity.
What does it mean to call that instance a violation of her anonymity? Well, what's imagined here
is that two minds, by some mysterious process, sort of melded with one another and produced

the same answers, the exact, identical exams. Lucille is so easy with the idea of that kind of
melding that she is stunned by being called out, not as a violation of her honor, but as a violation
of her anonymity. She wanted to be without name, essentially. That's what being anonymous
means. You're without a name. You kind of blend in with the crowd. That's exactly what she was
doing when her mind blended with that of the girl in front of her and they produced identical
papers. It's a funny little logic. It's a tiny detail that you can see, now, "rhyming" with other
details in the novel. If you think of the conversation between Lily and Nona, the two maiden
aunts that take care of the girls for a while, that funny conversation on page 38, where,
essentially, these are two women who have totally melded into each other. They say the same
things. Their conversations are just the ritual assurance of a shared thread of thought: "Someone
filled the teapot." [We're not even told which of them it is, because you can't even really tell
which it is.] "Children are hard for anybody." "The Hartwick has always kept them out." "And I
understand that." "I don't blame them." "No." "No." And it goes on.
These are two people who, like Lucille and the girl in front of her, their minds have melded this
time by long habit, by long living together, and by their love for each other. It gets darker,
though, on 105. It's hard, as it turns out, to maintain your separateness, or to maintain a sense that
you really are an entity as a person.
"Where's Lucille?" [says Sylvie to Ruth, having woken up on a bench.] "Home," [says Ruth.]
"Well, that's fine," Sylvie said. "I'm glad to have a chance to talk to you. You're so quiet, it's hard
to know what you think." Sylvie had stood up, and we began to walk toward home. "I suppose I
don't know what I think." This confession embarrassed me. It was a source of both terror and
comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible--incompletely or minimally existent, in fact. It
seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch
it unawares. But my allusion to this feeling of ghostliness sounded peculiar, and sweat started all
over my body, convicting me on the spot of gross corporeality. "Well, maybe that will change,"
Sylvie said. We walked a while without speaking. "Maybe it won't." I dropped a step behind and
watched her face. She always spoke to me in the voice of an adult dispensing wisdom. I wanted
to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge
was like, and if not, whether she too felt ghostly as I imagined she must.
This is an instance where what Ruth experiences might be said to be total identity, a very stable
identity. She cannot alienate herself from herself to know what she is thinking. So, if you think
about that construction, "I don't know what I think," it posits an "I" who could know the self.
That's two entities, not one. So, if you don't know what you think, maybe it's because there isn't
that objective distance between an "I" and a self. You're not self-alienated in that way that,
remember, Ambrose always is in Lost in the Funhouse. That's his curse, that he is alienated from
himself, and he can never integrate. So, it's like he's Lily and Nona in one person, two entities
but somehow the same. Ruth, on the other hand, is like an indivisible substance, but because it's
indivisible it seems, the logic here imagines, it's ghostly. Somehow, it's like an essence or
something unsubstantive, because it doesn't have that alienation built into it.
How can you exist in the company of other people, if the structure for even knowing oneself
doesn't seem to exist in the mind? There are other manifestations that have more to do with
nature, and you can find one of these on 115, 116, the bottom of 116- 15. This is when Lucille
and Ruth spend the night outside. It's one of two very important moments when Ruth spends the
night outside. Here's one with Lucille, and there'll be one right after the page where I asked you
to stop for today, with Sylvie.
For a while she [Lucille] sang "Mockingbird Hill," and then she sat down beside me in our
ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the
darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones.
Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings.
The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their
hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to
imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more
perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her
shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my
grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes.
Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent
upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the
survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that
remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent.
While it was dark, despite Lucille's pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been
dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic,
remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track or trace if only the darkness
could be perfect and permanent.
So, Ruth feels her boundaries overrun when the content of her mind and the quality of the world
become indistinguishable, the darkness in the mind and the body indistinguishable from the
darkness outside her. And this is a positive condition for her, insofar as it seems to eliminate the
need for things like memories, traces, remnants, that list that we're given. And I'm going to talk
much more about the question of loss on Wednesday. That's the theme for that lecture on this
novel, so I'm going to leave that as something for you to think about: what is the status of loss in
the novel? But for now what I want to note is how the overrun boundaries of the self is imagined
as redemptive. So, the loss of identity, as against some other outside thing--be it nature, another
person, another piece of the community, another group--that is imagined not as a problem but as
something to be embraced.
These observations about Ruth's permeability, and the general permeability of persons one to
another, brings us back to that question that I asked a little while ago. Where does Ruth's voice
come from? And here I want to note that language is imagined to be all mixed up with the
material of the world. And, if you look on page 85, you can see one example of this. (Oops.
Sorry. I think that's not the-- Sorry. Yes, this is the one I want.)
I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom.
Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. There were leaves that had been
through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among
them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration,
and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read Powers Meet, and another, which had
been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in an anonymous hand: I think of you.
Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic
niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not
otherwise.
Words are all bound up in the material of the world, the stuff that gathers in the corners of a
house. And, moreover, they are words that are very evocative, "Powers Meet," as if somehow
language and leaves meeting in the corner of a house signifies the various powers of the cosmos
coming together: "Powers Meet." "I think of you" and its anonymity, its character as coming
from an envelope flap, the kind of piece of paper that travels from one person to another,
suggests a communicativeness, a general intent surrounding these pieces of matter, leaves and
paper.

So, two things associated with language, the words themselves, and also intention, gather around
these debris. If that is true, we might also think of 126, the dictionary full of pressed flowers.
This is another beautiful image. So, Lucille has asked Ruth to look up "pinking shears" in the
dictionary, because she's trying to make her dress and she doesn't know what the pinking shears
are that are called for in the pattern. And so she asks Ruth to look it up. Ruth finds, pressed in to
old dictionary, flowers that her grandfather has gathered, all filed under their alphabetical name.
And, she is much more concerned with the flowers than she is with getting the definition of
"pinking shears." So, here you have two visions of language: one--the "pinking shears,"
language, the horde of words--is for identifying things so you can do practical tasks. And, in this
case, the practical task is Lucille's effort to blend in with the town. Ruth's conception of language
is that it is a horde of expressive gems or (Well, that's not a good way of putting it) it's a
vocabulary of the world that includes not only words but also flowers. And that there are beauties
of each, all in their place, in this dictionary.
So, if language comes, almost viscerally, from nature, here we can see exactly how Robinson is
in the realm of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, and here I'm going to read you a little
bit from Emerson's essay Nature. This is what he says about being in the woods.
Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and
the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to
reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, no disgrace, no calamity leaving
me my eyes which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the
blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent
eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me. I am
part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be
brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover
of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness I find something more dear and connate
than in streets or villages in the tranquil landscape and especially in the distant line of the
horizon. Man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
So, the transparent eyeball, "I am nothing. I see all," that is the sense you get of Ruth's voice, that
Ruth's voice is like the voice of that transparent eyeball. The difference between Emerson's
vision and Robinson's, I think, is the way Robinson is willing to let the human environment, the
built environment, the house, become part and parcel of that woodsy whole that Emerson so
wants to immerse himself in. So, the house is opened to leaves; leaves are mixed up with pieces
of paper with words. And so, you get that sense of a creation that is saying something to this
consciousness, in the same way that Emerson imagines, but it can happen in a house. She
embellishes this vision of a speaking, material world.
So, Ruth's sense of self mirrors that fluidity that you get in the transparent eyeball. There is also
something that you can see. (Wait. Hold on. I'm now trying to find the page number that I need.
This is 16 through 19. Here it is.) That fluidity of consciousness that the transparent eyeball gives
you is beautifully on display in this passage towards the beginning of the novel, when Ruth is
thinking about how her grandmother responded to the death of her husband and the departure of
her daughters. I'm not going to read this whole thing because it would simply take too long, but I
just want to show you what happens over these three pages. So, on the top of 16, this is another
one of those hypotheticals:
One day my grandmother must have carried out a basket of sheets to hang in the spring sunlight,
wearing her widow's black, performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith. Say there
were two or three inches of hard old snow on the ground, with earth here and there oozing
through the broken places, and that there was warmth in the sunlight, when the wind did not

blow it all away. And say she stooped breathlessly in her corset to lift up a sodden sheet by its
hems, and say that when she had pinned three corners to the lines it began to billow and leap in
her hands, to flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were
as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements. That wind! she would say,
because it pushed the skirts of her coat against her legs and made the strands of her hair fly. It
came down the lake, and it smelled sweetly of snow, and rankly of melting snow, and it called to
mind the small, scarce stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick.
Did you catch that little transition there, transition from proposition, "Say that this happens, say
this is what my grandmother did and saw and smelled," to a seamless inhabitation through that
free, indirect discourse. Ruth enters the mind of her grandmother and starts to inhabit her
memories of her husband from long before the time when Ruth was born. We smell the wind,
with Ruth, through the grandmother, and we know that it reminds her of the flowers that she and
Edmund would pick. And then, you get a long meditation of the most private thoughts that the
grandmother has about her husband, and what he's like in the springtime. And this is at the
bottom of 17, and it concludes with this line: "At such times." She's just imagined him as a
primitive man rather than formal Edmund.
At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and his Methodism, but all
the same it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.
It's that "soul all unaccompanied" that most concerns Robinson as a writer. And here Ruth
imagines a kind of free access to that other soul that is her grandmother. And, if you look in the
middle of 18, there is one of these amazing tense shifts. Ruth is going from meditating on her
early widowhood as a memory, to a time a little less far back, to the wake of her daughters'
departures, the grandmother's grief at their departure.
And now [That's the "now" referred to in the middle of 18.] And now to comfort herself my
grandmother would not reflect on the unkindness of her children or of children in general. She
had noticed many times always that her girls' faces were soft and serious and inward and still
when she looked at them just as they had been when they were small children, just as they were
now when they were sleeping. If a friend was in the room, her daughters would watch his or her
face intently and tease or soothe or banter and any one of them could gauge and respond to the
finest changes of expression or tone, even Sylvie if she chose to, but it did not occur to them to
suit their words and manners to her looks and she did not want them to. In fact, she was often
prompted or restrained by the thought of saving this unconsciousness of theirs. She was then a
magisterial woman not only because of her height and her large, sharp face, not only because of
her upbringing, but also because it suited her purpose to be what she seemed to be so that her
children would never be startled or surprised and to take on all the postures and vestments of
matron to differentiate her life from theirs so that her children would never feel intruded upon.
She's careful to guard their separateness. And then, you get this wonderful meditation--quite
mysterious, and I don't actually have a full account of it--why the grandmother finding the
potatoes in the garden comes to be a moment of revelation. Maybe this is something you can
think about. Why is it specifically that detail that Robinson chooses to make a moment of
epiphany when the grandmother says:
"What have I seen? What have I seen? The earth and the sky and the garden not as they always
are," and she saw her daughters' faces not as they always were or as other people's were and she
was quiet and aloof and watchful not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them
to be kind to her.

So, in that three-page passage, Ruth's voice inhabits her grandmother's mind at widely varied
moments in the grandmother's life: important, extremely intimate moments, even the strange
moment of epiphany in the garden. No one is anywhere near or around. It's a very mysterious
kind of epiphany. Who knows, really, what it means? And yet Ruth can tell us about it.
Robinson has described her writerly project as giving us access to the kinds of things that people
would say if they could, and I just want to read you this quotation from Robinson: "One of the
primary mistakes people make is to take people's spoken language to be equivalent to the level of
their thinking. I think it's one of the oddest errors." What she takes herself to be doing is to be
providing for Ruth's mind a language that can match the flexibility of this young person's
consciousness, its range, its permeability, and also in that very supple voice to be her identity, so
the voice becomes who Ruth is. So, no matter how far she ranges across her boundaries of
person, no matter how indistinct the darkness in her mind is from the darkness outside her body,
that voice can still be heard. And it can still be identified as hers, even as it ranges in and out of
her grandmother's thoughts, in and out of Sylvie's thoughts, in and out of Lucille's thoughts, in
and out of her mother's thoughts. So that, in the end, is what constitutes something like identity
in this novel.
Now, on Wednesday, in the very short time I will have, I'll talk about what that voice has to do
with the question of loss which haunts this novel in every sentence, as I'm sure you've noticed,
very elegiac sense to this novel. So, I'm going to reconcile this argument that I've made today
with an analysis of what that is doing in the novel.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 16 Transcript
March 5, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Today is Novel Pitch Day. Does everyone have a ballot? If you
don't have a ballot, there are some down here. We have a wonderful list of six novels, all brought
to you by students from this class. I'll tell you, my dream is that one day someone will pitch their
own novel. That's my dream, and yeah, this could happen. Yes. Okay. Are you ready? Ballot?
Here you go. So, without further ado, is everybody ready? Now, each of these students has been
given five minutes only to make their presentation, and at the end of it you will rank your top
three choices, 1 for your first choice, 2 for your second choice, 3. The TFs will take your ballots.
They will leave the room. I will begin to lecture on Housekeeping, and when they've added it all
up, which should go pretty fast because there are nine of them and they're very good at adding.
You have to know that to get in to the Ph.D. programs here. There is a little arithmetic test. They
will add it all up, and then I will announce at the end of the class which book it will be. So,
without further ado, Emma Barash will come and talk to us.
Emma: Well, thank you, Professor Hungerford. I'm Emma Barash, and I am pitching Giovanni's
Room by James Baldwin. So, what is Baldwin like? Well, Baldwin is one of the great twentiethcentury American authors, and he has some really unique insights into human interaction and a
shrewd sensitivity into the internal lives of his characters. His background kind of shines through
his prose. He is the son of a preacher, so his words have this really strong, sort of, grandness to
them, and there's a really, really unique resonance to everything he writes. Anyway, so Baldwin,
in my opinion, isn't read as often as he should in academic settings, so I chose this book because
I wanted to use this opportunity to read Baldwin at Yale. And a nifty little fact about Giovanni's

Room: It's about 150 pages. Yeah. And, it's eminently readable, so that's a big plus at the end of
the semester.
But also, I didn't just choose Giovanni's Room because it's short. I chose it because it fits
seamlessly with our syllabus. So, what's Giovanni's Room about? Well, Giovanni's Room is the
story of David, a twenty-something man who flees America to Paris in hopes of finding himself.
While in Paris David finds a fianc, Hella, and, in her absence, another lover, Giovanni, a man.
So, the novel spirals around David's reverie on one particular evening, the evening of Giovanni's
execution. I don't want to ruin any more of the book, so I'll let you wonder what offense
Giovanni has committed. Now, Giovanni's Roomfits with the notion of the Identity Plot which
Professor Hungerford was discussing a lot last week, but here the identity problem is founded in
sexuality, a fascinating issue which the literature we've studied so far has yet to explore.
So, Giovanni's Room complicates the Identity Plot further, but Giovanni's Room also explores
national identity. It is an American novel of expatriotism, an American in Paris. So without
further ado I want to read a passage in which David realizes his alienation from America and
from American-ness. So, here he is walking into the American post office in Paris to pick up his
mail:
Yet walking into the American Express office one harshly gray midsummer afternoon, I was
forced to admit that this active, so disquietingly cheerful horde struck the eye at once as a unit.
At home I could have distinguished patterns, habits, accents of speech with no effort whatever.
Now, everybody sounded, unless I listened hard, as though they had just arrived from Nebraska.
At home I could have seen the clothes they were wearing, but here I only saw bags, cameras,
belts and hats--all clearly from the same department store. At home I would have had some sense
of the individual womanhood of the women I faced. Here, the most ferociously accomplished
seemed to be involved in some ice-cold or sun-dried travesty of sex, and even grandmothers
seemed to have had no traffic with the flesh. And what distinguished the men was that they
seemed incapable of age. They smelled of soap, which seemed, indeed, to be their preservative
against the dangers and exigencies of any more intimate odor. The boy he had been shone
somehow unsoiled, untouched, unchanged through the eyes of the man of sixty, booking passage
with his smiling wife to Rome. His wife might have been his mother forcing more oatmeal down
his throat, and Rome might have been the movie she had promised to allow him to see. Yet, I
also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth, and perhaps not even the most
important part. Beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses was power and sorrow,
both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
Okay. All right. Here you see that miserable sense of separation, that confusion, that
hopelessness that Baldwin crafts, that loss of identity, and perhaps you can begin to see the
beauty and the might of his language which molds such a powerful story of love, of loss, and-most importantly--of self. Okay. Thank you.
Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. Kelsey, where are you? There you are.
Kelsey: Hello. I'm Kelsey, and the book that I'm pitching is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by
Ken Kesey. It is about a certain insane asylum, and the narrator is a six-foot-seven schizophrenic
deaf mute Indian chief named Chief Bromden, whose life is turned upside down by a brutal and
hedonistic man named Randall McMurphy. And Ken Kesey, who I need to talk about a little bit,
was sort of a rock star. He was to the hippie generation what Jack Kerouac was to the Beat
generation. He was an era's most outspoken proponent of LSD. He and his Merry Pranksters
went on the road in their Magic Bus touting it across the nation. One road trip that he took in
1964 with Neal Cassady, the same Neal Cassady who Dean Moriarty was crafted after, was
written down in a book by Tom Wolfe called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip [correction: Acid

Test] so he has that, sort of, in common with Jack Kerouac. And I'd like to play a little clip that I
have from a BBC interview with Kesey about LSD's effects on his writing. Oh, just some
background information: While he was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he was
working in a mental institution.
[video clip playing]
Kelsey: Okay. So, the door that Kesey opens in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reveals the
inner workings of an insane asylum. This, of course, draws attention to the one most obvious,
and also most complicating theme of the book, that of madness. We've touched on the theme of
madness before with Lolita and with Franny and Zooey, but I don't think we have addressed it as
explicitly as we would with this book. The book is set in an insane asylum. There is no way to
avoid insanity. At first glance that might seem like a very straightforward assertion. However, the
very sense of omnipresent madness in the book is one that, I think, ropes this book very neatly
into the argument of Professor Hungerford's syllabus. I think it's an intensification of most of the
themes we've studied so far, for example the Identity Plot. I think it's a very unique manifestation
of the Identity Plot, because the people in the insane asylum are perhaps one of the most isolated
groups that you could possibly be a part of. They're isolated by their own neuroses, the tyranny
of the nurses and a barricade of concrete, plexiglass and barbed wire. I think if you imagine any
attempt to find yourself within the confines of a sanitorium, you can sort of see how interesting a
story would be crafted on that.
Another theme that we have talked about is the relationship between language and experience.
We talked about that with John Barth, and I think that's a really important question to focus on,
when you're reading a book like this, because you have to think to yourself as you're reading:
how does an author accurately capture the experience of insanity, and, more importantly, how
can we as readers trust a narrator that's self-diagnosed as insane? And, in that same vein: what is
truth, and how does one portray truth? I'd like to read a passage from the book. This is at the very
beginning, when we're first introduced to the Chief, and he decides that he is going to begin
telling about all this:
about the hospital, and her, and the guys, and about McMurphy. I've been silent so long, now
it's going to roar out of me like flood waters, and you think the guy telling this is ranting and
raving. My God, you think this is too horrible to have really happened. This is too awful to be the
truth, but, please, it's so hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it, but it's the truth even if it
didn't happen.
So, I think you can see the confusion that can arise from having an insane narrator. One of the
most enticing aspects of this book is that it is funny. There are extremely hilarious aspects of this
book. I don't know if any of you have seen the movie, or at least that famous clip of Jack
Nicholson laughing like a maniac. The movie, in general, doesn't do the book justice at all,
whatsoever, of course. But I think that one moment is quintessentially Ken Kesey, and he uses
humor as his most powerful tool in conveying his deep and serious messages in this book.
One thing that I want to point out is, there is this really fascinating thing that happens over the
course of this book, and it's this. There is an X that frames the plot. And that X: one arm is the
Chief's ascension from insanity, and the other arm is McMurphy's descension into insanity. And I
think, if we choose this book, one of the most challenging aspects of our analysis of it will be to
find where the two slopes of those intersect. Just to wrap up, I think that this book is absolutely
phenomenal, and it's completely engrossing. My own introduction to it was completely random.
It was one of the books that my roommate happened to throw into her suitcase before she came
to Yale, and I read it at the beginning of the year. I took it with me to my grandparents' over a

weekend, and I didn't sleep the entire weekend 'cause I was reading it. And I think, if you choose
this book, each and every one of you will be equally as enthralled. So, I hope you pick it.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Miranda.
Miranda: Hi. I'm pitching Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. Joan Didion is, in my mind, one of
the greatest intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. She is perhaps best known
for her journalism, particularly her collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I
believe came out in 1968, in which she coolly confronts and sensibly analyzes the confusing
cultural climate of the late 1960s. What I think is most remarkable about her reporting is the lack
of naivet with which this literally tiny woman-- I don't know if you any of you seen a picture of
her. She's just remarkably small. So, she is clear-eyed, but not unsympathetic, innocent but
detached, and above all candid in her assessment of her country and her time. The voice that she
develops in Slouching Towards Bethlehem serves her very well in Play It As It Lays. She's able
here, too, to draw the same sort of precise portraits that she relied upon in her nonfiction, that
results in a novel that is positively, undeniably seductive.
The plot revolves around a sort of marginal actress, Maria Wyeth, who is divorced from her
director husband and who drifts aimlessly through the Hollywood party scene of the late 1960s
waiting for something to touch her, impact her emotionally and morally. She's both damaged
and, as a result, utterly unreachable. Tragedies--and there are many, major and minor, that sort of
blithely by--slip off her or appear to. It is a novel very much about a woman who accepts
everything, feels nothing, and finally resigns herself to the inevitable. The inevitable is, in many
cases, trivial fates dealt out at cocktail parties. It is told in several voices, Maria's and three of her
closest friends, and each character is haunted by an ineffable loss of meaning and consequences
that they either ignore or are ignorant of, willfully or otherwise.
In many ways these characters' lives are coming or drifting apart, and their lack of awareness of
this fact becomes, through Didion's prose, our own, so that the shock of the final scenes is both
powerful and hopelessly hollow. And I don't mean that in the negative sense. I mean that we feel
that consequences perhaps are unimportant, that there is something larger at work. So, Play It As
It Lays, I think, fits very nicely into the syllabus because it provides a beautiful contrast to The
Crying of Lot 49 in that it depicts the disintegration of southern California, and specifically L.A.,
in a much less manic, but no less troubling way. Didion's language, in its flat, plain tone, mimics
the flat, plain Los Angeles of her narrative, as Pynchon's convoluted, elusive language does his
perplexing and intricate portrait of the city. Also, as with Housekeeping, the loss of self is
imagined as a dispersal, though Didion's dispersal is a cold, defensive and ultimately empty one.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem begins with a quote from Yeats that includes the phrase "The
center will not hold." This has become very emblematic of that era. Maria, who in the first few
pages declares that nothing applies to her, is perhaps one of the most poignant examples of the
personal consequences of the loosening, the loss of cultural restrictions in the 1960s, a time
when, in fact, none of the old rules applied to her or anyone else. Didion proposes that the
consequences of this freedom might be more than any single individual can cope with, that in
fact if nothing applies, the individual center, no lesson societies cannot hold. It is an account of
the '60s that appears perhaps elsewhere, but was, I think, defined by Didion in this novel, and I
want to read a very brief passage from the beginning. Here we go.
I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point. But because the pursuit of reasons is their
business here--[she is, I believe, at this point institutionalized] they ask me questions: "Maria,
yes or no: I see a clock in this inkblot. Maria, yes or no?" A large number of people are guilty of
bad sexual conduct. I believe my sins are unpardonable. I have been disappointed in love. How

could I answer? How could it apply? "Nothing applies," I print with a magnetized IBM pencil.
"What does apply?" they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to
interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune. "There are only certain facts," I say,
trying again to be an agreeable player of the game, "certain facts, certain things that happened."
They will misread the facts, invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none exist, but, I
told you, that is their business here.
And I think it would be wonderful to end the semester with a strong female voice that is darkly
amusing, courageous and, especially, cold. And I don't mean cold in the negative sense; just that
she approaches things in a sort of detached way that allows you to observe these characters, but
not attach yourselves to them in a way that promotes a sort of self-identification that makes it
difficult for you to judge their actions. It's also fairly short, just over 200 pages: a fast,
captivating read. This is a sort of stupid analogy, but I imagine it's sort of like getting on a
highway in L.A. (not during rush hour) but heading to where you're going, maybe east towards
the hills, and you get to your exit, sort of, before you realize it. So that's my pitch. Thank you.
Will: Hi. My name is Will. I'm pitching Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. I'm actually going to start
without introducing it at all. I'm just going to play a clip from the movie that was made of the
book. I'm not even going to talk about it.
'Denis isn't feeling too good today.' 'Is Denis in here?' 'Yeah.' 'Well, maybe I'll come back later.'
'Don't worry. I just shot him.' 'You mean you killed him?' 'I didn't mean to.' 'Is he really dead?'
'No. He's sitting down now in the front room.' 'I don't know who shot him.' 'Well, you shot
somebody.' 'Yeah.' 'Okay. Have you taken him to the hospital or anything?' 'He started to.' 'How
are you doing?' 'I can feel it right here. It's just stuck in the muscle.' 'Oh. Oh.' 'It misfired.' 'You
misfired it a little bit.' 'Yeah. Well, how about if I take him to the hospital?' 'Do you promise not
to tell them anything?' [inaudible] 'Tell them it was an accident. Okay? Promise?' 'What did he
say?' 'Well, what do you mean what did I say? What--He's mad at me because I know all about
this stuff?' 'He's dead.' 'All right. I know he's dead.' 'Throw him out of the car?' 'Damn right.
Throw him out of the car.' 'I'm glad he's dead. He's the one who started everybody calling me
Fuckhead.' 'Wow. What a lousy birthday.' 'I don't know. Maybe he thought I might say
something. Will you believe me when I tell you that there was kindness in his heart? His left
hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering
iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.'
Will: That was a clip from the movie version of Jesus' Son, and this is the book. It's by Denis
Johnson, who has been in the news a lot lately because he wrote Tree of Smoke, which won the
National Book Award in 2007. And this book is, kind of, the book that established him as a
serious, great author, and I think it's wonderful. It's a collection of stories, and they're all kind of
about the same character, one of the characters you saw in there, and kind of the same group of
characters runs through all the different stories. And so, it's kind of novelistic in that way, kind of
like Lost in the Funhouse, the book we read. I guess, as you might or might not have been able to
tell from the clip, the book kind of deals with drug addiction, and the main character is addicted
to heroin. But I really think the book kind of transcends the drug genre. I'm not a huge fan of
drug books, myself, but I think this book is really beautiful and powerful and devastating and
really hilarious, really funny at times.
What else? It's short (like everyone else has been saying), but this book really is short. It's only
160 pages, and there really aren't very many words on each page, 'cause it's quite small, as you
can see. And really, I find this book-- I don't know how much I want to describe it, but it takes
place mostly in Iowa and kind of just travels around, kind of daily things. In one of the stories
the main character and his friend decide to rip scrap metal from a house and sell it to make a

little money so they can get drunk that night, and just different kind of adventures that they go
on. And then the book kind of ends as he makes this kind of pilgrimage to Arizona. It's really
beautiful. I guess I'll just read you a quick passage, if that's all right.
We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard filled
with rows and rows of austere identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come
across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky
was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces
streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the
knuckles of my spine, and if there had been anything in my bowels I would have messed my
pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, "It's the drive-in, man, the drive-in!" I
wasn't sure what these words meant. "They're showing movies in a fucking blizzard," Georgie
screamed. "I see. I thought it was something else," I said. We walked carefully down there and
climbed through the busted fence and stood in the very back. The speakers which I had mistaken
for grave markers muttered in unison. Then there was tinkly music of which I could very nearly
make out the tune. Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out of their
gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had ever come to see the show, they'd have left when the
weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down one from last week, or one left
here because it was out of gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance,
the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but
my breath.
So, I guess that gives you enough of an idea of it. I think it's great and I think you should vote for
it. It's a quick read. It's really riveting and enthralling and I find it really an incredible book.
So, Jesus' Son.
Eli: Hi. I'm Eli. The book I wanted to pitch was Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran
Foer. And the main reason I wanted to pitch it, of course, was: Professor Hungerford said that
she's waiting for one of us to pitch their own book, and--contrary to conventional wisdom--this is
actually my own book, just so you know. But, setting aside authorship issues--the thing is, you
just had to introduce the seed of doubt, and then the rumors percolate, so this is good--I love
books that have outrageous characters. Actually, hearing some of these pitches, I was like, "oh,
maybe I should vote for some of the other books." But I won't tell you that. But, this book does
have outrageous characters, which is really cool. And also, I just thought, the pitch, I would just
kind of describe some of the characters, and you'd be like, "those characters are indeed
outrageous," or go, "I will vote for this book."
So, the book kind of takes place in two different worlds. One is the world of Trachimbrod, which
is a small shtetl in the eighteenth century, and also Jonathan Safran Foer's ancestral home. And
the other world is kind of modern day Ukraine and it features Jonathan Safran Foer on a quest.
As, I don't know if you Jews out there, I'm sure, at some point, have done this, as I have, been
drawn to Slovakia or Ukraine to find the ancestral home, and that's what Jonathan Safran Foer is
doing in this book. So, in the, kind of, modern-day world, there are a number of really cool
characters. The main one is the hero, Jonathan Safran Foer, who is also referred to as the "spoiled
Jew" and the "ingenious Jew." The other character is his humble translator, Alexander Perchov,
who learned English exclusively through the use of a thesaurus (which produces some
outrageous results) and who works for the family business, Heritage Touring. His description of
it is:
It's for Jewish people like the hero who have cravings to leave the ennobled country America and
visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine. I will be truthful again and mention that before this
voyage I had the opinion that Jewish people were having shit between their brains. That is

because all I knew of Jewish people was that they paid father very much currency in order to
make vacations from America to Ukraine.
Food for thought. And then there's also Alex's dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Jr., which is Heritage
Touring's "officious seeing-eye bitch." So, that's one world. And in the other world, the world of
the shtetl, we have a Well-Regarded Rabbi who speaks exclusively in capitals. We have Brod, a
brilliant girl who emerges magically from a river and is adopted by the disgraced usurer, Yankel
D. We have two synagogues, the Congregation of the Slouchers and the Congregation of the
Upright. We have villagers, including the deceased philosopher, Pinchas T, who in his only
notable paper, "To the Dust: From Man You Came and to Man You Shall Return," argues that it
would be possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. We have the good gefilte-fish
monger, Bitzl Bitzl R. We have the mad squire and village rapist, Sofiowka N. We have Harry V,
the shtetl's master logician and resident pervert, who had been working for many years on his
magnum opus, "The Host of Hoists," which, he promised, contained the tightest of tight logical
proofs that God indiscriminately loves the indiscriminate lover. So, I don't know how many of us
that will pardon, in here
So, besides these outrageous characters, I do think this book fits well with the themes of the
course. It deals with identity, language and experience, and problems of narration and
remembrance. As the New York Times Book Review (I guess you could say) lauded the book,
"Not since A Clockwork Orange has the English language been simultaneously mauled and
energized with such brilliance and such brio." So, going with that, I thought I'd read, as people
have been inclined to do, a passage from the book. I'm going to take a little risk here. I've been
reading the book with a Russian accent in my head, so I figured I would just go with that here. I
figured that would have the added benefit of: If you don't vote for this book, then I'll just be the
kid who made a fool of himself and read with a Russian accent in front of everybody. So, I know
you don't want to do that to me. Yeah. Okay, I think. All right. So here we go. This is Alex kind
of introducing himself at the beginning of the book:
"I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous
nightclubs in Odessa. Lamborghini Countaches are excellent so are cappuccinos. Many girls
want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo,
the Gorky Tickle and the Unyielding Zookeeper. If you want to know why so many girls want to
be with me, it is because I am very premium person to be with. I am homely and also severely
funny and these are winning things. But nonetheless I know many people who dig rapid cars and
famous discotheques. There are so many here who perform the Sputnik Bosom Dalliance--which
is always terminated with a slimy underface--that I cannot tally them on all of my hands. There
are even many people named Alex. (Three in my house alone!) That is why I was so effervescent
to go to Lutsk and translate for Jonathan Safran Foer. It would be unordinary.
So that's said, and a fool proudly made. That's it. Thank you.
Roger: Well, it's really unfortunate to have to go after that, but hi. My name's Roger. I'm
presenting for Amina's section, and we're doing Dave Eggers' What is the What (and you can't
see the "What" because it's 20% off; plug, plug). And, I guess, rather than try to sum up the book
myself, I'll use not the author's but the person about whom the book is written's own words:
"What is the What is the soulful account of my life, from the time I was separated from my
family in Marial Bai --[if I mispronounced that I'm so sorry]-- to the thirteen years I spent in
Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps, to my encounter with vibrant Western cultures beginning
in Atlanta, to the generosity and challenges that I encountered elsewhere.

So, just to add a little bit to that, What is the What is a story of a Sudanese refugee in the United
States. And in the course of telling it, he reads an account from his life back in Africa, to stories
here in the United States, and everything in between. As for reasons why you should want to vote
for it or read it, I think the first thing which many of us in the section realize about the book is
just that it's really engaging. It's written in a way that's, I would say, kind of refreshing compared
to some of the other more--how to put it?--complex authors that we've read, in that it's just really
accessible and really just an easy read that's deeply human. You feel like you're having a
conversation with the guy, and (even though the guy is actually having a conversation with Dave
Eggers, so maybe that's why you get that impression, but at any rate) it's also a book which
manages to address really, really serious current issues such as civil war, genocide, alienation in
American society, but do so in a way that's simultaneously really poignant and inspiring, but
also, actually, funny. It's not a book that you're going to read and be depressed by, even though
you will come from it having really felt that you're dealing with really significant material, which
I thought is really cool, and we thought was really cool.
It's also--just going on to the whole contemporary thing-- it's written by one of the best
contemporary authors out there. He was nominated for a Pulitzer; he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist,
I think, last year, 2007. (I'm not sure, and if I got that wrong and someone here is a big Eggers
fan, I'm terribly sorry.) But yeah; he's great. And, in a course where we're doing from 1945 to the
present, I think it's good to have a really strong, really contemporary author represented. So,
that's another cool thing. Another thing which I think would be really cool about reading this
book is that - it's not your standard academic book at all. You're not going to find this book on
any syllabus, but it still really merits being read in that sort of a context because of the depth of
the material that's being covered, because of the way it's written. Really, there are some beautiful
descriptions with beautiful language. And, well, for any other reason that you'd want to read a
book in a class, it can serve that function, and yet you'd probably more like to hear about it in a
coffee shop or in a restaurant. So, I think that's a pretty cool opportunity which this would give
us.
As far as tying in to the course matters, this book is a great, great study, and, I would think, an
unprecedented study, as far as the Identity Plot goes, for our class, because as a black African the
protagonist is identified not by his ethnicity in the United States, but by his race. And, as is
shown in a really very interesting, I guess, scene, at the very beginning of the book, where he's
being robbed by a black man who says to him, "Oh, well, we're brothers because you're African"
and at the same time derides, only refers to him as African and actually mislabels him as
Nigerian when he's Sudanese. So, it really offers some really interesting perspective into issues
of race, issues of ethnicity, and just a totally new look at American society from, yeah, a
perspective that we're not really used to. I guess, yeah, that basically covers that.
As far as some other, maybe a little bit sillier things, this is a great date book for those of you
who either are dating or are looking to be dating. It's a book that people are reading all of the
time, and, even if they aren't reading, then you can really wow them with just your knowledge of
contemporary literature, and to say nothing of your concern for the people who are struggling in
America and abroad. So, really, that's a big plug. And it's also won a bunch of awards. It was a
finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, which I think is good, and the guy
from Barnes & Noble would not let me leave the counter because he liked it so much, and he is a
good judge.
So, those are some really good plugs but as far as a weakness, you might notice it's a little bit
bigger than some of the other books that we've read, but I promise you that that's okay. You fly
through the pages, and just to give you a sense of why you do that, I'll read to you a section from
the book. It's actually the last paragraph of the book, but it's not like one of those spoilers, like

"And then your mother died." No. It actually, really, I think, is very fitting to read, now, because
it's kind of his plug for why you should read his book, or at least it's a description of why he tells
this story. So here we go.
Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every
person I have encountered these last difficult days, and every person who has entered this club
during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than
human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you, because I cannot help it. It gives me strength,
almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the
collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other. I am alive, and you are
alive, so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am
taken back to God. I will tell these stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want
to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are
there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you
pretending that I do not exist.
Thanks.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Vote. If this were really a high-tech classroom, we'd have a
little console for you, and you'd be voting online, but we don't. Okay. Okay. Anyone need a
ballot? Okay. Rank them 1, 2, 3. TAs get to vote, too. Yes, you do. And when you're finished,
pass them to the aisles. Can I borrow your pencil? I am voting too. Okay. Everybody voted?
Okay, TFs. Everybody done? Pass them over. Okay. We will see them in a moment. Well, let me
say it's a tough act to follow you guys so congratulations to all the people who pitched books,
although I have to say I am a little hurt at the implied criticism. Long? Long? Hard? Boring? I
don't recognize my own syllabus. Maybe the long, but not the hard and the boring. So, we will
see what that next book will be.
Now, I have exactly five minutes, so what I think I want to do is just say something very quick
about loss in this book. I put this quote up on the board: "Need can blossom into all the
compensation it requires." That little blurb, I think, encapsulates this novel's meditation on loss. I
asked you last time to think about where Ruth's voice comes from, what situation we can
imagine, and there are a bunch of different theories that critics have put forward about where
Ruth is and from where we hear her voice coming. One is that she's dead and she's speaking to us
from the afterlife, that she really, somehow, did die in the lake that day, that she fell off the
bridge, or somehow the bridge is a metaphor for her passage into death. Or that this is an adult
Ruth, living who knows where, or just as a transient, who has written this account, or who speaks
to us, somehow. I think that quotation from Marilynne Robinson that I gave you at the end of last
lecture, about how she aims to speak in the voice of the consciousness of the person--not
necessarily the words that they would use if they were to write their own account--suggests that
what she is getting at doesn't require that kind of historical explanation to account for it, that she
doesn't want us to have to think of Ruth speaking from a particular place, which is also a way to
say that Ruth is gone; somehow Ruth is absent from us. And this relates to my point last time
about how identity is imagined as voice. Ruth, the historical Ruth, the character Ruth, a Ruth that
we could situate in any concrete position in the world, has vanished from the frame of this novel.
What we're left with is her voice.
The logic here is that vanishing makes the voice totally present; that full human presence is in
the voice, somehow inherent. That's why there are all of these meditations on what would happen
if various people either did disappear or didn't disappear. So, when Ruth meditates on what it
would be like for her to leave Sylvie, she says, "I did not want to grow gigantic and multiple to
Sylvie." Her sense is that, by leaving Sylvie, her absence would become enormous, and she

herself, in a kind of negative presence, would become larger than she is, and this is how Ruth
feels about her own mother's disappearance, that when her mother disappeared, what she got in
return was the compensation of memory: sharp, specific, evocative, mysterious, ever-present
memory. And the visual metaphor for this kind of memory is, of course, the lake. The lake is
imagined to contain whole and undecayed all the objects of the past that have been lost in it. So
memory is imagined in the same terms, so that you could always bring them up to the surface
and there they would be, whole.
So, the resurrection imagined, if you run the film backward of the train slipping in to the lake--I
read that passage last time--the kind of resurrection imagined, is the way memory works. But
more specifically it's the way the language of memory works. And I want to read my own
favorite passage. This is at the very end of the novel, and I want you to think, as I read it, about
the difference between this passage and the one I read from Bluest Eye about Pecola, that
passage of negativity about her being a kind of blank or a negative, against which all other
virtues could be present in the world. So, think about that as I read this, the bottom of 217:
Since we are dead, the house would be hers now [hers, Lucille]. Perhaps she is in the kitchen
snuggling pretty daughters in her lap. And perhaps now and then they look at the black window
to find out what their mother seems to see there, and they see their own faces and a face so like
their mother's, so rapt and full of tender watching, that only Lucille could think the face was
mine. If Lucille is there, Sylvie and I have stood outside her window a thousand times and we
have thrown the side door open when she was upstairs changing beds and we have brought in
leaves and flung the curtains and tipped the bud vase and somehow left the house again before
she could run downstairs, leaving behind us a strong smell of lake water. She would sigh and
think, "they never change." Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant waiting for a
friend. She is tastefully dressed, wearing, say, a tweed suit with an amber scarf at the throat, to
draw attention to the red in her darkening hair. Her water glass has left two thirds of a ring on the
table and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail. Sylvie and I do not flounce in
through the door, smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats and combing our hair back with our
fingers. We do not sit down at the table next to hers and empty our pockets in a small, damp heap
in the middle of the table and sort out the gum wrappers and ticket stubs and add up the coins
and dollar bills and laugh and add them again. My mother, likewise, is not there, and my
grandmother in her house slippers with her pigtail wagging, and my grandfather with his hair
combed flat against his brow does not examine the menu with studious interest. We are nowhere
in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We
pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window and the perimeters of our wandering
are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with
her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the seagulls
could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch,
does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
So, you see in that incredibly lyrical evocation of absence how the very absence calls forth this
lyric voice. The structure is exactly the same as the one that Morrison uses to describe what
Pecola is to Claudia and Frieda and the rest of their community. It's a way in which absence calls
forth the living essence of other people, but here what's called forth is a sort of living essence of
imagination, a living essence of voice, so that Sylvie and Ruth's absence for Lucille becomes the
very presence that they have to her. There is a passage earlier in the novel where she describes
the condition of the body that matches up with this understanding of absence. She's outside in the
orchard--this is on 203--imagining the story of a young girl in a lighted house that she sees. Let's
see. It would be that kind of story, a very melancholy story.

Her hair, which was as black as the sky, and so long that it swept after her, a wind in the grass,
her fingers, which were sky black and so fine and slender that they were only cold touch like
drops of rain, her step, which was so silent that people were surprised when they even thought
they heard it, she would be transformed by the growth of light into a mortal child. And, when she
stood at the bright window, she would find that the world was gone, the orchard was gone, her
mother and grandmother and aunts were gone. Like Noah's wife on the tenth or fifteenth night of
rain, she would stand in the window and realize that the world was really lost. And those outside
would scarcely know her, so sadly was she changed. Before she had been fleshed in air, and
clothed in nakedness, and mantled in cold, and her very bones were only slender things like
shards of ice. She had haunted the orchard out of preference, but she could walk into the lake
without ripple or displacement, and sail up the air invisibly as heat. And now, lost to her kind,
she would almost forget them, and she would feed coarse food to her coarse flesh and be almost
satisfied.
And then Ruth meditates on her transformation in that time in the orchard.
If I had stayed there, I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to
begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark. And, in general,
I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one.
I would call this an anorexic aesthetic. It's an aesthetic of starving the self into invisibility so that
the voice can become present. So in this scene, when she imagines the girl inside the house
eating, all that's outside the house is lost. All she can see when she looks out her window is her
own reflection. But outside the house, she is starved in to a kind of ethereal, full presence. So the
logic of absence--to bring it back around to this question of identity and the identity of the
voice--the logic of absence starves away the person so that this fullness can appear. And I think
this is the dark side of a novel that so many people initially read as a feminist novel, a novel
celebrating the strength and the independence of women. It turns to an aesthetic that has a kind
of purchase in our culture; that sense of anorexia blends into the spiritual fullness of imagining
memory as this beautiful, lyrical presence. I think this is the complexity of this novel; this is the
tension. It's also, in many ways, its beauty.
So, now I believe we have an answer. Jonathan Safran Foer. That will be our novel. Eli,
congratulations. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful break.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 17 Transcript
March 24, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. I'd like to begin. Welcome back. It is good to see you all. It's
a bit startling. I don't know where those two weeks went. So, tell me: I asked you to read Blood
Meridianover break; was this a happy Spring Break task for you? Was it good "beach reading,"
as I promised? No? No. I'd like, before I begin my lecture today, just to hear a little bit from you,
just so that I know what you're thinking about as I talk to you about this book. Who liked this
novel? Okay, a good, maybe, half of you. Someone tell me why they liked it; someone, someone,
someone tell me why they liked it. Okay. Now you're getting all quiet. Someone can tell me one
sentence why you liked this novel. Yes. Thank you.

Student: I like how creepy the judge is.

Professor Amy Hungerford: You like how creepy the judge is. It is impressive how creepy he
is, yes. Okay. Why else? Yes.
Student: I actually like how kind of quickly and bluntly some of the atrocities happen in it. So,
you'll be reading a passage where there are pretty mundane things, and then all of a sudden,
slaughter.
Professor Amy Hungerford: And you liked that? That was good. Yeah. It certainly is a kind of
virtuosic representation of violence, yes, absolutely. What did it remind you of? Well, yes, yes.
Student: I liked how ambiguous the ending was.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. The ending is very strange, and we'll talk about that. What
else? Yes.
Student: I liked that it read like a nightmare.
Professor Amy Hungerford: It read like a nightmare. What does that mean?
Student: I just remember, reading it, it felt like a nightmare. It was very, sort of, jumbled, and
just very sensory, and it felt like a nightmare.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. It is very sensory. This prose concentrates so much on the
material of the world, absolutely, and it does have that feeling of drawing you into its world very
completely. I think, also, that sense of nightmarishness is heightened by the fact that the plot is
not very strong in this novel. That's not what's driving this novel. You're laughing. Why do you
laugh? Why do you laugh about that, about the plot? Yes. You're still smiling from the laughter,
so I'm going to ask you.
Student: Just because yes, that is true. That's part of the reason that I found it difficult to
continue reading, just maybe be interested by the- I guess the dry, sort of emotionless way of
presenting violence. It was sort of interesting, but the fact that there didn't seem to be a point, or
a place that they're going, it made it really hard to not just be, like. "oh, this is going to be
disgusting."
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. It can produce this aversion in readers. How many were
averse to this novel? Okay, a few of you, at least. Yeah. I think, - when I first tried to read this
novel, I failed twice. I'm a sensitive soul. So, I failed twice to read this novel because of its
violence, and then I persevered. But it can get, actually kind of boring, sometimes, I think,
because of the plotlessness. So, unless you're really interested in how the story is being told in
that language, it can be repetitive and can numb you as a reader, I think. These are all aspects of
the novel that I will try to account for over the course of my two lectures today and on
Wednesday. There are two other things I'm going to do in these two lectures. One is, today, to
think hard about what it means to track allusions in a novel. So, that's going to be one thing that I
do today.
Allusions appear in most of the things that we read, dare I say all of them, but one never quite
knows what to do with them, once you have identified them. Now, the sense of literature as an
art with a history depends on our being able to do something with allusions or to have something
to say about them. What does it mean that one novel speaks to a novel or a poem or another kind

of writing from the past? How are we to make sense of that in the evolution of the art form? This
is a foundation of what English literary study looks like pretty much at any university. At any
university, if you're an English major, you're asked to study a historical range of texts. You're
asked to master, in some portion, or to some extent, the literary tradition in English. What does it
mean that we're asked to do that?
Cormac McCarthy's novel gives us the opportunity to take a case study. What does it mean, in
this day, in this time, for this writer to be writing in a tradition? So, allusion is one thing I'll focus
on that's of general interest in literary studies. The second thing, in the second lecture, that I will
focus on is what to do with detail, what to do with that odd detail that you notice in the novel. It
could be anything. Is there a way of making an argument that will radiate out from that detail
into some more holistic understanding of a novel? My second lecture will be a demonstration of
that and an argument for that as a literary technique, and I hope that this will be useful to you in
writing the next paper, which will be coming up fairly shortly.
So, I want to begin, then, with this quotation from Cormac McCarthy. This was his first
interview, 1992. Many of you probably know he's gotten a lot more press since Oprah's Book
Club chose his latest novel, The Road. He's sort of been out and about. He gave her an interview.
He's given an interview since then for a magazine. Before that he was a very reclusive writer,
and he had been writing since the late '60s and by 1992--up until that point--he had refused all
interviews. He usually refused readings, even when he had zero money. He lived out of hotel
rooms, even when he was married and had a son, when he was a young man. He's on his third
marriage now. He would turn down invitations to read even when they were down to their last
dollar. His ex-wife tells some amusing stories about this. He'd get an invitation to read, he'd turn
it down, and they'd eat beans for another night. So, that's her take on what that life was like. He
says in this interview: "The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its
life on the novels that have been written." So, this is my invitation to take seriously allusion
in Blood Meridian. Did anybody on their own recognize some of the sources of Blood Meridian?
Did you notice any allusions? Yes.
Student: Oral history, storytelling.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. The oral tradition is very powerful in
McCarthy's writing. The sound of the prose is very important to him. Yeah. What else? Yes.
Student: Along those same lines, when he frequently talks about the sun coming up or going
down, there is a lot of that in The Odyssey, when the sun's fingers are coming out
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. A lot of that cosmic imagery, I think he does take from the
great epics of our language. Yes. What else? What else did you notice? Yes.
Student: I noticed a lot of references to the Bible: the burning bush and other things.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely. The Bible is peppered throughout this, and I'm
going to have a lot to say about that--some to say about it, today, but I have a whole argument
about that that I'll get to on Wednesday. Yeah, absolutely. What else? Anything else you noticed?
Well, I'm going to start, actually, a little bit closer to home, in the American tradition. I'm going
to start with Moby-Dick. This is my lineup of texts that I am going to use today to talk
about Blood Meridian [pointing to a line of books on the table]. So, I want to start with Moby
Dick. This is probably the single most important book for McCarthy, beside the Bible, as a
source for both language, character, ideas, moral questions. All kinds of things come from MobyDick. And, if you want to begin in the easiest way, the first thing is to think about Ahab. Ahab is

known for his monomaniacal evil, his evil quest to take on the white whale. As a character who
is loquacious, charismatic, threatening, violent, he is very much a model for Judge Holden. So, in
that simple, general way McCarthy owes a debt to Moby-Dick.
There are many specific ways that this novel owes a debt to Moby-Dick. One, that I'll joint point
out, is from the prophet chapter in Moby-Dick. That's chapter 19. If you've read the novel, you
can recall that before Ishmael and Queequeg get on the Pequod they are accosted by a beggar in
the street. And his name is Elijah, and he warns them in very cryptic language about what they've
actually signed away, when they signed the papers to board the Pequod. And he suggests that
what they've signed away is their souls, not just the couple of years of their life. The version that
we get in Blood Meridian can be found on page 40 and 41. It actually starts on 39. The kid has
joined up with Captain White's gang of filibusters, and they are in a bar and there they find--this
is on 39--an old, disordered Mennonite in this place. And he turns to study them, "a thin man in a
leather waistcoat, a black and straight-brimmed hat set square on his head, a thin rim of
whiskers." And, if you look at the Moby-Dick version, I just want to point out how closely he's
following the cues here.
"Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod and were sauntering away from the water, for the
moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words [shipmates have ye
shipped in that ship] were put to us by a stranger who, pausing before us, leveled his massive
forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily appareled in faded jacket and patched
trousers, a rag of black handkerchief investing his neck.
Just the way that description, the very brief description of his outfit, what he's wearing around
his neck, his hat: they match up, in these two little paragraphs. The Mennonite, however, is much
more dire, much less playful than Melville's Elijah. He says to the assembled men: "They'll jail
you to a man" This is on 40:
"Who will?" "The United States Army, General Worth." "The hell they will." "Pray that they
will." He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. "What does that mean, old
man?" "Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed you'll not cross it back." "Don't aim to
cross it back. We goin' to Sonora. What's it to you, old man?" The Mennonite watches the
enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to
them. His eyes are wet. He speaks slowly. "The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million
years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye
carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land, ye'll wake more than the dogs." But they
berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering. And how else
could it be? How these things end, in confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the
wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young
men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again, and in the dawn
the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and
they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The
men were gone. The whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The
boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be
with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a
gray light. The fowls roosting along the grapevines had begun to stir and call. "There is no such
joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto," said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in
his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.
He offers them these portentous sayings, like this last little epigram about the tavern and the road
thereto, and he uses this archaic language. Moby-Dick's prophet, who occupies the same
structural spot, accosting the main characters as they go out on their journey, is much more

playful. He is berated by Ishmael for pretending to have a big secret, for speaking as if he had a
secret to tell, but not telling it. So, McCarthy takes the model and transforms it slightly, brings it
into a realm where sincerity and depth and fear replace the inklings of fear around a core of good
will, irony, playfulness. The reason there is that difference, I think, is that McCarthy has decided
not to give us an Ishmael. Ishmael is an incredibly charming narrator. He is thoughtful; he's
funny; he is a little self-mocking; he can wax both grand and silly; he can recognize his own
silliness. There's a vast interior of Ishmael's mind that we see in this narrative. We never see the
like of this from the kid, never. This is one way in which McCarthy has revised Melville, so this
is one of those observations I'm going to, sort of, put up on the shelf. What does it mean that this
is the way he has revised Melville? This is one of the questions that my two lectures, together,
will answer. What does that revision mean?
Another specific scene in which McCarthy is revising Melville comes when Toadvine almost
kills the judge. Do you remember the scene? The judge has been dandling the little Indian boy on
his knee. The men around the campfire are delighted. They laugh. In the morning the judge has
killed the boy, and scalped it, and is wiping his hands on his pants. And Toadvine puts his
revolver to the judge's head, and the judge says, "Shoot that thing or put it away." And Toadvine
puts it away. This is the direct echo of a moment when Starbuck stands outside Ahab's cabin.
Ahab's maniacal quest for the whale has been made apparent to the whole ship. Starbuck, that
wise and deliberative man, understands that the fate of the whole ship has now been recruited to
Ahab's maniacal cause. He knows that if he takes the musket and shoots Ahab in his bed he will
save the whole ship of men. He does not do it. So, both Toadvine and Starbuck are presented
with a moral problem: Do you murder the leader of an immoral, ill-fated, violent quest? Both
men decide not to.
This is a scene I'll come back to next time, on Wednesday, and I'll have more to say about it. But,
for now, one thing that we can say about it is, once again, the lack of interiority for these
characters makes a crucial difference. It's a crucial point of revision. Starbuck, we know, is
deliberative. We know he is a wise man. He gives counsel to Ahab over the whole course of the
novel: to abandon his quest, to go home to his wife, at the very end of the novel. In a crucial
moment, Starbuck gives an impassioned plea to Ahab, reminds him of his wife and child and
says, "Leave off chasing that whale. Let us live and go home." We have no such history for
Toadvine. What do we know about Toadvine? Well, he wears a scapular of ears that he's cut off.
He has tattoos from his criminal past on his face. He wears the evidence of a criminal life, not
the furrowed brow of Starbuck's thought. He is a very different kind of character, and that leads
us to wonder how we need to understand his failure to shoot the judge. Is it that moral
complexity yields lack of decisiveness, as we might say for Starbuck, that moral complexity is
presented as a kind of weakness? Or, is that far too much to say about Toadvine? Is Toadvine a
morally complex character? Do we have any basis upon which to say such a thing? So, this is
another kind of question we want to ask.
Now I'm going to move to my second in line, here, and that's Paradise Lost. McCarthy rings the
changes on the great voices of American literature, but also of world literature in English. You
were talking about The Iliad and the epic tradition. In this case, he is entering the great realm of
poetry. Now he gives a specific revision of Paradise Lost in Blood Meridian, if you recall. How
many of you have taken a Milton class, or have read Milton in class? Okay. Okay, a good
number of you, so probably a bunch of you realize this. When the judge makes gunpowder, do
you remember this scene? The men are out of gunpowder. They find the judge in the desert.
They're being hounded by the Indians they've been chasing all this time. They're at their mercy.
They know they're going to be massacred. They find the judge sitting on a rock in the middle of
the desert. Who knows how he got there? Glanton takes him up. He rides with them, and he takes
them to a volcanic cone, a dead cone, and there he instructs them how to make gunpowder. He

takes brimstone from the rim of the cone, he mixes it with charcoal and other things, and then he
has them piss on it. And from this he makes gunpowder, and they use that gunpowder to defeat
the Indians who come after them.
Well, this is taken directly from Paradise Lost. Satan instructs his fiends in how to make
gunpowder, and I'm going to read you a little bit from Book 6 of Paradise Lost. So, the fiends
are down in Hell strategizing, somewhat in despair over their chances against God's angels. The
fallen angels are standing around Satan, and they're taking turns making speeches, and they've
just heard a speech from a fallen angel who says, "We really need a better weapon. Otherwise
we're never going to win this war." And here is what Satan has to say.
Whereto
with
look
composed
Satan
replied.
Not
uninvented
that,
which
thou
aright
Believest
so
main
to
our
success,
I
bring.
Which
of
us
who
beholds
the
bright
surface
Of
this
ethereous
mould
whereon
we
stand,
This
continent
of
spacious
Heaven,
adorned
With
plant,
fruit,
flower
ambrosial,
gems,
and
gold;
Whose
eye
so
superficially
surveys
These
things,
as
not
to
mind
from
whence
they
grow
Deep
under
ground,
materials
dark
and
crude,
Of
spiritous
and
fiery
spume,
till
touched
With
Heaven's
ray,
and
tempered,
they
shoot
forth
So
beauteous,
opening
to
the
ambient
light?
These
in
their
dark
nativity
the
deep
Shall
yield
us,
pregnant
with
infernal
flame;
Which,
into
hollow
engines,
long
and
round,
Thick
rammed,
at
the
other
bore
with
touch
of
fire
Dilated and infuriate, [that's very much a McCarthy word, infuriate] shall send forth
From
far,
with
thundering
noise,
among
our
foes
Such
implements
of
mischief,
as
shall
dash
To
pieces,
and
o'erwhelm
whatever
stands
Adverse,
that
they
shall
fear
we
have
disarmed
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
So, there Satan's saying, "Look at the world. You look at all these plants. The chemicals we need
are in this earth." So, this is what the judge says, for his part, in like circumstance. This is on
129, 130, and this, remember, is told by Tobin, the ex-priest:
In all this time,--[as they were riding across the plain without gunpowder] In all this time the
judge had spoke hardly a word. So at dawn we were on the edge of a vast malpais and his honor
takes up a position on some lava rocks there and he commences to give us an address.
See, there is that same structural position. The judge occupies the place that Satan does
in Paradise Lost and gives a speech:
It was like a sermon but it was no such sermon as any man of us had ever heard before. Beyond
the malpais was a volcanic peak and in the sunrise it was many colors and there was dark, little
birds crossin down the wind and the wind was flappin the judge's old benjamin about him and he
pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself of an oration to what end I
know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother earth as he said was
round like an egg and contained all good things within her. Then he turned and led the horse he

had been ridin across that terrain of black and glassy slag, treacherous to men and beast alike,
and us behind him like the disciples of a new faith.
So, the oration urging them to see in the earth all the things they need: exactly out of Paradise
Lost. And then, a little further down the page, you see that Tobin speculates about the volcanic
terrain they're crossing - "where for aught any man knows lies the locality of Hell." He even
speculates that this is where Hell's entrance might be. So, what does McCarthy do when he
invites us to see the judge as the parallel of Satan? I think this is one of the most powerful
allusions driving readings of this novel. Lots of readers have taken Judge Holden as heroic evil,
on the model of Milton's Satan.
Remember, the famous problem about Paradise Lost is that, here was Milton writing it to justify
the ways of God to men, justifying how good God was, and yet Satan is this incredibly
compelling character. Milton writes Satan to be irresistible, and in particular he is, rhetorically,
incredibly gifted, and so he makes all of these wonderful speeches that Milton writes for him that
we get to listen to. So, McCarthy sets up a similar problem in Blood Meridian. Here is the judge.
He has this compelling language that we want to listen to. It's very sonorous. There is that debt to
the oral tradition, and yet he is this incredibly evil man. So, there is a problem, here, of moral
valence. Can we condemn, or does the book condemn, this figure? It's the problem in Paradise
Lost. It's the problem, also, in Blood Meridian. If you find the violence in Blood Meridian simply
gratuitous, then you've answered that, in a certain way, by saying, "No. The character is not so
compelling that I can put up with the graphic representation of violence. It doesn't make it worth
it." But there is another school of thought that says the aesthetics of the violence, the aesthetics
of the judge, do make it worth it. So, that is a kind of debt.
The other way this sheds light on the novel is to say that the novel is concerned, like Paradise
Lost, with the great cosmic structures of the world. Now, this is another element, too, of its use of
the Bible, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But it gives, for the novel, a certain kind of weight.
It makes us read it looking for those big, cosmic structures and statements about those big,
cosmic structures. It lends it weight unleavened by the kinds of delightful playfulness that we see
from Ishmael. Melville is full of the Bible, and full of portentousness, too, but always Ishmael's
voice is there charming us. What we have here, instead, is sheer portentousness--some say
pretentiousness--weighing on every sentence. The allusions to Paradise Lost are part of that
portentousness.
Now, let me move to something smaller, moving a little later in the poetic tradition: Wordsworth.
In the opening lines of this novel, we see the line on page 3, "All history present in that visage,"
the face of the kid, "the child, the father of the man." That phrase, "The child, the father of the
man," comes from a short, little poem by William Wordsworth. It's called "My Heart Leaps up
when I Behold."
My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky: / So was it when my life began, / So is it
now I am a man, / So be it when I shall grow old / Or let me die! / The child is father of the
man: / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.
This is a lovely little snippet of a poem. The point of it is to say that the child, delighted by the
rainbow, gives you the man, delighted by the rainbow, and he says, "Let me die if I'm no longer
delighted, if I get to be so old that that childlike delight in the rainbow is gone." The rainbow
comes freighted with its own biblical literary history: that is, it's the sign of God's promise to the
world, to humankind, that God will no longer send a flood to wipe out the human race as He did
in the days of Noah. So, it is a hopeful sign for the fate of humankind, and it reflects well on
God's intentions towards us.

McCarthy's child, father of the man, is a very different sort. Just read that sentence right prior to
the allusion: "He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless
violence." What McCarthy announces here, in his revision of Wordsworth, is that, although to
invoke Milton's Satan is already to project us into the realm of Romantic figures, he is rejecting
the later Romanticism of the early nineteenth century which found in humankind, especially in
the child as the epitome of pure humankind, a kind of great hopefulness. This is not what
McCarthy sees in humankind. This is not what the kid gives to us, even though we are told, a
little later on, on page 4, the child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly
innocent. What does that innocence mean? Is it, here, an innocence like Wordsworth's child, who
can behold the rainbow with joy and a pure relation to the world and to a caring god? Is it that
kind of innocence? Is it the innocence simply of not knowing something? Is it that kind of
innocence? Is it an absence of guilt? Is that what the innocence is?
These are questions, again, I'm going to put up on the side. What is the quality of the kid's
innocence? This is something I'm going to answer on Wednesday, but I want you to think about
it. The allusion to Wordsworth causes us to ask that kind of question. The revision tells us we are
in a much darker world. Now, I'm actually going to skip over some of the biblical allusion and
trust you to read, in the first couple of pages, just in that first section. I'd like you reread it and
think about how the Bible is woven in there. You see lots of Garden of Eden imagery there. You
see a parricide, the image of the murdered father. There is an echo there of Cain and Abel, even
though they are brothers. There is a sense that this is a world in which violence and murder has
already entered. So, you can think about that.
I want to go, now, to my last in the pile of books. This is an historical source called My
Confession, and it is by a man named Samuel Chamberlain. Chamberlain fought for the U.S. in
the Mexican War, and after the war was over he joined up with the Glanton Gang. The Glanton
Gang is a historical fact, as far as we know. It was a gang of scalp hunters that operated around
the border right after the Mexican War in the 1840s and '50s. Sam Chamberlain--I want to show
you--he was quite a remarkable guy. He was from Boston, born in New Hampshire, grew up in
Boston. At sixteen he left Boston and went out West, taking a sort of circuitous route. He went to
find his fortune and to find adventure, but he also went with a box of paints. And he produced
these amazing watercolors everywhere he went, and he wrote this testimony of his adventures
called My Confession. It reads like a picaresque. It's full of his own heroism, all the senoritas that
he romances, all the great battles he fights in, but he really gives us an amazing set of paintings.
You can just see these. I'm going to show you a couple.
While I'm waiting for this [image] to come up, I'm going to show you something you can't see on
this web site. This is the Texas State Historical Society where these documents are kept. The
pages are written-- I don't know if you can see this. This is a reproduction. See, he writes in this
gorgeous hand, and he embellishes all the pages with little drawings. And this is hundreds of
pages long, with hundreds of watercolors in it. My bet is that McCarthy actually saw this
manuscript in the Texas State Historical Society. That's where he lived. That's where he was
living when he wrote this book. And it just is amazingly visual and gorgeous. He ended up
making three copies of this with all its paintings. When he got back to New England he married
and he had three daughters (which he named after various senoritas that he had romanced) and
he made a copy of My Confession for each, so there are three of them. One is at Annapolis; one
is at the Texas State Historical Society, and I think one is with the family. All right.
So, this isn't giving you the paintings that I want, and I'm going to--These are two that I took up.
This one on the right-- Well, we'll do the little one on the left. The one on the left is his drawing
of the Grand Canyon, and he claims that it was the first ever painting of the Grand Canyon (and I
think this is probably false). That's them crossing through, the gang. This is Judge Holden, here,

discoursing on evolution in a very Judge Holden-ly way. So, we actually hear about this sermon
on evolution in the novel. Well, here it is in Chamberlain's Confession.
Now, I want to read to you a little bit from the Confession.
The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size who
rejoiced in the name of Holden, called Judge Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew,
but a more cool-blooded villain never went unhung. He stood six foot six in his moccasins, had a
large, fleshy frame, a dull, tallow-colored face destitute of hair and all expression, always cool
and collected. But when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hog-like eyes would gleam with
a sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of a fiend. [I'm going to skip a little bit.] Terrible
stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name
in the Cherokee nation in Texas. And before we left Fronteras, a little girl of ten years was found
in the chaparral foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat
pointed out him as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand. But though all suspected, no
one charged him with the crime. He was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico. He
conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would
take the harp or guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful
performance, out-waltz any poblano of the ball, plum centre with rifle or revolver, a daring
horseman acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in
geology and mineralogy, with all an errant coward, but not that he possessed enough courage to
fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage and strength stealing
weapons, but where the combat would be equal he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first
sight and he knew it. The intellectual beast saw fit to patronize me in the most insulting manner,
lecturing me on the immorality of my conduct in drinking and gambling. This was shortly after
the murder of the muchacha, and when I made an angry reply he said, "Come, Jack. Don't bear ill
will. Shake hands and make up." I replied, "No. I thank you. Your hand is too large and
powerful. It leaves its mark." Holden gave me a look out from his cold, cruel eyes and quietly
said, "You are there, are you? Well, look out where my hand may squeeze the life out of you yet,
my young bantam." I felt like trying my revolver on his huge carcass, but prudence forbid
bringing matters to a deadly issue at present.
There is that same Toadvine-Starbuck moment. It's right in My Confession, as is that particular
strange description of Judge Holden as huge and hairless. Now, in the nineteenth century hairless
just meant that he didn't have a beard, but McCarthy takes that and makes it into this really
freakish character. It's almost like he's a giant infant. What does it mean that McCarthy gets the
most powerful character in the novel so directly from this source? That's one question. Second
question is: what does it mean that he's actually taking an historical fact, the Glanton Gang and
their adventures, and using these as the kernel of his novel, when--as my little pile of books here
has demonstrated--he's totally absorbed in the novel's relationship to literary history?
So, what's he doing by doubling the literary history with an American history? He's pursuing two
sets of links back through time: one in the realm of art, one in the realm of history. What's the
relationship between the two? When I first read this, I will say, I was extremely surprised. Are
you surprised, too, to see that it takes so directly from Chamberlain's manuscript? The problem is
the problem of originality. This is a problem that, I think, McCarthy's quotation, that I wrote up
on the board, points towards: "The ugly fact is that books are made out of books." Why is that an
ugly fact? What's ugly about that? "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been
written." Is it ugly because it calls into question the very principle of originality? This is what
someone, a reader like Harold Bloom, might say. Harold Bloom argues that it is the "anxiety of
influence" that shapes many writers in the tradition. As they take on the great writers of the past,
they feel that they are ever belated, that there is no room yet in the world to push the art form

further. Is that why it's an ugly fact? Is its ugliness, or the way that word is used in this quotation,
is it registering McCarthy's anxiety about his own belatedness? Can he really be original? Can he
really answer the portentous, cosmic aura that he invokes over and over again in the very style of
this novel? The style keeps telling you, "Come and look for a deeper meaning."
Now, I want to point out one last thing for you, since I do have just the couple minutes that I will
need. This is on 4 and 5. At the top of 4, as the kid moves from Tennessee down to New Orleans,
and then out to the West, he moves through the South:
He sees blacks in the fields lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton, a
shadowed agony in the garden. [There is some of that Eden imagery I was going to point out to
you at more length.] Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper
skyline.
The landscape itself is already an artifact; it's paper. It's as if it's of McCarthy's own construction.
But if you look just across the page, on 5, this is a tiny thing, and probably it didn't register to
you at all.
A week on he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned walking the sand
roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat.
Do you notice the way the words are repeating there? "Spiderlike among the bolls of cotton,"
"his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his coat." It's a tiny, little thing. I would argue,
however, that what we're seeing here is the way the very style and tone perpetuates itself, out of
itself. So, I want to add a final layer in my excavation of allusion, and here say that he's alluding
to himself, that there is a constant re-layering that takes the language and the repetitiousness of
that language builds within the text.
There is a lot of anxiety about origin, right here in these couple pages. We're told, "Only now is
it"--as he goes to Texas--"only now is the child finally divested of all he has been." And you
note, at the beginning, that he is, and his folk are known for, "hewers of wood and drawers of
water." These are the traditional adjectives given to the sons of Ham, the hewers of wood and
drawers of water. Ham's crime against his father, Noah, was that he saw his father, Noah, naked
in his tent. Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and I guess he was naked in his tent while he was
passed out. Ham happened to peep in and saw his father naked. His two brothers covered the
father. The two brothers are therefore blessed; Ham is cursed. Why is this a curse-worthy action?
Why is this a curse-worthy mistake? I think it's because, in seeing the father naked, you see the
mystery of your origin. And so, the kid is likened to someone cursed for looking upon their
origin. There is a sense in which he can almost understand it. This is meant to be mystery, and
yet by looking, somehow, he is closer to it than he should be. The problem for the kid is to divest
himself of origin, to forget it, so if Ham is cursed because he saw his origin, the kid's curse lies,
in part, in the divestiture of all origin. He forgets it. It's not that he sees it; he forgets it.
And then you can get a sentence like this: "His origins are become remote as is his destiny and
not again in all the world's turning will there be terrain so wild and barbarous to try whether the
stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of
clay." I want you to read the sentence several times before Wednesday, and ask yourself if you
can figure out what it means fully, all of it. Parts of it are more clear than others. Think about the
balance between the rhythm of that sentence and its content, the tone, what its tone says to you,
what its diction says to you, and what the sentence itself actually says to you. So, that's what I'd
like you to think about. And on Wednesday I'm going to take this discussion of allusion, and I'm

going to sort of ball it up and it'll become part of another argument, and that'll stem from one tiny
detail I'm going to take out of the novel. So that's where I'm going.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 18 Transcript
March 26, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Starting on page 312, here is the little detail. This is the kid after
he has left the Glanton Gang. They've been routed by the Yumas, and now he is on his own.
He traveled about--[This is the middle of the page.] He traveled about from place to place. He
did not avoid the company of other men. He was treated with a certain deference as one who had
got on to terms with life beyond what his years could account for. By now he'd come by a horse
and a revolver, the rudiments of an outfit. He worked at different trades. He had a Bible that he'd
found at the mining camps and he carried this book with him, no word of which he could read. In
his dark and frugal clothes some took him for a sort of preacher, but he was no witness to them,
neither of things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man.
It's that detail of the Bible that interests me here. He had a Bible he'd found at the mining camps,
carried this book with him, "no word of which he could read." Why does the kid carry a Bible,
when he is illiterate, and why does it appear at this moment in the narrative? These are the
questions I want to try and answer. I want to account for this little detail through an argument
that will pick up the points I made about allusion on Monday and integrate those into a different
kind of argument. What does this Bible signify at this moment? The kid, I would guess to most
of you, seemed like, at this point, he had become somewhat different. Is that right? Did you feel
that, by this point, when he leaves the Glanton Gang, he's matured in some way? Did you feel
that? Yes? No? Yes. Maybe. If you didn't, you swam against McCarthy's own prose.
Remember that at a certain point late in the novel he is no longer called the kid; he is called the
man. I'm sure most of you caught that. What this says to us is that McCarthy has built the
structure of the narrative along the familiar line of the Bildungsroman, the novel of a boy
growing into a man. It's hard to miss this when that's the character's only name, and it changes in
the middle. This is a fairly obvious gesture towards that very well-known narrative structure.
There are other indicators, though, that suggest a transformation of the kid, or some sort of
complexity to the kid, that might be belied by the way the narrative is conducted.
Remember that difference I pointed out on Monday between Melville and McCarthy, between
the interiority you get through Ishmael as a narrator, the complexity of him as a character, and
the flatness of the kid. You don't have an Ishmael character whose mind you can see into. We
don't see into the minds of these people very often. If the Bible signifies, as it seems to do to the
people who see him and take him to be some kind of preacher, to have some kind of wisdom, if it
suggests a development, what kind of development is it? The judge is the person who gives us
something to go on in this respect, and if you look on page 299 we can see what that is. The
judge and the kid are at odds in the desert after the rout of the gang, and the kid is hiding with a
loaded gun. And the judge is hunting him, and he keeps calling out to the kid.
"The priest has led you to this boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you've not the
heart of a common assassin. I have passed before your gun sights twice this hour and will pass a

third time. Why not show yourself? No assassin," called the judge, "and no partisan either. There
is a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know you alone were
mutinous, you alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen."
The judge sets the kid apart from himself and from the gang. In this moment, especially, we feel
that the kid has some kind of moral superiority, some kind of resistance to the violence that has
been dominating the novel up until this time. You can see it, also, in a late example of the judge.
He says, on 307, when he meets up with the kid much later when the kid is in prison (This is on
307, about two thirds of the way down):
"Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you
tell me who that was?" "It was you," whispered the kid. "You were the one." [And then I'm going
to skip down a little bit.] "Our animosities were formed and waiting before we two met, yet even
so you could have changed it all."
The judge, here again, singles out the kid as having somehow betrayed the gang, and he suggests
that--this is on the prior page--he has lied to the authorities. But he suggests that the kid had
actually conspired with the Yumas to make it possible for the Glanton Gang to be decimated, that
he had given them information and allowed them to ambush the group. He suggests that the kid
was actively working against the gang in this scene. Is this true? Is the kid somehow special?
Does he stand apart from the gang? This is a question I want you to ponder.
Now, one very distinguished reader of this novel, Harold Bloom, has called the kid a hero. There
is a preface to the Modern Library Edition of this novel where Bloom argues that the kid is the
hero against the heroic evil of the judge. And remember, in my discussion of Milton's role as a
source of allusion in this novel, what Milton's Satan brings with him into this novel is that sense
of heroic evil. Bloom sees the kid as the heroic good--flawed maybe, maybe a little bit modest-but yet still the heroic good. And Bloom actually makes a mistake that I think is quite indicative
of a mistake in reading. That's he capitalizes "the kid." He makes "kid" like a proper name,
capital K, Kid. You never see it that way in the novel.
Is the kid a hero? Is there moral development? I want, now, to see whether there's any case to be
made for this, and to do that I'm going to track the kid through the middle of the novel. There are
about 75 pages in the exact center of the novel where the kid does not appear very often. This is
also a structure that pertains in Moby-Dick, so this is again something that he has partly
borrowed from Melville. When the kid does appear, let's see what he does. This is during the
time, by the way, when they're just massacring anyone who is breathing on the desert plain. Any
peaceful tribe they come across, they will skin anyone whose hair looks like it could be an Indian
scalp. Let's look first at 157. This is the first place where the kid is noted to appear in this
section. This is McGill emerging from the burned encampment.
McGill came out of the crackling fires and stood staring bleakly at the scene about. He had been
skewered through with a lance and he held the stalk of it before him. It was fashioned from a
sotol stalk and the point of an old cavalry sword bound to the haft curved out from the small of
his back. The kid waded out of the water and approached him and the Mexican sat down
carefully on the sand. "Get away from him," said Glanton. McGill turned to look at Glanton and
as he did so Glanton leveled his pistol and shot him through the head.
It looks like the kid is approaching him as a kind of act of mercy. Here is a man skewered
through with a brutal weapon, and the kid approaches him. Glanton's response is simply to kill
him, seeing him as more of a burden to the gang than anything else, but the kid approaches.
Here, you do see a difference between the kid and Glanton, at least in their approach to McGill.

162, a somewhat similar case when Davy Brown has an arrow through his leg. Brown has asked
someone to help him push it through so he can then extract the arrow, and everybody has
refused. This is on 161.
"Boys," said Brown, "I'd doctorfy it myself but I can't get no straight grip." The judge looked up
at him and smiled. "Will you do us Holden?" "No, Davy, I won't, but I tell you what I will do."
"What's that?" "I'll write a policy on your life against every mishap save the noose." "Damn you,
then."
So, they're just kind of playing with him, and laughing at him as he suffers. "Then finally the kid
rose. 'I'll try her,' he said. 'Good lad,' said Brown." And they go through the process of pushing
the arrow through, and the priest chides him after this is all done.
When the kid returned to his own blanket, the ex-priest leaned to him and hissed at his ear,
"Fool," he said. "God will not love ye forever." The kid turned to look at him. "Don't you know
he'd have took you with him? He'd have took you, boy, like a bride to the altar."
I think what he means there is that David Brown would have killed him, would have killed the
kid if he had had the chance, somehow, in his moment of pain. So, the kid does look, again, he
looks quite merciful, in this passage. We see him on 169 at dinner with the governor of Chiapas,
Angel Trias. This is on 169. This is a very brief mention. "The kid in the first starched collar he'd
ever owned and the first cravat sat mute as a tailor's dummy at that board." The ex-priest has sort
of indicated with his eyes to note that the judge and Trias are conversing in some unknown
language, a language that none of them know, and it's as if to say--that look is as if to say, "See
there. He has a kind of mystical evil about him. He speaks even in these other languages that no
one can understand. He's an otherworldly figure," the ex-priest seems to be saying just with his
eyes. The kid is just like a dummy here. He is just a blank. On 173, this is the passage I noted on
Monday where Toadvine and the kid are grumbling against the judge and Glanton because of
their penchant for massacring peaceful Indians and Toadvine puts the pistol to the judge's head.
There is a parallel moment in the desert after the rout of the gang when the kid does not kill the
judge; the kid has his chance and he also does not kill the judge. So, this is another appearance of
the kid. They're talking together. And, I won't read it, but you can look at it if you like. That's on
173. 178, the kid instigates a bar fight. This is towards the middle of the page. They're all
assembled in a bar.
The kid addressed the table in his wretched Spanish and demanded which among those sullen
inebriates had spoken an insult. Before any could own it, the first of the funeral rockets exploded
in the street as told and the entire company of Americans made for the door.
And this begins the chaos that will eventuate in piles of bodies in this cantina as the Americans
leave. And then on 204, this is about the time that the kid returns to the narrative. This is with
Shelby. Remember, they've drawn lots to see who will conduct the mercy killing. "Of the
wounded men two were Delawares and one a Mexican. The fourth was Dick Shelby and he alone
sat watching the preparations for departure," and the kid draws the arrow, but he does not kill
Shelby. He lets Shelby die in the desert.
These moments look like a kind of mercy, but I'm going to argue that they are not, in fact,
instances of mercy, that in the end they are not accountable for by any kind of moral calculus,
that they resist that kind of evaluation. Why? Because every time the kid shows mercy, he shows
mercy to one of his own gang and we know what the gang goes on to do. Right? They simply go
on killing more people. So, the allegiance that he seems to show with suffering, the mercy, is so
selective that it can't be called such, and it's a kind of trick of McCarthy's narrative to allow us to

see the suffering of these men in this kind of detail, while the suffering of all the people they kill
goes by pretty quickly. You do see infants being bashed together, or you see people run through
with lances. You see people's heads hacked off; you see many scalpings. But there's never a
moment when that's really focused on, that we really see it and are asked to feel for that suffering
person. It's spectacular violence, in that literal way that we know that word "spectacle."
There is no moral development. Why do we think that there should be? I pointed out two
reasons. One is that the judge points out, or argues that, or advances the rhetoric that, the kid is
different from all the others. That's one reason we think that. The other reason is that he
transformed from "kid" to "man," and that old narrative of Bildungsroman suggests the
acquisition of wisdom. And we associate wisdom with moral complexity, moral sophistication,
moral depth. These are things we bring to the novel out of our immersion in a cultural tradition
of such stories. There are other reasons, though, and I'm going to go to page 143 now. This is the
parable of the traveler. You'll recall that this is a story that the judge tells as a kind of instructive
story to the men as they're sitting around. And the story is that there's a traveler passing through a
wild part of the mountains, and he is accosted by a man who lives there. The harness marker who
lives there invites the stranger in, and then tries to get money off him and then finally the traveler
gives him a lecture on morality. In the end, as the traveler leaves, the harness maker accosts him
again, and kills him and buries his bones. The wife discovers this and cares for the bones of the
traveler. The son of the harness maker becomes himself a killer of men.
So, it's a little story that we get here. The story seems to be about a contention between good and
evil, between the harness maker who is a wild and chaotic force: he lives in the woods; he
dresses up as an Indian to perpetuate his crimes, and he takes advantage of innocent victims. The
traveler is possessed of moral knowledge. He can give a coherent moral speech, and he is not
unwilling to exhort the harness maker towards a better life. It seems to be all about moral
contention, and the point of the story, from the judge's point of view, is to show that evil is an
inheritance. So, the son of the harness maker becomes a killer of men, too, but that the lack of a
father (The traveler, we find out, had fathered a child who was as yet unborn, and so that child
when born is, as the judge says, "euchered of his patrimony." This is on the bottom of 145: "All
his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain.") the absent
father takes on this quality of being a perfect model that the son can never attain. He never learns
that this man was a human being, and therefore that he could never be the kind of ideal he can be
as a dead man.
So, his point is that that child's life is, as he says, "broken before a frozen god and he will never
find his way." What this ending of the story doesn't tell us is that the descendants of the traveler,
of the innocent victim, actually also become killers of men. And we discover this at the very end
of the novel, when the man makes his last kill, and this is on 323. Remember the scene? The man
is camped out outside the village, and this group of bone pickers, or sort of migrants in the desert
come up to him, and they're curious about the scapular of ears he wears. I said on Monday that
this belonged to Toadvine. I was mistaken. It belongs to Davy Brown; it belonged to David
Brown. So, he's wearing Brown's scapular of ears, and the travelers are curious about this. And
one boy in particular won't believe him about their origin, and taunts him and sort of calls him a
liar. The group backs away. That night, that young man comes back with his gun and he says on
322:
"I know'd you'd be hid out," the boy called. He [now "the man"] pushed back the blanket and
rolled onto his stomach and cocked the pistol and leveled it at the sky where the clustered stars
were burning for eternity. He centered the foresight in the milled groove of the frame strap and
holding the piece so he swung it through the dark of the trees with both hands to the darker shape

of the visitor. "I'm right here," he said. The boy swung with the rifle and fired. "You wouldn't
have lived anyway," the man said.
And they come up, the boy's family or his companions in the dawn, to get his body and they say,
top of 323:
"I know'd we'd bury him on this prairie. They come out here from Kentucky, Mister, this tyke
and his brother, his mama and daddy both dead. His granddaddy was killed by a lunatic and
buried in the woods like a dog."
So, that little sentence tells us this is a descendant of the traveler from the judge's story. That's
who was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog. The brother who's been killed by
the kid, now the man, tried to kill the kid. So, we know that he has become a killer of men with
that same taste for mindless violence that broods in the kid at the very start of the novel, and his
younger brother, about twelve, inherits the dead boy's gun. So, we see that inheritance, yet, of
violence, continuing. So, what appears to be a parable, what's told to the group of men by the
judge in the form of a parable-- invoking the parables of the Bible which have spiritual, moral
lessons to them or can have spiritual, moral lessons to them--that discourse is not, in the end, a
discourse that will divide killers of men from people who are not the killers of men. It does not
help us to divide up the world between evil and good. It does not track along those lines that the
judge's story about the kid, that the kid is his nemesis, that the kid is the counterforce to his evil.
It does not track along those lines, and in fact, the whole novel renders the idea of a moral
machinery moot, and you can see that, a little bit, too, in the epigraphs. I won't stop on those
right now. The epigraphs to the novel suggest, also, the futility of a moral discourse. I argued on
Monday that there were two threads of tradition, or inheritance, or influence that McCarthy is
drawing on: one historical--and I noted Sam Chamberlain's source material from his account of
his life with the Glanton Gang--and then that whole train of literary allusions that I unearthed for
you. The historical is made moot in this wonderful little passage from the judge. If the moral is
made moot in all these ways that I am discussing, the historical is dismissed quite quickly, 330.
He says:
"Men's memories" [This is the very last line of the page.] "Men's memories are uncertain and the
past that was differs little from the past that was not."
Think about that claim, in the context of a historical novel: "The past that was differs little from
the past that was not." You can read "the past that was not" as the fictive past, the imagined past.
This claim is that the true past has no significant distinction from the fictive past, that men's
memories are no source of truth about the past. In this little line McCarthy says to us, "That
historical record that I was quite careful to invoke, that I was quite careful to follow in some
places, from which I got lots of detail that I used in my novel: forget about that. My novel stands
on an equal plane of authority. It gives me a platform to make equally valid claims of truth about
history and about the world." This is a kind of grandiloquent argument for fiction as opposed to
history. On 309, we have another interesting look back to the material that I was talking about on
Monday. This is when the kid is dreaming about the judge while he's undergoing surgery for the
arrow wound in his leg.
In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great,
shambling, mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other
than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would
not go.

What does that mean, "There was no system by which to divide him back into his origins for he
would not go"? What I did on Monday was excavate some of the origins of the judge as a figure
in Ahab, in Milton's Satan. This tells us--in the voice of the narrator, this time--that you can't
reduce his character to those origins, that to excavate the allusions, or to note the literary
tradition out of which such characters arise, does nothing to reduce the singularity of McCarthy's
artistic creation. Even finding that eerily similar description of Judge Holden in Sam
Chamberlain's account, McCarthy seems to be saying to us, doesn't reduce him to some
understandable character. That claim for the judge's preeminence as a character is brought home
to us at the very end when the novel switches to the present tense and makes these remarkable
claims for the judge. And this is when they are dancing after the kid has been killed in some
horrific manner of which we're not told. And here is the judge dancing, and you get the refrain
that "He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die."
He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards
and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat. And he is a great favorite, the judge. He
wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about
and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes,
dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will
never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge.
He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
The judge himself is a figure for the artist. He's a music maker. He's a performer, a dancer, in this
passage, but the assertion is that he will last forever. And the only way, I think, to understand
that, is to see him as a literary character. Very self-consciously in this moment, that like Milton's
Satan, he's a character that will live in the tradition, that will never die out in the imagination of
readers. It's a remarkably ambitious claim to make for your own character. But when you read it
with that passage I just read, about the impossibility of dividing him back into his origins, you
begin to see McCarthy's literary ambition, and that is to add to the tradition in a significant way.
McCarthy says about writing novels that it's not worth doing--you cannot write a good book-unless it's about life and death. He dismisses, for example, Proust and Henry James as important
writers on this ground, because they're not writing novels about life and death. I would argue that
McCarthy needs his novel to be about life and death because he is looking for the sound and the
feel of literary authority. In these passages, I'm suggesting that it's a literary authority coming out
of a Miltonic tradition, perhaps out of the tradition of great American novels like Moby Dick, but
it goes much deeper than that, and this is where I get to my original little detail of the Bible, the
illiterate kid holding the Bible. 248, we get a discussion among the men of the Bible in the
context of a discussion of war. This is what is said about it. This is Irving, or, actually, first Black
Jackson and then Irving.
"The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword," said the black.
The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. "What right man would have it any other way?"
he said. "The good book does indeed count war an evil," said Irving. "Yet there's many a bloody
tale of war inside it."
I would argue that this is a description of McCarthy's own book, except there is one thing that's
different. The good book does, indeed, count war an evil. McCarthy's novel does not fail in
making us see war as evil, because we're confronted over and over again with these scenes of
violence, over and over again with its gratuitous nature. We feel the waste when that last young
boy is killed by the man. We feel the waste of his life. We feel the tragedy in discovering that the
sons of the harness maker and the sons of the traveler both come to the same end and become
killers of men. We see that evil and, like the Bible, there is many a bloody tale within it. It does

not count war an evil, because it has not allowed a moral machinery to have a place in this
universe or in the logic of the novel. What it holds out instead is the feeling of morality, the
feeling that you could have a rhetoric that would divide the kid from the judge in a meaningful
way, that would divide killers of men from not killers of men, that would divide the good from
the evil, that would divide the peaceful from the warlike, even that would divide history from
fiction, if there's something moral about the truth of history.
Why does McCarthy use the pattern and the sound of biblical language throughout the novel? I
think this is why. Robert Alter--who, if you've studied the Bible in any college course, you've
probably at least come to know his work--he is a great translator of the Old Testament, and he
came out recently with a version--I think it was in 2004--which he titles The Five Books of
Moses. It's the Pentateuch, and it's retranslated in a very startling style. It's trying to honor the
syntax of the Hebrew, which is paratactic, which means that it's strung together with "ands"
rather than subordinated the way that Latinate languages are subordinated. So, the King James
Bible has, in the English tradition, been the prestigious literary translation of the Bible. Alter, in
2004, tries to make the modern equivalent of the King James Bible. And, in the introduction to
that translation, he says that what he's trying to do is to take the innovations of writers like Stein,
Faulkner, and--the only one from the late twentieth century he mentions--McCarthy, to make a
Bible that is true to the Hebrew syntax.
This citation from Alter, this foremost scholar on the Bible and biblical translation, suggests just
how successful McCarthy has been in persuading the ear that he is writing something like
scripture. He has persuaded Alter's ear that this book is the equivalent of Hebrew prose. He is so
successful in doing that, that he can make these gigantic claims. And I would point you back to
the beginning of the novel, the citation of his father, the only line we get really about the kid's
father: "His father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink. He quotes from poets whose names
are now lost." It's as if McCarthy is telling us, "I'm erasing all that past that I'm invoking from
the Bible on up, from the Bible to The Iliad, to Milton, to Wordsworth, to Melville. I'm invoking
it all, but forget all those names. Remember just one: the judge or, better yet, McCarthy. That's
the one that you can remember." So, McCarthy gives us the feel of scripture, and yet he erases all
that could be the content of scripture. That's why I am interested in the Bible in the hand of an
illiterate kid.
What is the Bible in the hand of an illiterate kid but the symbol of that kind of narrative, the
symbol that there can be an authoritative narrative about the nature of the world, about all of
history, about its meaning, about its structure, a book that can compel its readers, that can speak
to life and death in the most ultimate way, but because it's in the hand of an illiterate person it
cannot be read? So, what McCarthy is saying to us in that tiny detail, is that the Bible is
important as an artifact, as a literary artifact, proof that such narratives can exist. And McCarthy
sets out to produce one, and, in keeping with the illiterateness of the kid, one that has no moral
content at all, has only made claims about the material of the universe and not the spiritual
quality of the universe, and that persuades entirely by the sound of rhetoric and the structures
that are familiar to us from the narratives of our tradition. That's the ambition of the novel. I'm
actually right on time, so I will stop there.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 19 Transcript
March 31, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Now, what's coming up? As I mentioned last week, on Wednesday
I'm going to give my censorship lecture, and in preparation for that I would like you to go to a
local bookstore, any one, and just observe how it's laid out, what you see, what your attention is
called to, what your attention is not called to, and here's a difficult question: What isn't there?
Think about that, and I'll talk a little bit about what isn't there on Wednesday. Also, in order to
keep up, please try to read at least to page 202--that's the next chapter division in The Human
Stain--so that you're on track to finish it--it's 361 pages--for next Monday. And so, next Monday,
a week from today, I will give my second lecture on The Human Stain. And I will talk about The
Human Stain a little bit on Wednesday, because some of what I have to say about censorship
does pertain, so that's what's coming up.
I hope you all thought about the Identity Plot as you read this novel. It's hard not to. When I gave
that lecture, I suggested that when a genre gains a certain credence, a certain widespread use in
the culture, it requires more and more innovations on it to make a fresh story out of it. It also gets
us to the point where that set of conventions is available to writers in a new way, to be
transcended in a new way. So, one thing that I want to ask about this novel is, does it transcend
the genre? Does it do more than provide the certain dramas and satisfactions that we come to
expect from a novel about identity? In this sense, because it is so deeply embedded in those
kinds of narratives, Roth is taking a kind of risk here. He's playing it safe because he knows that
this is a topic of interest, but he's taking a risk as an artist because he's working in very welltrodden territory.
I suggested that, also, when a genre reaches a certain point of saturation, writers tend to change
the subject. I didn't say this when we talked about Blood Meridian, but I think in part Blood
Meridian is that kind of change of subject. So, this returns to the genre, and we want to ask what
it's doing with the genre. Before I go in to my meditation on that question today, I just want to
call your attention to another element that does relate back to Blood Meridian, and that's its
status as a historical novel. This novel places itself with certain kinds of historical markers at the
very opening. It was the summer of 1998, the summer of the Monica Lewinsky affair, the
summer when Viagra takes off in the marketplace. Those are very contemporary historical
markers.
Now, think back to the way Blood Meridian opens with its historical markers. Do you remember
this line? It's the father talking about the kid's birth. He says, "Night of your birth, '33. God, how
the stars did fall." I think I've got that correct. What he's talking about is the Leonid meteor
showers in 1833 that mark the night of the kid's birth. For all that McCarthy is interested in--and
mining--the historical detail of the 1830s, '40s, '50s, that novel favors historical markers that
seem like cosmic markers of time. So, contrast the stars falling in, yes, a historically specific
meteor shower, but nevertheless in something that looks like a cosmic communication of
meaning. Contrast that with the relatively mundane, debased historical markers that Roth
chooses, Viagra, the Monica Lewinsky scandal. You want to ask yourself, what kind of history is
each writer invoking?
I want to suggest to you that if you press on the markers that Roth chooses, you will find
something more than trivia, more than contemporary trivia, that Roth has in his sights an equally
universal, trans-historical kind of truth in this novel, that's brought up by those little details of
history. And that trans-historical history is the history of desire, of which both those things are
indicative. I will say a lot more about desire and its relationship to the history of literature and to
writing in this novel in my Monday lecture, but as you go on I would like you to think about how
history functions as a set of contexts for the story that Roth tells you.

Now I want to talk about identity. So, does this novel conform to the form of the Identity Plot?
There are certain ways I think it does, and it does so in a very explicit way. Remember how I
mentioned that tension in the Identity Plot is produced by the individual's relationship to the
group and the way that's vexed. It isn't a very exciting Identity Plot if the protagonist just
discovers that he or she is whatever categorizable identity and says, "Oh, good. I'll be that," and
then goes on. The tension comes from feeling that either such an identification would be
coercion, or that it comes with all kinds of attendant suffering. There are all kinds of tensions that
are produced in making that not an easy identification, and you can see that very explicitly in this
novel on page 108--106, 108--when Coleman talks about being at Howard University, and along
with that, the experience of being called a "nigger" for the first time. This is on the top of 106:
Especially when he began to think that there was something of the nigger about him, even to the
kids in the dorm who had all sorts of new clothes, and money in their pockets, and in the
summertime didn't hang around the hot streets at home, but went to camp, and not Boy Scout
camp out in the Jersey sticks, but fancy places where they rode horses and played tennis and
acted in plays. What the hell was a cotillion? Where was Highland Beach? What were these kids
talking about? He was among the very lightest of the light-skinned in his freshman class, lighter
even than his tea-colored roommate, but he could have been the blackest, most benighted field
hand, for all they knew that he didn't. He hated Howard from the day he arrived. Within a week
he hated Washington, and so in early October, when his father dropped dead serving dinner on
the Pennsylvania Railroad dining car that was pulling out of 30th Street station in Philadelphia for
Wilmington, and Coleman went home for the funeral, he told his mother he was finished with
that college.
Right there in that sentence, in this little set of scenes about Howard and his experience in D.C.,
you see him at first being asked by his family to identify with a certain version of the black
middle class, and then finding he is revolted by his own difference from that middle class. He
feels like a black field hand, the darkest of the dark field hand, "for all they knew that he didn't,"
and on 108 we get it in very abstract terms. "You finally leave home, the Ur of we, and you find
another we, another place that's just like that, the substitute for that."
The problem of the Identity Plot is the problem of the "I" and the "we." Here is Coleman laying
out exactly how he feels about that, and so what he's going to favor there, again on 108, is the
raw "I," all the subtlety of being Silky Silk. So there you have encapsulated, in a very short
amount of prose, a major form--narrative form, narrative dynamic--of the Identity Plot as a
genre. On 144, you get another version of that, slightly more personalized to his family. This is
another version of identity and what Coleman thinks about it. This is after we get the history of
Coleman's family, his ancestors, and we're told that he is not the first to pass as white or to
disappear from the black family in to which he was born:
"Lost himself to all his people" was another way they, the family, put it. Ancestor worship, that's
how Coleman put it. Honoring the past was one thing. The idolatry that is ancestor worship was
something else. The hell with that imprisonment.
So, this version of identity on 144, this vision of it, is identity as ancestor worship and
imprisonment in that family, imprisonment in that way of thinking, a radical un-freedom. So, this
is one version of identity, radically individual, rising out of the difference that you feel from the
various "we" groups you are asked to join. But there are other versions of identity that are
imagined here, and they track pretty clearly with scholarly ways of thinking about identity at this
same time.

So, in one sense identity is this radical individual humanist version that I've been tracing in the
last few minutes. Another is that identity is a constantly changing performance, and we get that
too in Coleman. You see it, again, right in the section about Howard on 109, and I want you to
note the words that Roth chooses here, 109 in the middle: "He could play his skin however he
wanted, color himself just as he chose."
"Play his skin any way he wanted." Now, remember that his father is a great devotee of
Shakespeare and tries to communicate to his children, not only through their Shakespearian
middle names, but through every verbal interaction he has with them, that the grandeur of the
English language will somehow fill them and make them who they are, that this is the source of
their dignity and their power. He takes that lesson and transforms it. It's about playing on the
model of drama, but it's about playing color, and this is an artist's vocation, "color himself just as
he chose." He's like a painter, in this sense, so this is identity as performance. There are many
instances of this. On page 115, 116, there is just a little description of Steena's dance for
Coleman. I'm going to just read a little bit of it.
All at once, with no prompting from him, seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet, she
began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a
Fergus Falls girl after a little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin
himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song, prompted by a
colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song. There to see, plain as day, was all the
power of her whiteness, that big, white thing. "Someday he'll come along, the man I love, and
he'll be big and strong, the man I love." The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted
from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up
to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending, to cover her shame.
The history of jazz that's concentrated in to that tiny, little passage has been unpacked by a critic
by the name of Jonathan Freedman. He does a whole history, which I can't produce here, of how
Artie Shaw and various players played Gershwin, and used black musicians in their ensembles,
and how this very dance, when Steena, here, we're told, in a way, inhabits most fully her
whiteness, she does that by performing to a music that is radically hybrid, black and Jewish. So,
Freedman argues that in this passage we get identity as a vision of absolute fluidity, absolute
performance and fluidity, and that the whole history of American jazz stands behind that
imagined state. It's the very difference between the hybrid music and the pure whiteness of
Steena's body that creates what's so provocative to Coleman, the spectacle of whiteness in the
context of hybridity.
The father's obsession with the English language, though, has taught Coleman to categorize
relentlessly. Do you remember this little detail? This is on page 93 when Coleman is describing
or we're having described to us exactly how Coleman's father taught them to speak. This is on
93.
Growing up they never said, "See the bow-wow." They didn't even say, "See the doggie." They
said, "See the Doberman. See the beagle. See the terrier." They learned things had classifications.
They learned the power of naming precisely."
The father, for all that he is imbuing them with the most elite version of a white literary tradition,
Shakespeare, he is also teaching them relentlessly to see classification and categorizing. In
Coleman this comes to mean something quite different, and you see it in this funny, little passing
moment on 107, the very top of the page. This is talking about his father's cherished volume of
Shakespeare's plays, the oversized book with the floppy leather binding that, when Coleman was
a small boy, always reminded him of a cocker spaniel.

The son felt his father's majesty as never before, the grandeur of both his rise and his fall, the
grandeur that as a college freshman away for barely a month.--[And then it quotes from
Shakespeare.]
The cocker spaniel: Why? Why choose that as what the little boy thinks of when he looks at that
floppy volume? It's a moment when being trained to classify and to categorize causes him to see
the source of that linguistic precision, the book of Shakespeare, in very demeaning terms, or
reductive terms or--I'm not getting quite the precise word I want--in deflating terms. So that,
instead of grandeur, the book of Shakespeare becomes the source for the names of dogs. And the
way the child's imagination blends grandeur and the ordinary, I think, gives us Coleman, who
can imagine the details of everyday life, the life he lives, as a grand play. Doc Chizner furthers
this transformation of the father's lesson in this very crucial passage, that I'm going to talk more
about later, when Coleman passes as white or Jewish for the first time. And that's when he's
boxing for the pit coach:
"If nothing comes up," Doc said [this is the bottom of 98] "you don't bring it up. You're neither
one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk. That's enough. That's the deal."
"You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk." This takes the question of
categorization--are you colored? Are you not?--it negates it: you're neither one thing nor another,
but then reinstates it in a different mode: you're Silky Silk. Make up a new category for yourself.
So, Doc Chizner takes that transgressing use of precision that we see in the cocker spaniel
metaphor in the child's imagination, and he shows Coleman how to apply that to living race in
America, living his race in America. You are Silky Silk. You're not a race. You're a proper name,
the irreducible singularity of a person.
There is a third way of thinking about race, and that, of course, is as biology. That, too, is present
in this novel. The body is relentlessly present, and I hope that you picked up on that. It's not hard
to pick up on it. The very matter and specificity of the body is everywhere in this novel, and so I
want to look back at 21 and 22. This is in that wonderful scene when Coleman dances with
Nathan. So, we get a whole description of Coleman's body and what it is that Nathan sees in it,
suddenly, now that he's shirtless on this hot summer night, and also now that he is no longer
talking about the "spooks" business. This is 21.
On display were the shoulders, arms and chest of a smallish man still trim and attractive, a belly
no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that had gotten seriously out of hand, altogether the
physique of someone who had seemed to have been a cunning and wily competitor at sports
rather than an overpowering one. And all of this had previously been concealed from me,
because he was always shirted, and also because of his having been so drastically consumed by
his rage.
What you see there is the revelation of certain things we will find out to be true about Coleman,
that he was a cunning and wily competitor rather than an overpowering one, that he is still fit and
virile, that he has himself in hand, nothing that had gotten out of hand, seriously out of hand.
Coleman very much still has himself in hand. He is still the maker of himself, the presenter of
himself to the world in a deliberate way. But then we go on, and there are some things that we
see that perhaps tell us something different. Rather than the body revealing the truth about
Coleman-- certain kinds of truth, not a racial truth, other kinds of truth--we see marks on his
body that don't produce that knowledge.
Also previously concealed was the small, Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the top of his right
arm just at the shoulder joining, the words "U.S. Navy" inscribed between the hooklike arms of a

shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid muscle, a tiny symbol if
one were needed of all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life, of that blizzard of
details that constitute the confusion of a human biography, a tiny symbol to remind me why our
understanding of people must always be, at best, slightly wrong.
What's revealed when Coleman is shirtless is the very sign that he cannot be known in any kind
of complete way. It's the mark of a history on his body, that he was in the navy, a history we'll
learn a little bit about, but not a lot, but for Nathan it is the mark of an irreducible difference
between persons, that always there are details that are not accessible, circumstances of the other
fellow's life. In this moment Nathan recognizes Coleman as a cipher, a sign that can be projected
upon with meanings of his own. I would suggest to you that we don't see the full flowering of
this until quite a bit later in the novel, but I think this is the first moment where, in Coleman
revealing his body, he suggests to Nathan the possibilities of that body as a sign. So, he is no
longer, in this moment, entirely "in hand" anymore. So, if his physique hasn't gotten out of hand,
his circulation as a sign certainly has. In this case, he has now become a blank canvas for
Nathan. Certainly, up until this moment at the beginning of the novel, what's most on the surface
of the plot is how he has become the victim of rumor, how his self-presentation got completely
out of hand, taken over by other people's erroneous readings of his words. So, if the body seems
to be in his control, himself as a signifier is not. Here Nathan is invited into it, but in a very
different way than the rumormongers who surround him at Athena College and in the town. So,
the body is not going to be a place of revelation.
Speech, as I've noted, is a problematic moment of revelation, but it can be that. And on 81, 82,
we see an example of that when his speech formally in the novel touches off what will be some
of the most important revelatory passages in the novel. And this is when Nelson Primus, having
berated Coleman and advised him in his clever, authoritative, arrogant way not to pursue
anything against Lester Farley or Delphine Roux, has offended him and enraged him so much as
to become the target of Coleman's rage. Coleman said, "I never again want to hear that selfadmiring voice of yours or see your smug, fucking, lily-white face," and the question becomes
why--and we see Nelson ask it the next page--why "white," why does "lily-white" become the
insult that he hurls at Nelson? And formally, even though there's a little bit of an interlude here
about Athena College and Coleman's rage, this is the moment when we launch into the tale of
Coleman's childhood, and we learn for the first time what kind of family he comes from, and
what the history of his passing has been, how he made that decision to abandon his family of
birth.
So, speech can be revealing, but only in those moments when it is out of Coleman's control.
Here, in this moment, "lily-white" is inspired by his rage. He is out of control, in that sense, and
of course, "lily white" is the term his brother, Walt, applies to him in a similar moment of anger,
after Walt discovers that he has told his mother that he is essentially estranging himself
permanently from the family in order to marry Iris. Walt says, "Don't ever show your lily-white
face here again." So, he's reproducing Walt's language, and, from that, it indicates to Nelson
Primus and for us, in the unfolding of the novel, that there is a mystery here to be told. And then
we get the telling of that mystery.
So, from that little word, all of this unfurls, and I would just note, just in passing, that this is
quite a contrast to Delphine Roux. On 38 and 39, you can look at: Coleman is very surprised that
she has made no effort to hide the identifying marks of her own handwriting. Delphine Roux-though her name suggests the Delphic, the oracular, the mysterious, the secret--Delphine is
someone who cannot conceal herself. The very material of her language, of her writing, of her
letters, puts her identity on the page to be read, and it seems as if she hasn't even tried to conceal
it. So, Delphine's lack of depth, her lack of complexity as a character, her basic despicableness is

summed up in that inability to conceal herself, whereas Coleman only reveals himself in
moments when he is unguarded, or when he has become, not a person in control of his own
representation of himself, but rather a sign at large among other representers (Nathan, Delphine,
other people).
Secrecy, then, is at the very heart of what identity means in this novel, and now I want to get to
this crucial passage on page 100. For me, this is where we learn really what identity means in
this novel. So, he says he wants to be in this fight with--in front of the Pitt coach--with Ray
Robinson.
It wasn't just that [This is on 99.] It wasn't just that Coleman weighed some seven pounds more
than when he'd boxed on the amateur card at the Knights of Pythias. It was that something he
could not even name made him want to be more damaging than he'd ever dared before, to do
something more that day than merely win. Was it because the pit coach didn't know he was
colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret? He did love secrets, the
secret of nobody's knowing what was going on in your head, thinking whatever you wanted to
think, with no way of anybody's knowing. All the other kids were always blabbing about
themselves, but that wasn't where the power was, or the pleasure either. The power and the
pleasure were to be found in the opposite, in being counter-confessional in the same way you
were a counter-puncher, and he knew that with nobody having to tell him and without his having
to think about it. That's why he liked shadow boxing and hitting the heavy bag, for the secrecy of
it.
And I'm going to skip down a little bit. He talks about concentrating, and how the secrecy is
produced by the concentration, or is related to the concentration on the one thing that you're
doing.
Whatever is to be mastered, he becomes that thing. He could do that in biology, and he could do
it in the dash, and he could do it in boxing, and not only did nothing external make any
difference; neither did anything internal.
That little example right there: He could do it in biology, on a biology exam he could focus
exclusively on that thing, become that thing, in the dash, in boxing in the ring, but why choose
that example? Why not mathematics? Why not chemistry? Well, here again, it's Roth's craft
coming through. Roth chose that because what Coleman does is precisely to overcome biology.
It's the biology of who his parents are, of who their parents are. That biology, the biology of
American race, is what he takes hold of and transforms. It becomes his secret. Biology becomes
his secret, not as an academic subject, but as a lived experience. Boxing is the sport of
concealment for him, thinking ahead, observing his opponent, watching how slow the punch is:
All the answers that you came up with in the ring, you kept to yourself, and when you let the
secret out, you let it out through everything but your mouth.
For all Coleman's training in the English language from his father, his mode of revelation, his
mode of communication, is not verbal. It is somehow physical, as a physical performance, as a
damaging physical performance. That term "counter-confessional," being--the pleasure and the
power were in--being counter-confessional in the same way you were a counter-puncher, in not
telling--this is quite a remarkable term for Roth to use. The history of Roth's writing from the
very first story collection, Goodbye, Columbus published in 1960, through the many, many
novels in the next five decades, that trajectory, which I'm going to talk a little bit about on
Wednesday, is defined by the confessional quality of many of these works.

So, Roth is widely known for drawing on his own life in his fiction, and for making Nathan
Zuckerman track his biography in significant ways. And, in this novel, it happens to be true that
Philip Roth went through prostate cancer surgery and now lives up in the Berkshires and has
been very secluded up there and very productive writing novels in the last ten years. So, in this
novel already, anybody who knows even those basic facts knows that Roth himself as a writer is
confessional, in some sense of the word. One question we might want to ask is: is he counterconfessional the way that Coleman is, the way that you can be a counter-puncher, and what
would it mean to be that? Why does it matter? In fact, does it matter? And then, why does it
matter, if it does, that his novels track his life? This is a long-term question for anyone who
thinks about Roth's writing, and I will get more to it in my second lecture on The Human
Stain next Monday, but it's something to think about.
But let me pause, again, on that rhetorical question. "Was it because the pit coach didn't know he
was colored? Could it be because who he really was was entirely his secret?" There are two ways
of reading that last question. "Who he really was was entirely his secret." If we read that, "who
he really was" as a colored guy from East Orange, then we'll see it as that being his secret. But
you can read it, you can parse that grammar, a different way. "Who he really was was his secret."
Could it be because who he really was was "his secret," secrecy as the essence of identity? It
doesn't matter what's in that hidden box. It doesn't mean that we have to fill it in. It doesn't mean,
even, that it can be known. And you think back to the way the anchor on his arm, the tattoo on
his arm, reminds Nathan of how little you can ever know about the other fellow. The very fact of
the person's other-ness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about
them, and that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another.
This returns the meditation on identity to a universalist, humanist version of what identity would
be. It's simply private consciousness. Private consciousness is what defines us as persons, and
then, radiating out from that, all the things that one can do with a private consciousness, which
then encompasses these other modes of identifying that the novel rehearses, and then critiques or
sometimes endorses, plays with, jumbles, juggles. We have a private consciousness. You can
decide to decide. This is something that Coleman does on a number of occasions, and it's a
phrase that Roth repeats when he's deciding to decide to be done with the spooks business,
deciding to decide not to be worried about Lester Farley. You have the power to form your selfpresentation. You have the power to make your identity an artistic performance. That's what
private consciousness does for you, but it does a couple other things, too, and I want to track
those, or suggest them just briefly before I end today, in one sense by following the theme of
difference, and in the other sense by following the word "secrecy" in the novel.
First, on the question of pure difference, on 47, in that wonderful scene of Faunia with the cows,
this is Nathan reflecting on the desire that he sees enacted there. And again, remember, Coleman
is not primarily a man of words, but a man of being, and he has just stood in silence with Nathan
watching Faunia milk the cows.
It was enough to be able to conduct themselves like two people who had nothing whatsoever in
common, all the while remembering how they could distill to an orgasmic essence everything
about them that was irreconcilable, the human discrepancies that produced all the power. It was
enough to feel the thrill of leading a double life.
And what this passage, the sentences above, emphasize, is that Faunia is a woman of thirty-four,
a "wordless illiterate," and that Coleman is a man replete with the vocabularies of two ancient
tongues, as well as his own native tongue. So, the very difference between them, this time limned
in terms of education and language, vocabulary, literacy, here it's that difference that is invoked
as the engine of desire. So, if desire is always that looking towards the other thing, the thing that

you are not, the thing that you do not have, the thing that is absent from you: that's the definition
of desire. You can't have desire if you already have the thing. Desire is that force that's always
reaching toward something that is separate from you. Difference between human beings is just
that, in this scene, just the engine of desire.
So, here, for all the meditations on race, the social construction of race, race as performance, race
as essence, race as biology, race as secret, it's secret that gets to that over-arching concern with
desire in the novel. And this is a moment where I think Roth is transcending the genre. He's
taking the dramas of the Identity Plot, and he's driving them to an extreme and pushing them
over in to another subject matter. So, in this sense, identity as secrecy pushes us over in to the
subject matter of desire and mortality, which is at the heart of Roth's writing from beginning to
end. Now, I will not say that identity is not also a subject matter he's working with from
beginning to end of his career. That's definitely true, and I'll say more about that on Wednesday
when I talk about the shape of his career. But especially as Roth moves later in his career these
questions of desire and mortality take the upper hand.
Now, the last thing I want to do, just very quickly, is point to page 44, another use of that word
"secret," the very top of the page.
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as
possible to string along with your delusions. The trick of living alone up here, away from all
agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity,
is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth
exponentially increasing, the encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your
only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance, this is quoting Hawthorne again, the
communications of a solitary mind with itself. The secret is to find sustenance in people like
Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.
Now, one question I, myself, as a reader have struggled with about this novel is whether Roth
imagines that Nathan's state, when he describes it that way, is a false one or a weak one, one to
be rejected. Is it a withdrawal from life? I think that last sentence, "The secret is to find
sustenance in people like Hawthorne," gives us the answer that I'm content with. And that is: yes,
it's a withdrawal from life if you don't understand Hawthorne as a person, as someone with
whom you can become entangled. It's the very act of thinking of a literary forebear as a person
rather than a text that allows this to be a productive state, one that Nathan will be drawn out of
by Coleman, but yet one that the novel does not reject.
It's when Coleman becomes for Nathan a character, the person becomes this living
representation, that he is drawn out of his solitude. So, in a way, it's not even Coleman the person
that draws him out, but his world when he encounters Coleman and his story, when he sees
Coleman's body during that dance as a cipher, as the sign of all that you can't know about the
other fellow. When he sees that about Coleman, that's when he comes out of one productive state
of communing with the brilliant dead and comes in to the world of Coleman who will be dead
very, very shortly. So, on Monday next I will talk about that relationship between desire and the
literary, between persons and characters, between life and novel. Think about those things as you
read.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 20 Transcript

April 2, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Today I'm going to talk about censorship in the United States since
1945, in the period that we're studying, and I'm going to connect that with The Human Stain and
some of my general thoughts about Roth's work at the very end of lecture. So, I'll give you a
little bit of history and then a little bit of meditation on Roth. I asked you, for today, to go around
to the various bookstores in New Haven, choose one and go, and observe what you saw there.
And in particular I asked you to think about what you are not seeing there. So, does anyone want
to tell me what they saw on their little observation trip? What did you observe? Yes.
Student: I went to Labyrinth, and they had a ton of history, historiography, cultural studies, all in
the front, that seemed very deliberately diverse.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Diverse in what way?
Student: Diverse, culturally, as far as the history books that I looked at. They ranged anything
from Germany during the Weimar Republic, to the history of tragedy, to death in the Atlantic
slave trade, to all sorts of other things, though mainly European. What was not there, which I
found interesting, which I looked for specifically, because I thought it might not be there,
was Mein Kampf.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Did you look back in the stacks too? Uh huh.
Student: Yeah, I looked in the stacks. I didn't see it there, or in the library at all, so I guess they
don't support Hitler, which I approve of.
Professor Amy Hungerford: You approve of Mein Kampf not being in Labyrinth bookstore.
Student: I approve of not supporting Hitler, I guess, Mein Kampf
Professor Amy Hungerford: Very good. Okay. What else? What else did people notice? What
did you notice about the bookstore? Yes.
Student: There is a table that has works by Yale graduates.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Which bookstore did you go to?
Student: Barnes and Noble. Yeah, so just clearly trying to sell to the market they know.
Professor Amy Hungerford: By Yale graduates. But here's a question: not by Yale professors?
Student: I'm not sure.
Professor Amy Hungerford: It's a significant difference. What else did you notice? Yes. Local
market. What else did you notice? Someone--Yes, Eli.
Student: I guess that I really haven't thought about this this much, but how much of a decision it
is to decide what kind of shelf the book goes in, like history versus philosophy, and I guess it's
probably the publishers who do that, or, I don't know, but-Professor Amy Hungerford: Well, this is a really important question: where to shelve the book.
Now, it's not just about categories, although it is partly about categories, what subject matter

does a book belong to; it's also about what kind of shelf, physically. So those tables that we're
thinking about in Labyrinth, with that array of literature, who chose that? Does anyone know
who chose that literature to put on that table? I can tell you in a minute. One question is: who
chose that? Now, those tables are in Barnes and Noble, too. So, you walk into the bookstore on
the ground level, and there are all those tables, and the stacks go up really high. There are all
these elaborate ways of getting books' covers to face you. Okay. Then there are all the stacks and
shelves up on the upper level, and those books are interspersed with smaller displays.
So, if you go up there, you'll begin to see some very interesting things. There's a little table, for
example, up on the right. Maybe you noticed this, right as you come up the stairs in Barnes and
Noble, and it's promoted as "urban literature." Well, in my experience, having seen it over the
years, it's really just code for black writers, somehow, so it's all these books about the black
history of New Haven, or whatever. So, you have these little tables around.
Now, the big tables in front of Barnes and Noble, who chooses what goes on there? That space is
bought and paid for by publishers, bought and paid for. It's part of the contract with the publisher
to stock that book that it be displayed in certain ways. You know those nice discounts that you
get, 20% off the New York Times bestseller books when they're in hardback? Those are possible
at Barnes and Noble because of the huge buying power of that bookstore. So, they buy in huge
volume. Now, a store like Labyrinth or its predecessor, Book Haven, wasn't able to have that
kind of volume in sales, and so they couldn't negotiate with a publisher that sort of discount. So,
that means that a smaller bookstore, because of its smaller buying power, can't provide a
competitive price in a market where Barnes and Noble is right next door.
Now, there were ways that independent bookstores try to compensate for that, especially in this
market, by giving discounts to faculty members stocking their books at the bookstore. This is
somewhat controversial, although it's Barnes and Noble that has tried to make it controversial by
bringing it up with the university and saying, "Now, isn't this a kind of bribery?" But that's the
way that a store like Labyrinth, or like Book Haven before it, was able to try to be price
competitive among people it knew wanted to buy from them, those professors who stock their
book at an independent bookstore.
So, back to this question of who decides what's on the table: at Labyrinth I went in, and I said,
"Who decides what's on this table?" And they said, "Oh, she's over there," and I went and talked
to her and I said, "How do you decide what's on the table?" She said, "Well, you know, I had a
good general education as a young person, and I kind of know who's who in the intellectual
circles in Europe and in the United States. And so I browse the lists, and I talk to sales reps when
they come in, and I read, and I look at what certain courses are stocking, and I see what people
are reading on campus, and then I decide." That's really different from that space being bought
and paid for by a publisher as part of a marketing agreement. Those tables are very powerful, for
browsers, in shaping what browsers might possibly buy, or think about, when they come in to a
bookstore.
So, that space is particularly key to a bookstore's presence, culturally, in the community. And
Sarah's point, about the Yale graduates on the bookshelf: that is a nod to Barnes and Noble's
immediate context. So, there is that local marketing piece.
But, think about this. There are just a few fiction buyers who work with publishers to decide
what novels will end up in Barnes and Noble. So, writers, when they're thinking about, "can I
sell my book?" instead of thinking, "I wonder if I can impress the owner of the Seminary Co-op
in Hyde Park in Chicago,"--a very famous, huge, wonderful bookstore, not a chain--instead of
saying, "I want to sell my book in Chicago. It's set there, and maybe it'll be appealing. I wonder

if I can impress the owner of that bookstore," and having a strategy that addresses those kinds of
individual circumstances in different spaces-- Powell's in Seattle, Labyrinth in New York--they
have to say, "I wonder if I can impress the buy from Barnes and Noble." So, instead of many
people making that decision about whether a novel is worthy of being promoted, it's one person.
That person becomes extremely powerful in shaping what literary texts reach us, what comes to
our attention through the bookstore.
Now, have you ever wondered, as you're driving down the street, why there might be a Dunkin'
Donuts here, and a Dunkin' Donuts just two blocks away? Have you ever noticed that? There are
various stores that you'll see this: gas stations sometimes, fast food restaurants, sometimes WalMart. Bookstores are another that you will sometimes see this. Why is that? Well, what they're
doing is competing in an overwhelming way with another store in that market. Usually this
happens when they're trying to drive another store out of business. So, they're a big enough
chain, they can absorb losses from an unproductive second store to saturate a market, and then
they can absorb the closing of that second store once the competitor has been driven out of
business. So that's why that market saturation happens. It's not because they think it's going to be
profitable, that there's another hundred-percent increase when they add that second store one
block over. It's all about market saturation. It's getting it as close to a hundred percent as
possible. So, those kinds of tactics are possible for chain stores, and they are not possible for
independent bookstores. And this is how many independent bookstores have been taken off the
map in our cities and in the suburbs.
So, this is one way that censorship comes to us: not in that old-fashioned way of censorship laws,
but in a new way, market censorship. This has always been part of how things work in a
capitalist economy. It's true that in the past literary enterprises--be they selling books or writing
books or publishing books--had to make a profit in order to stay afloat. But the way that profit
was made has changed from the early twentieth century until this point, and I'm going to say
more about that. So, just by going in to the bookstore, I want you to think about--the next time
you go in, think about how things are being presented to you. Now, how many of you get most of
the books you buy--not for classeswell, let's just ask this, blanket, and then I'll break it down-how many of you get most of the books you buy from a bookstore? Still quite a few of you. How
many of you get them mostly over the internet? Okay, not a majority. Taking out classes, books
you buy for pleasure, your own decision to buy them, how many of you are still buying those in
bookstores? Okay, actually a lot of you. So, that really, even, tips the scale in favor of
bookstores, so that's interesting to me. I wasn't sure what you would say. That suggests that
bookstores are still powerful purveyors of culture; they still shape what you think about and what
you read. It's browsing, or maybe that you've read about something, and you go looking for it,
that brings you in to the bookstore.
Censorship does have a legal history in this part of the century. And so now I want to just give
you a little rundown of that. So, this [a slide reading "Censorship and Censure"] is actually a title
of a chapter of a book that I will be writing on the post-45 novel, and I'm going to have this as
the last chapter of that book. The reason for that is that censorship and what I'm calling censure-that's the public outcry against literature, even not on legal grounds--is a way for the culture to
speak back to the literary. So, I spend a lot of time in this class, and in my teaching in general,
and in my writing, talking about what books say to us. But what do we say back to those books
as a society? Well, censorship and its companion, censure, do a lot of that talking back. So, there
are two sides of access to literature. I've just been talking a little bit about market constraints on
what can be published and read, and now I'm going to talk a little bit about legal constraints. I'm
going to get back to the market constraints in a little while.

Since the early twentieth century, a lot of the legal constraints on publishing and distributing
literature have eased. In the 1870s, the Comstock laws in the United States aimed to regulate the
use of the mails for the dissemination of obscene materials. These laws were used in 1914 to
indict Margaret Sanger for sending information about contraception across state lines, and she
had to flee, and she left the country to protect herself. So, just the description of how
contraception worked was a violation of the Comstock laws; so of course we're happily out of
that moment. In 1933, for literature there was a major decision by Judge Woolsey declaring that
James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene. Often censorship in literature would have to do with the
import of literature into the United States. So, this is sort of on the same logic as the Comstock
laws. The Comstock laws regulate the traveling of obscene literature across state lines. Customs
regulations regulated obscenity coming in to the United States.
Why is obscenity important? Well, obscenity is largely recognized by legal scholars as not being
protected by the Fourteenth Amendment; it is not protected speech. So, that's why it was
important for someone who wanted to keep Ulysses out of American hands to call it obscene.
Now, it's very interesting to read what Woolsey says about Ulysses. It just shows you how the
learned reading of literature comes to have a legal impact in the world. So, this is Woolsey on
Joyce:
Joyce has attempted, it seems to me, with astonishing success, to show how the screen of
consciousness, with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions, carries, as it were, on a plastic
palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about
him, but also on a penumbral zone residual of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up
by association, from the domain of the subconscious.
He's talking about the stream-of-consciousness method of narration in Ulysses. He shows how
each of these impressions affects the life and the behavior of the character which he is
describing, and I'm going to skip down. He goes on to detail more about Joyce's technique: "It is
because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but
has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject
of so many attacks, and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented."
So, here, Woolsey takes a very serious view of Joyce's artistic project, and he takes as the mark
of its success what he calls the loyalty of Joyce to that project, of showing exactly what
characters think in their subconscious associations, as those rise into consciousness and into
language. That principle is furthered in the United States in 1957 with a case called Roth.
It's Roth v. United States, and in this case Woolsey's approach to the literary is enshrined in
American law, affirmed as a precedent. So, according to the Roth case, something can be judged
obscene only if it meets three conditions, and those are these: The books' descriptions of nudity
or sex must go beyond the limits of taste established by community standards. So that phrase,
"community standards," will become very important in later law, and I'll mention how in a
minute. "It must not appeal to the interests of the average adult." So, you have to be really
aberrant in order to meet this standard; it can't appeal to the interests of the average adult. That's
what makes it obscene, so--I don't know--necrophilia, maybe that counts. And lastly--this is the
kicker--it must have no redeeming social or literary value whatsoever. That means if you can
prove just that one, you're safe. So, no matter what it is, even if it is necrophilia, if you can prove
that it has literary value it cannot be obscene.
And so this particular standard comes in to play when Allen Ginsberg's Howl goes on trial in--I
think it's 1959--it goes on trial. Similarly, a customs case and a case about selling the book: it
was bought at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and the poor sales clerk was indicted for
selling it, and also the bookstore was indicted for importing it. It had been published in Europe.

All they had to do in that trial, and it's very funny to read the transcript, is to prove that Ginsberg
in Howl was doing anything remotely resembling literary work. And it's very funny to see people
trying to argue that he was not. So, it's not enough to say that he uses the word "cock," for
example, in that poem; that's not enough. And the prosecutor tries to make the case on the basis
of individual words, and then you see them having these hilarious conversations about how
individual words work in metaphors and how they mean different things. This standard really
saves literature from any kind of continuing legal censorship.
But, there are other ways of producing censorship; that "community standards" comes to be a
problem in, for example, textbook design. So, there are these huge markets in public schools in
Florida and Texas and California, and so textbook publishers have to appeal to the community
standards of those huge, powerful markets, and that has an impact on what's available to school
systems all over the country. So, there is a way that those community standards, while in the
Roth case they're redeeming--they help to make the case against censorship, against a too-wide
definition of obscenity--it does have an impact in other ways in the opposite direction. Since the
1990s, in the wake of these changes, libraries have become the primary place where legal cases
are based. So, in 1982 the school board of Long Island, in Island Trees, Long Island, tries to
remove, or actually does remove Black Boy, Slaughterhouse 5, and various other sort of books of
the 1960s, mainly about politics, mostly has them removed from the school library. And a suit is
brought against that school system for doing that.
The decision in that case affirms that even though public school systems are within their rights in
the context of the classroom to restrict what is on the syllabi of their teachers, that the school
library represents what they call a "special environment." The special environment is a place of
voluntary study; it is a place where the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be suspended. And as they
say, sort of poetically, students do not leave their rights at the school door. And so school
libraries can't be regulated in that way. But these things come up over and over, and what's
interesting about that particular case is that the objection was that these books were antiAmerican. How far have we come since Black Boy had to be truncated? Not that far, in certain
sectors of the country, in certain ways of thinking. Black Boywas cut in half because it didn't
seem like a good reflection on America. It's still a problem for some books in being accepted and
read.
So, I began to talk about market constraints, and I want to just say a little bit more about that and
how it affects the writing of literature and the publishing, even before you arrive at the
bookstore. Traditional publishing has undergone a huge consolidation since the 1980s. So, there
are large multinational corporations that have bought up publishers. The one signal example of
this is when Bertelsmann, a German company, bought up Pantheon Books. This is written about
in a book. Now I'm forgetting the name of it. It'll come to me. One of the Pantheon editors led a
revolt when this happened. It became clear that Bertelsmann was going to impose a new standard
of profitability on the lists in Pantheon's portfolio. So it used to be in old-time publishing, sort of
mid century publishing and up to the 1980s, that the list, a literature list (and that's the list of
books that any publisher publishes), the list should be profitable. That does not mean that every
single item on that list will be profitable. So editors in the old-time mode could work with
writers who they found to be difficult and interesting, path breaking, unusual, not catering to
what was popular. They could work with writers and cultivate them and they knew that they
were taking on a book--say it's a collection of short stories; these are notoriously hard to sell-they were taking on a book that was not going to make a profit. But then they would also take
on The Joy of Cooking--or The Joy of Sex, since it's censorship day--and they knew that the profit
from a popular book could help to carry and balance those less profitable books, or not-at-allprofitable books, that they had on the list. So, there was a management of lists that could be tilted
to allow different kinds of books into the public domain.

When publishers were taken over by multinational corporations that were very distant from the
interaction between an editor and a writer, they looked at the numbers and they started to demand
that every book have its profit-and-loss analysis and that a very strict regulation be followed in
ensuring that all titles were going to make a profit. That's a very different standard, and it had a
huge impact on what kind of latitude editors had in working with writers who they thought might
be a little unusual or not so marketable. At the same time, agents began to have a role in the
publishing business. In the 1950s, when editors were encouraging literary writers directly, they
had a much more collaborative relationship with writers. But as profit became more important
writers needed to turn to someone else who wasn't going to pressure them to follow the market,
and agents came to have a role. Now, it's interesting. There is yet a third role that has just begun
to emerge in this structure, and that is of the coach, the writing coach: so you can now pay big
bucks, if you're a writer, to have someone who will call you up every week and say, "Hey, how's
the book going? Let's talk about your ideas. Are you writing today?" It used to be that agents
took that kind of active role. Well, agents are very busy now, with their clients selling movie
rights and such things. Movie rights are where a lot of the profit in a book sale come from. So,
agents began to be what the old-time editor was, and I think we have yet to see whether coaches
become what agents used to be in turn. But, as profitability becomes more and more of an issue
in selling a book to a publisher, there is an ever ongoing search for that person who will be the
ally of the literary in this process.
I've talked about the consolidation in book selling, the rise of the chains, and I've also talked
about those financial relationships between book sellers and publishers, were space is bought.
They also have incentives that publishers give, sometimes give money for readings to be held at
a bookstore. So, sometimes those things are bought also, those kinds of events, promotional
events. There is, of course, this whole context of the rise of the internet, and all kinds of
competition from the film industry, other media. Market constraints are sometimes paradoxically
produced by that overload that we get from the internet. So what that means is the culture is
finding new arbiters. So, you have this huge volume of information and cultural offerings being
given to you. In that welter of information we all look to some arbiter to tell us, "How do I sort
this out?" Nobody has the time to read all the blogs and decide which one they're going to read
regularly. So you might get a link from someone else's page, someone you are friends with,
someone you admire, a writer you've seen elsewhere. You might read certain print publications
and from there follow them in to the internet, into cyberspace. Most books now come with a web
address somewhere on them. A lot of films do; most films do. This is still in a period of
development. How profit gets connected up with those arbiters isn't yet very clear, so companies
are experimenting with paying for placements, like when you do the Google search and there are
certain Google-sponsored links at the top. That's like having the space in the front of your store
bought and paid for. So you think that you're getting--or, I think we all know that those are
sponsored links, now, but at the beginning people didn't really quite know that, so it looked like
you were getting-- the product of a disinterested electronic search, but in fact you were getting a
promotion. So the internet experiments with all kinds of both new and tried and true ways of
using money to create prominence among the welter of information.
Then there is another rising problem in question, and that is of intellectual property and access as
books are digitized. So, I don't know if you have heard of the Google Book Project, and also all
the digital libraries initiatives. There are various ones, but the Google Book Project is digitizing
with a special technology. People think it's probably a robotic technology--it's kept secret--for
scanning books that are in the public domain, and they've made agreements with lots of
university libraries including Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, to digitize all the books that are
beyond the copyright that are in their collections to make a huge digital library. And the dream is
that this will be a sort of bonanza of access. It'll be searchable. It'll be--well, maybe--free. It'll be
accessible all over the world. So, there is a dream here that's very noble. Publishers and writers'

groups, unions, are very worried about copyright infringement, because Google has stepped over
the line and is interested in pushing the envelope into scanning copyrighted material. So, what
has started to happen is that individual publishers have made deals with Google to let Google
digitize their list for a fee. But, see, now that money starts to come into this arrangement, it starts
to look less like free access and more like an access that is, once again, shaped by these financial
considerations. It's not at all clear how the nobility of the project and the financial context are
going to work themselves out, and it's not at all clear yet what the general approach of
educational institutions will be towards this. Yale has not signed onto this, for example, so some
universities have; some haven't. These are huge, looming questions that will impact what we get
to see as literature, how much access we have among the vast choices that the internet makes
available to us.
I want to just mention one more thing, and that's about internationalization. One thing that you
didn't probably see at the bookstore is fiction in translation, contemporary fiction in translation,
notoriously impossible to sell. There is a press called the New Press that was founded after some
of the Pantheon editors left and they founded this nonprofit press. That is the only kind of fiction
that the New Press publishes, contemporary fiction in translation, because they knew that only a
nonprofit press could publish this. It will never sell. One of the objections to the Google Book
Project is that the vast majority of its texts are in English, and it seems to present an Englishcentric vision of the world's knowledge, 'cause it does have pretensions to be the repository of
the world's knowledge.
In the reception of literature there are other forces, and here's when we start to move in to the
realm of The Human Stain. In the 1990s, there was a very lively and often acrimonious debate in
academia and among intellectual commentators about whether literature was the purveyor of
ideology, political ideology. So, the question is, does literature have a message that it's trying to
tell us? And one way to think about this is to think about English 125, major British poets, the
picture of what the old-fashioned canon might look like. It's all white guys. I think there might be
one woman that you can put on the syllabus in the Spring, a modern poet. You can probably
teach Bishop. I think people do teach Bishop in the second term of English 125. Did those poets
represent the communication of an ideology? Because a lot of contemporary fiction became the
object of contention: along with these very traditional syllabi, are you going to include Toni
Morrison on your syllabus? Well, this is no longer controversial. She's such an overwhelmingly
powerful author, at this time, by the sheer quality of her work, but early in her career it would
have been a question.
One of the striking things, of course, about American fiction in the second half of the twentieth
century, and into the twenty-first, is the demographic really does change. Writers of color are
much more prominent; there are many more points of view present in that canon. So, is literature
sociological? Does it speak to society, or is it an aesthetic object, something that we should
understand as part of the history of an art form? Do you have to choose between these two? And
I cite here what became an incredibly important book. It's really a wonderful book by actually a
Yale graduate, John Guillory. The title is Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon
Formation, published right at the height of the culture wars, of the canon wars. In it, he argues
that in the mid twentieth century, literature was a kind of social elite good, and that the aesthetic,
if it had an ideology, it was an ideology of bourgeois privilege. So, it wasn't that the content of
particular poems would be communicating something about an elite bourgeois ideology, but
rather that the very act of being in the institution where you would study such a thing (at Yale, in
English 125) that was the repository of the elite power of these texts. So it had much more to do
with institutions than it did about the content of any particular literary work. And it makes some
very persuasive readings of canonical poems that demonstrate the undecidability of their

ideology, or the way that they resist how they've been cast, how those poems have been cast by
critics.
There are also ways that novels were received and complained about that become part of this
picture. So, we've talked about Black Boy. I mentioned how controversial Woman Warrior was
because of its impurity as a Chinese text. Toni Morrison became a real advocate of writing by
women of color, in particular, and also as a literary critic she mounted an argument about how
whiteness functions as a central part of the traditional canon of literature. And she wrote Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in 1992, a very influential text.
Internationally, we had the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie's persecution, the fatwa issued
against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini after the publication of The Satanic Verses, for its
depiction of Islam. That kind of persecution becomes a feature of this more internationalized
debate about what is okay to say, especially about religions, and then of course we have the
Danish cartoon episode, with the cartoons of Muhammad that are now seeminglyit's resurgent.
There is another question about a film about Muhammad's life, I believe it is. Then there is
Roth's work, and here's where I just want to meditate for a minute on Roth.
Philip Roth's work has been defined by these kinds of objections, that censure that I was talking
about. He was very widely acclaimed in 1960 when Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book
Award.Goodbye, Columbus is a set of stories mostly about young Jewish protagonists living in a
Jewish context in Jewish communities in Newark or in New York. It included a story called "The
Conversion of the Jews" in which a young boy (actually, well, a little older than young boy,
maybe he's a teenager), Ozzie Freedman, becomes extremely agitated because all his questions to
his family and to his rabbi about Christianity are dismissed; he finally comes to be punished for
asking these kinds of questions. So, Ozzie stages his revolt by climbing to the top of the
synagogue roof and threatening to jump off if his family, all the assembled students from his
Hebrew school, and the rabbi, won't kneel down and pray to Jesus, which of course they do
because he's about to jump off. This story was quite controversial, as you might imagine, so there
was a taste of Roth's vexed relationship to Jewish community in that story. So, it was all about
how a hidebound Jewish community was preventing and circumscribing the curiosity of a young
American boy, and it really highlighted Ozzie's Americanness. And Roth has always emphasized
that about himself: He's an American writer.
Like Saul Bellow before him--Saul Bellow had been his mentor and teacher for a brief time at
the University of Chicago--Bellow insisted on bringing into American literature the voice and
sensibility of an immigrant Jewish family. Bellow was from a Russian Jewish family that
immigrated to Canada in the early twentieth century. Bellow was told he would neve--because of
his heritage, when he was at the University of Chicago--he was told he would never have the ear
for language that would allow him to write beautifully, because of his linguistic background and
because he was Jewish. Well, Bellow pioneered the way of bringing in a particularly Jewish and
European notion of literature and a sensibility about the body that could enter American
literature and change it from its either WASPish or southern genteel quality. And, certainly, this
was a very powerful current, and Roth is the continuation of that current in American letters.
Roth comes out in 1969 with Portnoy's Complaint. Portnoy is quite a novel. It's really all about
masturbation. It's about Alex Portnoy jacking off in the bathroom to every possible provocative
thought he can have, and it's told as if to Alex's psychiatrist in a sort of ranting, over-the-top
style, very explicit. This got Roth into big trouble, partly because Alex lives in a very tight-knit
Jewish family, and this enters into the whole story of his obsession with sex. Irving Howe, a very
prominent Jewish literary critic, public intellectual, wrote a famous essay in 1972 called "Philip
Roth Reconsidered." And he basically said that the adulation given to Roth was entirely
inappropriate--he now saw on reflection, now that he had read Portnoy's Complaint--because

Roth had an unfocused hostility towards the Jewish community. This enraged Roth. That rage
fueled huge portions of his career. When, in The Human Stain, Roth has Coleman Silk say, "All
of Western literature began with a quarrel, the wrath of Achilles," in a certain way he is
describing his own origin as a writer.
Now, if you'll go with me: Do you have just five minutes? I want to get to one last point. Roth, in
case you haven't noticed, is a very misogynist writer. Did you notice? Hard to miss that. Why do
I like Roth? In this context where writers are taken to task for their offensiveness on cultural
grounds, on gender grounds, on the grounds of identification, how can you like someone who
has this major flaw, who seems to see all women as sexual objects, who is unembarrassed about
saying his writing is about a man's life, the life of men; it's not about the life of women? So, why
do I like Roth? This has actually baffled me for years. Why doesn't it bother me? There are parts
in The Human Stain that really are quite amazingly objectionable. My favorite is the gift of the
molestation. Do you remember this when they are talking about Faunia, and how great she is in
bed, and what she is like at breakfast afterwards, and they speculate, Coleman and Nathan, that
maybe that was the gift of her having been molested? Well, molestation is never a gift. If there is
anything that comes from living through a hard life, it is not the gift of the molestation, but the
gift of the person who survived it. This is insane.
Why do I still like Roth? Well, partly it's that, like no one else, he can take me into a voice,
seamlessly draw me in. Some of his ranting voices are more or less convincing. Some are more
or less caricatured; of course the women's are more caricatured than the men's. Nevertheless, he
can take me in there, and the way his sentences work are really sometimes just astonishingly
beautiful. There is a part of The Human Stain that I particularly like, and you'll get to it as you
finish the novel for Monday, and that's when he's describing Coleman and Faunia at Tanglewood.
So, just think about that when you read that, pause for a minute over that.
I think what it is ultimately is that I'm very moved by two things in Roth's writing; that is the
meditation on mortality and what goes along with that, I think: the focus on and the dignity of
the body. There is a very Whitmanian sense to his understanding of sex and the body in all its
complexity. I appreciate that. I am moved by that sense of the inaccessibility of the other
person--this is from my lecture on Monday--the way you always get the other fellow's life
somehow wrong. That speaks to me about the difference between my consciousness and anyone
I encounter in the world. That to me is profound and moving. It reminds me that, for all Roth's
linguistic energy and skill as a writer, there is still that great divide that language is trying to
cross. And that's what I appreciate about literature in general, that it's that great attempt to cross
that divide. I can overlook the misogyny for those things. Am I like Roth? Probably not, but
that's why I like him. I read to see what I'm not, not to see what I am, and so Roth's very
difference from me, his misogyny, is part of what allows me to feel that I am entering, however
partially, however always in a compromised way, into the consciousness of another person
through that beautiful, amazing medium of language. So, that's why I like Roth, and I would
encourage you to think about your own responses to the books that we've read together, think
about what it means about you as a reader that you respond in certain ways. So we'll pick this up
on Monday; thank you for waiting.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 21 Transcript
April 9, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. So, today I'm going to give my second and final lecture
on The Human Stain. My first lecture focused on identity, and my final argument about the novel
in relation to the question of identity is that the first half of the novel comes down on the
definition of identity through secrecy, that what makes you who you are--anyway what makes
Coleman the person he is--is his secrecy. "Who he really was was his secret." So, I did that little
reading of that phrase. Today I want to talk about what happens in the second half of the novel to
the question of secrecy, and how that relates, then, into the question of desire and narrative. So,
that's where I'm going today. If you'll recall, on page 47 (and I don't think we need to turn to
this), desire is said to be generated by the human discrepancies, the difference between Faunia,
with her illiterate vocabulary, and Coleman, with the vocabularies of two ancient languages and
his language of English. So, discrepancy, difference, is understood as the engine of desire. So,
this shouldn't be surprising, when you think about what desire is. Many psychological theories of
desire agree on one thing, and that is that desire is reaching towards a lack. Desire is generated
by lack, so you can think of difference as one version of what it means to lack. What you are not,
you then desire; what you have not, you then desire. So, you don't desire that thing which you
already have. So, it's just a simple structure of desire that I want you to keep in mind.
Now, I want to note, in the second half of the novel, something that you probably noticed. At the
beginning of Chapter 4, we are plunged back in to Nathan's first-person voice. So, that "I" of
Nathan comes back very strongly at the very beginning of that chapter. We haven't seen it for a
while. We've been embedded in Faunia and Les and Delphine and Coleman, inside all their
minds, using that technique of free indirect discourse, where the narrative voice just, sort of,
seamlessly allows you to look at the world through that character's eyes and in that character's
mind. So, that technique is highlighted as a technique in Chapter 4 when we are reminded so
suddenly that this is all being written by Nathan, that the illusion of these characters' voices is
just that; it's an illusion. The second half of the novel, then, sets up the source of the story--how
does Nathan know all that he knows to give us that story--sets up the problem of that source, and
then it finally answers it in the person of Ernestine Silk. Ernestine, Coleman's sister, answers
some of those basic questions about Coleman's background, first of all revealing his racial secret
simply by her presence at the funeral and her resemblance to his daughter, Lisa. So, her body is a
kind of revelation to Nathan, and then she fills in some details that we can see recapitulate
material that has come in an imaginative form, different imaginative form, earlier in the novel.
So, I would note (and I will come back to this point), Ernestine is kind of a stock character. There
are some characters in this novel--Delphine, to some extent Les, and Ernestine-- who are
stereotypes of one kind or another. There are various ways of thinking about this problem in
Roth's fiction, but the critical way of thinking about is that his fiction is uneven, that he cannot
somehow truly inhabit the complexity of some kinds of characters. And he has said about his
own work that he writes novels about the lives of men, very clearly masculine fiction, so that
should come as a surprise to none of you. So, that's one way of understanding the sort of clichd
quality of characters like Ernestine. I'm going to offer a slightly different way of understanding
that by the end of the lecture, so be looking for that. But, for now, I just want to focus on the
structure of the second half of the novel, setting up the problem of knowledge and then
producing a part of an answer to it. But, even though you have that partial answer, there is still a
residue of fictionality within the logic of the novel. Of course, it's all fiction. But, within the
logic of the novel, we know that there is a lot that Nathan is making up. So, Ernestine's story
doesn't get you Steena dancing at the end of Coleman's bed, for instance, a very important scene
in Nathan's construction of Coleman.
So, there are scenes like that, that are purely the product of Nathan's imagination. You have the
final spasm of this kind of imagining when Nathan stands at Coleman's grave and asks him to
speak to him one last time and tell him the story of telling Faunia his racial secret. So, you have

that last scene where we enter fully in to the minds and voices of those characters. One question
that you want to ask, here, is how we should understand this move. Is there something, perhaps,
duplicitous about the way Nathan suggests he's related to this enterprise of imagining? We're told
on page 337, right before that graveside scene, that it was Ernestine's speaking to him that caused
him to be seized by his story. This is in the middle of the page: "I was completely seized by his
story, by its end and by its beginning, and then and there I began this book." So, we get an
account of its start. So, he's "seized" by the story. It puts him in a position much like he is at the
very beginning of the told story that you've just arrived at the end of, when Coleman shows up at
his door demanding that he write the story of the unjust dismissal from Athena College. So, there
are two moments when Nathan claims to be seized by Coleman and his story. It puts Nathan in a
very passive position. It suggests that he's not the active party here, that somehow he has been
drawn into this enterprise, into this narrative, maybe against his will.
I think you can see this as duplicitous, so I want to look a little bit at how this is duplicitous, and
this is where desire comes back into the braid of my argument. There is a sentence on page 164 I
want to direct your attention to. Desire, that urge to inhabit or fill the lack of whatever it is, has a
structural relation to language in Roth's work. So, desire has a structural relation to language.
And I think there is no better example of it--and there's perhaps no better example of Roth's
ecstatic sentence structure--than this sentence on 164, and I will read the whole of it. It starts
"The kid." You see it about a quarter of the way down, halfway through a line, "The kid." This is
about Faunia.
The kid, whose existence became a hallucination at seven, and a catastrophe at fourteen, and a
disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a
janitor, but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a
self-obsessed mother, the kid, who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone and yet is
protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on unintimidated is enormous, and yet whose
purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything
loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who
excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but morally speaking the least
repellant person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so
long in the opposite direction, because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction,
and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is
propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical
union, who is anything but a plaything, upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to
sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade in arms than anyone else on earth.
Wow. That's quite a grammar. What you see in that sentence is language trying to embody desire
by its very excess. It's acting out, formally, just how far Coleman has to reach from where he
was, to arrive at Faunia as his object of love and desire. And you see that missing lack is
thematized in the middle of this sentence: "because of all he has missed by going in the opposite
direction." She embodies everything he isn't--and the grammar of that sentence relentlessly tries
to fill in, to reach towards who she is. And that's why I think it's--it's a repeated noun phrase;
that's the grammar of his sentence, a repeated noun phrase. So, you just have piles of descriptions
of Faunia, and--now let me see if there is, no--there is no verb. This is a sentence fragment.
People, this is a sentence fragment. You can't find a verb for the subject. So, it's quite a
remarkable feat of grammar, and it embodies the formal quality of language as desire.
But, it's more than just at the level of grammar, or at the structural level of language, that desire
and language coincide. It's also there in the way sex is imagined as anti-metaphorical, if you look
on page 203. This is when Faunia is dancing for Coleman, and she insists, when Coleman wants
it to mean something--I guess she is just about to dance for him--when he wants their sex to

mean something, she says, "No. It's just what it is." "He said to her, 'This is more than sex' and
flatly she replied, 'No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex all by itself. Don't fuck it
up by pretending it's something else.' " What Coleman's urge is, is to use language to make sex
into something other than it is, to make meaning out of it. That's a fundamentally linguistic
enterprise. By insisting that it can't be made into something else, it puts sex not so much outside
of language, as it elevates sex to the equal of language. So, just as the grammar of the sentence
reaches out to fill that lack, sex does that, too. But it doesn't require the resources of language to
be successful, so you don't need the language. Really, all you need is sex to produce that human
connection that desire seeks. So, it elevates sex.
Sex is the analog to writing in other ways, too. On page 37, Nathan talks about sex as "the mania
to repeat the act," and he also talks about the language tasks that go along with it. This is on the
top of 37, when he is talking about why he withdrew from life:
I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength,
the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egotism, the resilience or the toughness or the
shrewdness or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism to deal
with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
So, sex always comes along with those meanings, and Nathan could not separate out the two in
the way that Coleman succeeds in doing with Faunia, in finding an illiterate woman. I think it's
her illiteracy, in a sense, that enables the separation of sex from language. But that "mania to
repeat the act" looks a lot, actually, like Roth's writing. Roth is an extremely repetitious writer,
across his novels. His novels often engage the same kinds of characters, sometimes the same
character: lots of Nathan Zuckerman novels. Even the ones that are not Nathan Zuckerman
novels look like Nathan Zuckerman novels. You usually have someone who looks like Nathan.
The women often look the same. They often rant in similar ways. So, there is something about
Roth's writing that is close to that mania to repeat the act; so, there you get that parallelism again.
So, the distance between one person and another is crossed by language and by sex in two equal
tracks. But it's also crossed, in this novel, by the imagination. And this is where the entering into
Coleman's story comes into play. Now, you will have noticed, at a few jarring points, that
suddenly you'll be in free indirect discourse, in the third person, and suddenly the "I" of that
character appears. And there's an example on 165. This is Faunia, at the bottom of the page. She
is thinking about the crow.
That crow's voice. She remembers it at all hours day or night, awake, sleeping or insomniac. Had
a strange voice, not like the voice of other crows, probably because it hadn't been raised with
other crows. Right after the fire I used to go and visit.
You see that "I" coming very suddenly there. So, why does it appear? Well, this is a moment
when Nathan, as the writer, takes an unusual liberty, makes an unusual claim on us as readers, by
entering directly into the first person of this character, violating what has been the formal habit of
the novel, up until that moment, or the formal habit of that scene. It happens on a few occasions.
So, he becomes the eye of Faunia. Now, you might say that this is just to emphasize the
imaginative work that's required for Nathan to tell this story. But I want to suggest that there is a
structural relationship between Nathan and Faunia that we have to attend to, and to excavate this
I want to go back to that first dance scene, on page 27, with Coleman and Nathan. This is when
they start to talk about sex. And this is Nathan's reflection: "The moment a man starts to tell you
about sex, he's telling you something about the two of you." It's quite a remarkable statement. Its
homoeroticism should not be lost on you. He's telling Nathan about sex with Faunia, but how
Nathan hears it, is that it's about him and Coleman.

Now, I don't mean to say that it literally becomes about the fantasy of sex between--literal sex
between--Coleman and Nathan. But, I will point out a couple of things. One is that Nathan, if
you recall, has been rendered impotent by his surgery. So, his only relation, in that physical way,
to Coleman, is not really as a man as such. I think he's imagined to be unmanned in this scene.
So, then you get, on page 43, an even fuller description of this. He's talking, Coleman is talking,
again, about Faunia, and Nathan is very much responding in the conversation.
We were enjoying ourselves, now, and I realized that in my effort to distract him from his
rampaging pique by arguing for the primacy of his pleasure, I had given a boost to his feeling for
me, and I exposed mine for him. I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my
eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, over-involved and
overexcited in the way you are when you're a kid and you think you've found a soul mate in the
new boy down the street and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as
you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to. But ever since he had
banged on my door the day after Iris's death and proposed that I write Spooks for him, I had,
without figuring or planning on it, fallen in to a serious friendship with Coleman Silk.
The language of courtship and of gushing, of that overeagerness, suggests a crush. It reinforces
the homoerotic charge of their dance, and the way Nathan observes his virile body as they dance
together. And it gives it that emotional dimension. So, we're told of Coleman, in another spot in
this basic scene, that he's contaminated by desire alone. Nathan, if he is seized by Coleman's
story, as we're told at the end of the book, is contaminated, too, by that story, and by desire for
Coleman. So, just as that stepping over into the first person from free indirect third-person
discourse, stepping over in to the "I" of his character, represents crossing a certain kind of
boundary, so does the erotic charge that is given to his relationship with Coleman.
Now, there are a couple ways of thinking about that homoerotic structure. One is through the
work of a critic named Eve Sedgwick, and if you've taken any women's and gender studies
courses, or studied feminist interpretations or queer interpretations of literature, she should be a
familiar name. She wrote a famous book called Between Men, and her argument is that, in a lot
of--I think her subject was Victorian fiction--in a lot of Victorian fiction, the homoerotic or the
homosocial bond between men is channeled through a woman, and the perfect example of that,
in this novel, is when Coleman and Nathan go to the dairy farm to watch Faunia. So, it's as if, by
both watching Faunia together, through her their desire for one another is channeled. So, they're
able to experience desire together, and it's safely not for each other because Faunia is right there
as a mediating point of the triangle. But I think we can say some other things about the structure,
too, and not just that it's there.
Essentially, Sedgwick's theory allows us to see how it works, to see that it's there. But then, we
want to ask, why? And this is related to another feature of the text that you might have noticed,
and that is the repeated reference to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Did you notice that? It
comes back. Tadzio and Aschenbach are the two characters from Mann's Death in Venice. This is
a mid-twentieth-century German novelist. This is a small novel, a little novella. It's about an
older man named Aschenbach who goes to Venice for a vacation. And he's a scholar and a writer,
and he goes to Venice, and he suddenly finds himself transfixed by a beautiful young boy that he
sees at the hotel. And he spends the novel chasing Tadzio, the boy, all around the city and trying
to get close to him. And the mother realizes, the mother of Tadzio realizes there is this sort of
lecherous man coming after her boy and warns him, Tadzio, to stay away from Aschenbach. In
the end Aschenbach is taken with, I think it's tuberculosis or some disease--I can't remember
what the disease is--and he dies in Venice. This passion for the boy is described, and this is the
part that Roth quotes in this novel, as "a late adventure of the feelings."

So, in those quotations Roth is directing us to think about the lateness of that desire as its
characteristic quality. It's an older man suddenly waylaid by an unexpected surge of passion.
Now, what I find interesting about that is that Roth could have chosen any number of romantic
stories to characterize this. Humbert would be one: a late adventurer of the feeling, an older man,
younger woman. Why does he take a homoerotic structure? Why does he choose this story, a
story of same-sex desire, rather than a heterosexual desire? Why is this the model that he
chooses? So, I would suggest it's important that the novel is called Death in Venice, that
Aschenbach dies. There is something about homoerotic desire--and this is a characteristic of
fiction that features it over the centuries--that it seems deadly. Somehow it's deadly. It's imagined
as being deadly. Of course, this is a product of its unconventionality in older times, the fear that a
heterosexual person, or a person who conceives themselves as heterosexual, might experience if
they are taken by a homoerotic urge.
So, there's somehow that death gets wound into stories of homoerotic desire, and The Human
Stain is no different. I just want to point out a couple of examples. You can see it in the
difference between the way Nathan describes his decision to dance with Coleman and the way
Faunia describes hers. This is Faunia on 226. This is just right in the middle of the page.
She's playing with her hair and thinking that her hair is like seaweed, a great trickling sweep of
seaweed saturated with brine, and what's it cost her anyway? What's the big deal? Plunge in,
pour forth. If this is what he wants, abduct the man and snare him. It won't be the first one.
That's Faunia, sort of thinking, why not? Why not dance as he's asking me? Why not? What's the
big deal? What does it cost her? Contrast that with, on 25 and 26, the way Nathan thinks.
"What the hell?" I thought, "We'll both be dead soon enough." And so, I got up and there on the
porch, Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot together.
And, if you look on 26, you get another description where death comes back up as a reason.
Maybe why it didn't even cross my mind to laugh and let him, if he wanted to, dance around the
porch by himself, just laugh and enjoy myself watching him, maybe why I gave him my hand
and let him place his arm around my back and push me dreamily around that old bluestone floor,
was because I had been there that day when her corpse was still warm--[that's Iris' corpse] and
seen what he'd looked like.
The corpse pops up in the middle of this reflection on why he's dancing. So, two times in the
space of a page, death accompanies his decision to dance with Coleman. So, why then is
homoerotic desire such a threat, a threat in this way? Well, one structural reason could be that
homoerotic desire threatens to collapse the engine of desire, which is difference. The novel has
set up difference being the engine of desire. So, if it's desire for the same--understood as gender,
the important sameness being gender--then it looks like a self-canceling desire, a desire that can't
sustain itself, somehow, or that lacks that fundamental structure of difference that the whole
novel seeks to set up. If desire is the engine of the sentence, as well as the engine of the
narrative, as well as the engine of human connection in the novel, its collapse is a great threat,
not just to human connection, to human life, but to writing.
So, this is one way to understand the problem, and it goes back to speak to my point about
inhabiting, or being a parasite upon, Coleman's story. Nathan inhabits the "I," and finally begins
to conflate himself with Coleman, or with Coleman's lovers, and we get various versions of this.
So, while Faunia and Coleman dance, he replaces--let's see--he replaces Les. So, while they're
dancing in the cottage--Do you remember this scene? I can't find my page number in my notes

right now -- while they are dancing in Coleman's house privately--this is after Coleman stops
seeing Nathan--he's outside in his car lurking on the road. The only other person who does that is
Les Farley. So, he comes to be in the position of Faunia's other lover. Okay. So, that's one way he
enters into his characters, as he starts to occupy, structurally, the same spot as they do, but it
actually gets much more complicated. This is on 326, in Ernestine's conversation, in her scene.
She is very helpful to say:
"Well, then" [because Nathan has said, "I've been trying to figure out Coleman"] "Well, then,"
she says, "you are now an honorary member of the Silk family."
So, there he is, taken right into the Silk family, so he starts to replace Coleman after Coleman's
death. At the very end, as he's getting into the car to drive down to New Jersey for dinner with
the Silks, he says--let's see--"Like Steena Paulsson before me," he was going to sit with his East
Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. He becomes Steena in that passage. He
becomes Faunia when he dances with Coleman. He leeches into all the aspects of Coleman's life.
So, it's not just inhabiting imaginatively, but there are these structural ways that he comes to
double Coleman and also to double his lovers. It's by virtue of a blankness that Nathan sees in
Coleman and in Faunia that he can pull this off, and this is very noticeable in my favorite scene
of the novel, the Tanglewood scene, which I think is quite beautiful. This is on 209, 210. He's
writing about music, here, and the feeling that all the people in the audience were going to be
swept away by death. That's sort of the overwhelming sense of mortality in the beginning of the,
in the middle of the page, there, and he says:
And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing, in a
Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.
I would suggest that it's precisely that "lacking nothing" that makes it deathly, because if you
lack nothing, there is no desire. So, it's the very stasis of the day and the solidity of that music
that brings him into this mood. And then Bronfman appears, the pianist, and you get this
wonderful description of what he does, how he attacks the piano and banishes death with his
contention with the piano. And it should remind you of all that's said about life being an
argument. Remember, I mentioned last time Coleman saying that all Western literature begins
with a fight, with an argument between Achilles and Agamemnon, Coleman's fight with the
college, Coleman's fight against the racial contract drawn up for him at birth, Nathan's contention
in the world of desire which he then withdraws from.
He implants in his own narrative of his thoughts what Coleman will later say. This is on 211.
Coleman says, "I was telling Faunia that he took ten years at least out of that piano." Nathan had
said on the previous page that they "would have to throw that thing out after Bronfman's finished
with it." He plants in the narrative the shared thought, asserting that somehow Coleman's
mind is Nathan's mind; that collapse is written right into the realist assumption of the novel. We,
sort of, read along in those passages thinking, "oh, let's take this at face value, oh, yes, they're
thinking the same thing." But, of course, it's Nathan who plants that; it's Nathan who's making it
up. We don't know how honest Nathan is. So, he claims to have the same thoughts. It's the
blankness. He describes--Nathan--Faunia and Coleman as a pair of blanks, and it's precisely that
blankness that allows Nathan to inhabit Coleman.
This is, in fact, a quality that he finally attributes to the, as he says, "negroes," in the photograph
of Coleman's family. And this is on 337, the very bottom of 336. "They were pale but they were
Negroes. How could you tell they were Negroes? By little more than that they had nothing to
hide." This is quite an astonishing sentence. If identity is, in its ideal form, secrecy, if you have
nothing to hide, then you don't have an identity. There are two things, two implications that flow

from that. One is that racial secrecy is really the only kind of secrecy that matters, because being
Negro is the only thing that one would hide. It also means that these people are just as blank as
Faunia and Coleman; so there is a somewhat pernicious racial simplification going on, here. It's
somewhat related to the simplification of thinking that homoerotics is the desire for the same.
What both of these logics leave out is that point that is insisted upon, actually, earlier in the
novel, which is that the other fellow always has a life you can't know, that it's simply the
otherness of any individual person that keeps you from knowing more than you can see on the
surface. It's the otherness, not the racial otherness, necessarily, but just the otherness.
So, in these last pages, otherness gets collapsed back into racial otherness, and I think perhaps
this is why Ernestine emerges as a stereotyped character. He is folding an analysis of identity
back into racial stereotype, an analysis of identity as blank. They have no interiority. One
question that you could ask is whether this constitutes a critique of Nathan. Is Nathan being
brought to task for stealing the story of Coleman Silk? Is this making passing, racial passing, into
the ultimate form of identity, that to be interesting as a character you've got to be passing? Is it
indicting Nathan? Is it suggesting that Nathan really does desire Coleman? These are all kinds of
questions that you can think about. One thing, I think, it does do, though, is highlight the
constructedness of the narrative, across the board. Coleman says about hisSpooks narrative that
he could not do the creative remove that the pros do because the creative remove, he says, "It's
still the raw thing." It's a bad book because it's still the raw thing. He has no self-distancing.
So, what the critique of Nathan does, the implicit critique of Nathan, does is distance us from
him, to some degree. It allows us to see him as an unreliable narrator. It also, I think, models
Roth's own relation to Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan Zuckerman is the creative remove, is the
medium of the creative remove, that Roth requires in order to write about his own life. Most of
the Nathan Zuckerman novels draw very heavily on Roth's life, and in fact at one point Roth
writes an autobiographical nonfiction book called The Facts. And it's all, mostly, about
complaining, about the response to Portnoy's Complaint, and also caviling against his ex-wife, a
very happy habit that Roth has. At the end of The Facts there is a letter to Roth from Nathan
Zuckerman where he says, "You idiot. Why are you doing autobiography? This is not your style.
Facts: it's just not your thing. Forget it. It's terrible. Don't publish this. Go back to what you do
best, which is making stuff up."
Roth has played with this dynamic between autobiography and fiction throughout his career. And
I think the threat, the deathly threat, of the collapse that's figured in the homoerotic element of
this novel is the threat of--it sort of doubles the threat of--Roth collapsing into Nathan
Zuckerman. And, in another sense, it doubles the threat of writing really only about men, that
what's weak about the novel is the way that it inhabits the subjectivities of women especially.
Delphine Roux is just a caricature, really, and in many small ways Faunia is a caricature, too. I've
talked about Ernestine. Les can be seen as a caricature. So, it's not something exclusive to his
female characters, but it does suggest, as I mentioned a little while back in the lecture, a certain
kind of limit to Roth's project.
So, I will finish by saying Roth is an extremely important writer in this period because of the
very complexity with which he makes the texture of his novels speak to the question of fiction's
relationship to life, writing's relation to life, and the relationship between the writer and what he
or she writes, the writer and the work. These are questions that vex writers in this period. We
have seen many writers in this syllabus who worry about these things: Barth, Morrison, so many
of them, Maxine Hong Kingston. Roth does it in a way that nobody else particularly does. He's
also widely admired. When The New York Times had this feature a few years ago--I think it was
2004--on the best novels of the last twenty-five years, and they polled about 125 public
intellectuals, writers, professors of literature, reviewers, and asked what is the one best novel.

They asked--they made it hard. They said, "What's the one best novel of the last twenty-five
years?" Well, number one was Beloved, number two was Blood Meridian, but if you added up all
the Roth novels together that people chose, Roth was the winner. So, he's highly regarded,
although there is split opinion, as you can see, there, about which of his novels is really the best
one.
So, I will say to you that we're tracking, in what we're reading, writers who are making an
enormous impact on what American fiction looks like in the latter part of the twentieth century.
It's very interesting to me to see the very ambivalences that are at the heart of this fiction. Now,
I'll stop there for Roth. Let me just say, as we go into Edward P. Jones, the novel that I don't have
on the syllabus is Beloved. It's always a novel that I hope that you've read. I used to teach it
routinely, but it's fun to shake it up and put some different things on, knowing that a lot of you
will have read it. When you read Edward P. Jones, if you have read Beloved I'd like you think
hard about the relationship between those two writers and the two novels. If you haven't
read Beloved, I urge you: just go to Wikipedia, and just get a plot summary, or open it up, even
better. I won't ask you to read it on the side, extra, although I would love to. Find out a little bit
about it, just so that you have it in your head as you begin to read. Okay. Thank you.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 22 Transcript
April 14, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Today, of course I'm going to talk about The Known World, the
second-to-last of our novels. In the two lectures that I have planned, I'm going to take up fairly
abstract questions, because I think this novel, for all its wealth of detail, calls for an address to
these couple of questions. And I'll tell you about those in a minute, but before I pursue that line
of argument, which today will take a somewhat narrow scope and on Wednesday will take in the
whole of the novel, I just want to hear from you, a little bit, about what reading this novel was
like, just in a simple way. How did you respond to it? How did it make you feel as a reader?
What was the experience like? What did you notice? So, who can tell me what they noticed? Yes.
Student: I guess it found it a little disorienting, because of all the names that were introduced
quickly at the beginning, and jumping around in a different time, and also referencing the dead
people as being alive. So, that was really confusing and disorienting, but I also really liked it,
mostly because of the descriptive language that was used, particularly when referring to--I felt
like he captured the environment really well, so I enjoyed it.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. So, was the natural description a kind of grounding, in
that context of disorientation? That's a very, I think, perceptive take on what he's doing in the
novel. Yeah. What else? What else did you notice? Yes.
Student: Well, the lack of a strong sense of plot made it difficult for me to come back to the
book, once I'd put it down, so that I thought that it was beautifully written, which meant that
when I was sitting there reading it I had no trouble staying engaged with the book, but when I
put it down I sort of forgot about it and had no interest in picking it up again until I did because I
had to for class.

Professor Amy Hungerford: It's terrible, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. It has an interesting effect that way.
It's like, as I was saying, I think, to a friend in office hours, that it's totally committed to plot, but
on the tiniest scale, in the local sense, that there are so many tiny narratives within this novel that
there isn't one, or it's hard to detect the one that will hold you for the whole novel. And I'll
definitely- I'll talk about that in my second lecture. Yeah, absolutely, so that's something we have
to account for. Yes, Mary.
Student: One of the things that I thought was really interesting was how suddenly the narrative
would jump into the future or the past, saying a lot of things about one character-Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely: totally fluid chronological sense in the novel.
So, we have to make sense of that. We have to know what to say about that. One thing I think we
can say is--to put it in context--is that he's doing something quite different from Toni Morrison,
just to take a point of context that is totally apparent, I think, that he's writing in the same vein as
Toni Morrison; he's writing an historical novel about slavery. And, after Beloved in the mid '80s,
you cannot do that without being in the realm of Toni Morrison. But what's interesting about the
contrast in time travel between Morrison and Jones is that with Jones it works proleptically, into
the future. With Toni Morrison, Beloved develops the concept of what she calls re-memory. Any
of you who have read the novel or thought about it in a classroom probably have thought about
this. Re-memory is that way for the characters that the memories of slavery exist independent of
persons, so that the daughter of a slave who is living in freedom, if she goes back to the South, is
imagined to be capable of walking into a memory of slavery even though slavery is, in that
moment, gone. So, it's as if there is a free contact between the present and the past, but there is
not this free contact between the present and the future, the way that you see in Jones. So, we
want to ask ourselves: in what sense is he innovating on the aims of the historical novel, as Toni
Morrison wrote it twenty years or so earlier? What else did you notice? What other feelings did
you have about the reading experience? Is it like anything else we have read this term, and, if so,
what? Is it like anything else? Yes.
Student: Well, this is kind of an unfair comparison to make, because of the morality issues, but
it reminded me of Blood Meridian, in the sense of its quality of lots of different thoughts and
events.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. That's an interesting parallel. So, it has a detailed attention
to the particular, which ends up leeching significance out of the particular. Yes. Both novels do
that, and it does call into question, I think, for both novels, how we're to read its morality,
because both deliberately take up subjects that evoke in us moral responses. So, Jones' choice--if
you think about Nabokov setting himself up with a problem (how can you make us love a
pedophile?)--Jones' problem, his chess problem, is: what do you do with a black slave owner?
How are we to understand the phenomenon of black slave ownership? So, that's the moral
question he brings up, and we will have to see whether ambivalence finally gives away to
critique, whether there is a strong moral critique of the situations that he sets up. Let me begin,
then. I have some sense of how you're receiving the book, so that's helpful. I thank you for that.
Let me begin, then, with my abstract question, and it really comes from the title of the book, The
Known World. It raises in that title immediately the question of knowledge. How do you know
anything? That is a central question for this book: How do you know anything? The abstract
question I'm going to ask on Wednesday is how does anything exist, another extremely abstract
question, how can anything exist? So, those are my two, sort of, governing questions. They will
become much fuller and more detailed and concrete as I lecture. How do you know anything? A
related question is, who is the knower? The Known World: known by whom? So, the question of

the subject of knowing, the person who knows, is immediately also at issue. Who is that person?
Is that person accessible to us? Can we know that person?
History poses, in the contemporary period, all of those problems of knowledge, and I think this is
one reason why this is a historical novel. And it's one reason why fiction turns to the historical in
this period, because the practice of history at this time, in the second half of the twentieth
century, begins to change. So, it used to be that historians felt that they could know the past;
when they had gained a certain distance from it, it would become knowable, that objective
distance. And so, any historian worth his salt would probably be loath to write about something
too recent, because that wasn't what history was all about. History was about getting perspective,
the perspective and objectivity that time provides. Well, in the mid twentieth century this vision
of history began to change, and I'm going to mention a couple of figures here that are especially
relevant to literary studies.
One is Michel Foucault, a French historian and philosopher who in the 1960s began to argue that
history was best understood as the evolution of discursive systems, systems, essentially, of
language married to institutional power, and that those systems were properly understood as
shaping what we could know and the social identities one could inhabit at any given time. So, in
the early '60s he writes about the history of insanity; he writes about the history of sexuality; he
writes about the history of prisons and discipline. And he argues that institutions like the asylum
and the prison form modern subjectivities, form how it is that we think we can be people and
know things. So, the argument goes something like: you can't be a modern madman without the
asylum. It's not like madness existed, and then asylums got built to take care of it. He sees the
rise of the asylum and the rise of clinical insanity as requiring one another; you can't have one
without the other. So, it's the rise of the defining institution that maps directly onto the rise of any
condition like that: similarly sexuality, laws that govern deviants, norms of behavior that
stabilize gender. There are some wonderful stories from medieval French literature, for, example
that Foucault talks about, that feature girls who jump over ditches and suddenly become boys.
There is this sense of instability of gender that he brings out of some historical material, and then
he talks about how we came to believe that gender was stable, and what discursive systems were
required, what laws, what kinds of etiquette, what kinds of education were required to make us
believe that gender was stable, among other things.
So, this kind of history suggests a couple of things to those of us who study literature, and it did
so very powerfully in the 1980s, and that is that discourse, language, is extremely powerful. It
affects how we can know anything. It's not just the medium in which we can describe what we
know. It's that very foundation through which we know anything. And I think some of the
revisionist history that you see taking place in fiction-- and here I'll have recourse again
to Beloved--demonstrates the belief in language's power to make history.
Toni Morrison is, in Beloved, looking towards fiction to do something else, too, and that's to
replace lost history. Another development, out of Foucault's work and the work of others, is an
interrogation of the archive. What's in the archive? What kind of archive do we use? If you're
interested in the history of institutions, that's a very different-looking historical archive than it
would be if you just think that great men make history. So, then you go and you look at the lives
of the great men over time who have made history. That's a very different-looking archive, or if
you think that history is made by governments.
So, there's a whole movement in the '80s and '90s, the new social history, that takes the archive
to be much broader than it was before, to include all kinds of things that common people
experienced. So, the letters of factory workers, the popular magazines and so on, all kinds of
ephemera, what historians would call ephemera, came to be important in a new way. Morrison

uses that to imagine a history that can't be told because there is no archive for it, and in the case
of Beloved, it's the history of the illiterate slave woman. She finds a newspaper cutting about a
woman who killed her children rather than have them return to slavery, and she lets fiction do the
work that history cannot do, which is tell that woman's story. So, it's a kind of recovery that the
new social history and the developments coming out of Foucault's work are making happen in
the discipline of history. Here it's happening in literature and having its effects in literature.
There's one other historian I want to mention, and that's Hayden White. Hayden White was a
historian who argued that our notions of how history should be written are deeply informed by
our understandings of how narratives work, so this is part of the overthrow of what you might
call teleological history, the idea that history has a trajectory, that it has a goal. And this would be
related to, history is about either the inevitable rise of certain kinds of humanist thought in the
West, or about the decline of civilizations over time. Both of those versions of history are
teleological. They suggest that history has a point. Hayden White read history like literature. He
argued that historical accounts were emplotted, that they were shaped in their argument by the
very expectations set up by literary works. So, we expect stories to go a certain way, and so that's
how history gets written. I think that Jones is somewhat more interested in this second version of
the new history, a history that's very aware of its plotting, and it's this question of the grand
narrative of history that's very much at issue. How do you know where history is tending? This is
certainly a question for Jones.
And I'm going to now just say one small thing, and I'm going to come back to this question, in
the course of this lecture, about postmodernism. So, one feature of what is called postmodernism
is this decline of the grand narrative. So, when Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote something
called The Postmodern Condition, he argued that we could have no overarching cultural
narratives, religious narratives, historical narratives, social narratives, moral narratives, in the
postmodern age, because in the postmodern age everything is fragmented. Fragmentation is the
hallmark of the postmodern for him. It has to do with the rise of global capitalism, and this is an
argument that is related to Fredric Jameson's argument about postmodernism, and Jameson and
Lyotard are parallel in their analysis. They give different value to this tradition--to this condition
(sorry). Lyotard celebrates it. It's a kind of freedom for him, the freedom from the grand
narrative. Jameson is much more skeptical about its qualities, and sees it largely as damaging to
persons. So, one question we want to ask is, if there are any grand narratives in Jones, are they
seen as consolatory? Do they provide any compensation for the sufferings of the present?
So, this is one question I want you to, sort of, hold in your mind. What is this novel's attitude
toward narrative as such, both on the small level and on the grand level? On the small level it's a
little more apparent. It's clear the novel values the tiny version of narrative. Does it value the
large version? So, with all those sort of abstract questions in mind, I want to turn to the novel and
look at how knowledge, especially knowledge of history, knowledge of the past, is generated.
And the first example I want to turn to is that of Moses telling Caldonia the story of Henry's
building the plantation. This is on page 209. So, this is after Henry's death, and Caldonia calls
Moses in, and as a way of comforting, Moses begins to tell this story.
Moses took his eyes from his lap and began to invent some early days when they were building
the house and there was not much on the land except what God had put there. Caldonia was at
the edge of the settee in her mourning dress. "Now, Master Henry always knowed what kind of
house he wanted to build, Mistress. I don't even think he knowed about you that particular time,
but he must have had some idea that you was out there somewhere waitin' in your own kind of
way, 'cause he set up about building a house that you would want. He built it up from nothin'. I
was there, but I wasn't there like he was there. He said to me that first day, he said, 'Moses we
gonna start with the kitchen. A wife needs a place to fix her meals for her family. Thas' where we

gonna start,' and he bent down and Mastah drove in that first nail, bam. That was a Monday,
Mistress, 'cause Mastah Henry didn't believe in startin' somethin' on a Sunday, God's day."
Caldonia, her hands clasped in her lap, leaned back and closed her eyes. The story about the first
nail came a little more than a month after Henry had been in his grave. It was gospel among
slaves that one of the quickest ways to hell was to tell lies about dead people, but Moses did not
think about that as he spoke of the first nail, did not think about the dead needing the truth to be
told about them. He did not think about it until that day Oden Peoples, the Cherokee patroller,
said to the men around him about Moses, "Heft him on up here. I'll take him in. He ain't gonna
bleed for long."
There are all kinds of cues in this little, tiny passage to the production of knowledge. So, first of
all, let me point out a literary resonance, and that's to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, which is the
story of Henry Sutpen, another Henry, and the way he built a plantation out of nothing. And
what's remarkable about Sutpen, his overarching and overwhelming characteristic, is that he had
a plan, a plan that reached all the way down through his heirs, and part of that plan was the
unblemished whiteness of the line he was establishing. So, this story about another Henry,
another Master Henry, pulling a plantation out of the wilderness with his bare hands, echoes
those literary stories that we have in our minds. Now, of course we aren't to believe that Moses
has read Absalom, Absalom. It's not that Moses is taking that story in particular, but just that for
Moses the story of a masterful creator is already in his vocabulary and for Jones that he wants to
have us think about stories like that. So, this is what it calls to mind on two levels. He
deliberately casts it, Moses does, as a godlike creation, having him start on a Monday as if it
were the first day of God's seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis.
Now, then you get warnings: "The quickest way to hell was to tell lies about dead people." That
knowledge suggests a whole body of oral tradition among the slaves, so it is folk wisdom; it is a
folk warning. What Moses does, then, is stand up against folk wisdom, and he takes on for
himself the power of a masterful creator. So, he does himself what he assigns to Henry. He
becomes a creator, here, in language. The warning from the collective wisdom stands at odds
with his individuality at that moment. It's at odds with his seizing that power for himself, and we
will see as the novel goes on the repercussions of his having done that for the slaves in the slave
quarters. It will have serious repercussions, some good, some bad, and here we're told that there
is something in the future for him, too, that is a repercussion, that involves blood and his
disabling. This kind of knowledge is that old, familiar friend: foreshadowing, of course.
So, this is yet another kind of knowledge that Jones puts in front of us. It's the proleptic
knowledge, the knowledge looking ahead to the future, that the author of a grand narrative is in
the sole position of giving. It's the prerogative of the maker to tell us what's coming next,
because it's only the maker who knows what the whole is looking like, what the whole will look
like, because it's the maker's intention that will determine everything that happens. And so,
there's yet this other layer of knowledge and of voice. There is a narrator in the mix here who is
not Moses, who is Jones, or the writer of this novel, whoever we want to imagine that to be-we'll call him Jones--who knows something that Moses doesn't. We are put in the position of
being on the same plane as that creator, so it puts Moses in the tragic position of not knowing his
fate. He's a little like Oedipus in this way, that the gods all know what the facts are about his life,
and the life of the world, but he doesn't. He blunders along. There is that ironic distance between
the knowledge of the audience and the knowledge of the character in the dramatic situation, so
Moses is in that position here.
Now, what is exactly he lying about? Well, we get other versions of Henry's beginning. On 122,
we see a slightly different story, and I'm not going to read too much out of here. But if you turn
there, you'll recall that early in the building of the plantation, Moses and Henry are tussling in the

dirt, when William Robbins rides up. And Robbins makes a point of scolding Henry for thinking
that he is somehow not different from his slave, and he advises him that he must make that a
bright and enduring line between them. So, this plantation is founded on the white man's policing
the divide between master and slave, even after his slave, Henry, has bought his freedom. So, it's
perpetuated between Robbins and Henry, that seigniorial power, and Henry acquiesces and
disciplines Moses in an arbitrary way. Moses, when he comes--when Henry comes--back from
speaking with William Robbins, wants to continue working. Moses loves to work. He loves the
completion of work. He is a very fine builder. We learn in the scene that he can build in the dark
just by feel and by the sense of the place of things. And so, Moses is told not to work. Henry
slaps him, and Moses then keeps on working anyway after Henry leaves. So, in that story, Moses
is the maker, not so much Henry. And, if there is an origin, before that scene of Moses building
in the dark, it's a scene of the two of them tussling on the ground. So, William Robbins is right.
There is a blurring of the distinction between master and slave. It's that, and it's sundering, that is
the origin of the plantation. And we're told also in this chapter that he hadn't even thought--he,
Henry--hadn't even thought about Caldonia yet. Equally, we learn, in passing, on page 59, that
very soon before that scene of him and Moses that Henry was already dreaming of his plantation.
This is at the very bottom of the page:
Moses made to go down the lane of cabins, eight on one side of the lane and eight on the
otherside, laid out just the way Henry Townsend had seen them in a dream when he was twentyone years old and without a slave to his name.
It's not a kitchen for a future wife, but a line of slave cabins for his future slaves that Henry has
in mind. That's the origin that Moses is lying about, so there are two layers of lies here. One is
the lie about the plantation being built on a vision of slavery, and two is the lie on its being built
by Henry alone. So, Moses, in telling his story, asserting his authority to tell history, effaces
himself from that history, and also effaces the line of difference between slave and not slave. He
doesn't say it was built on that distinction, and that serves his purposes, of course, because his
stories to Caldonia will have as their final dream the effacement of the line between him and
Caldonia. His dream is that she will see him as the next Mr. Townsend, and we'll see by the end
of the novel what happens to that dream.
So, how do you know about the past? Caldonia can only know about that past through Moses,
and we've seen that it's an incredibly complex view backward, with all these layerings. And once
again we're asked to stand in the position of knowing more, even, than Moses does. We know
about Henry's dream of the line of slave cabins. Moses doesn't know that piece, so there is that
difference cropping up. On page 75, you have another version of telling those stories.
When Augustus and Mildred, Henry's parents, lay down and held each other after Henry's death,
one of them started talking--they would not remember which one it was--all about Henry from
his birth to his death, starting a weeks-long project of recalling all that they could about their son.
If they had known how to read and write, they could have put it all in a book of two thousand
pages.
This is a very different kind of telling. If there is a literary model here, it's that of Odysseus and
Penelope. I don't know if any of you have read The Odyssey. There's this beautiful scene, at the
end, when Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, and he and Penelope stay up all night telling each
other stories; they talk all night. And so that's the vision you have here. It's a private exchange of
history, and we're not told all the things that occur in their conversation. That is a kind of
storytelling that is compensation for loss. It's history as compensation, and this is much more in
the realm of what Toni Morrison is doing in her fiction, fiction as filling in the gaps of loss as
best fiction can. Now there's no fantasy about how complete that could ever be, but there is the

effort and the effort honors what's been lost, and here Augustus and Mildred honor their
ambivalent love for their son. They completely disagree with what he has done in his life, and
yet they honor that loss telling stories to one another and they blend together as people, as
separate people, in that act.
On 239, we can see yet a third version of how history and the world make sense, and this is when
Counsel Skiffington rides into Texas after his plantation burns down. How do you know
anything? Well, as he meets the sort of motley crews of people that he meets on the road, he
continually thinks back to the burned library at his plantation. (And this is in the middle of the
page.)
He had seen a dark old man driving the wagon, not really a Negro, not really from any race that
was recorded in any of the books in his destroyed library. [And then a little further down] When
he turned from the wagon with the pregnant women, a boy smiling with perfect teeth was facing
him. He knew the origins of this one from another of the destroyed books, someone from the
Orient.
Counsel brings with him from the destroyed library the categories of knowledge that he hopes
will make the world make sense. It fails him, often, as in the brown man he can't quite categorize
from the books. It gives him satisfactions on those occasions when its categories do apply. So,
Counsel is a model for that person who takes the discursive knowledge of his culture and tries to
fit the world he encounters into it, and he's troubled when it doesn't work. So, this is a mode of
knowledge that fits quite nicely with what I've been telling you, in a sort of simplified way, about
Foucault's understanding of how history works. And so, here, you have a version of that right in
the character of Counsel.
So, some of the problems that these scenes point up are: how can the knower know anything,
when the knower himself or herself is a fragmented person? And, I think, the fragmenting of
knowledge across layers--what do we know, what does Moses know, what does Caldonia know,
what does the narrator seem to know--that fragmentation makes it impossible to imagine a
subjectivity for any of these characters that can truly encompass a stable world view. So, that
fragmentation of self is another layer of the problem of knowledge. How can you know anything,
when you're not a stable knower yourself?
And I just want to look back to some of the other readings on our syllabus, to think about how
these problems have been addressed. So, how do you know about the past in Robinson, for
Marilynne Robinson? For her, writing is the transcription of consciousness, of human
consciousness. There is an endless present to her work and when she talks about writers from the
nineteenth century for example--Hawthorne, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau--she calls them aunts
and uncles. I think it's very telling. It's as if they were part of her family, part of her present, and I
think that's indicative of how she thinks of writing and its access to the past. Because writing is
continuous with consciousness, you can simply know the past by reading it. And if you read her
essays on history, that's fully borne out in the assumptions that she makes.
If you think about Cormac McCarthy, how can you know the past? Well, his trans-historical
vision suggests that to know the past is simply to know human nature, or to know human nature
is to know the past. So, remember those epigraphs about the ancient evidence of scalping. It
suggests that the human tendency towards violence has no origin, has no end. It's a different kind
of eternal present from Robinson's, and yet it is still one that gives him a seamless access to the
past, so he can make modern U.S.-Mexico border look very much like, for example, the U.S.Mexico border in the 1840s (and this is later in his Border Trilogy when you see the nuclear tests

in this same landscape that we've seen all the action of Blood Meridian). So, he makes those two
look very similar in that landscape.
Philip Roth: how do you know the past? Well, this is a major theme of my lecture on Wednesday
of last week. How does Nathan know any of Coleman's past? He has to rely on other narrators.
We have to rely on him. I was questioning his credibility as a narrator, as someone who could tell
us about the past, so there's that level of problem raised in that novel. At the same time, like
McCarthy, he has a trans-historical understanding of what access to the past would be, through
the trans-historical theme of desire. So, desire is the same now as it was in Hawthorne's time.
The desire to purify the American libido in the Monica Lewinsky trial is not different, for Roth,
from the spasm of purification that Hawthorne writes about in The Scarlet Letter. So, that is a
different vision of what it means to be trans-historical, and I think it allows for Roth that fearless
setting of the contemporary. He doesn't look to a historical setting that's distant from himself. He
sees the present as history. And, if you believe in the trans-historical, you can make that move,
'cause you don't need the distance from history to get objective purchase on it. It's all, sort of,
part of the same story.
And then, if you think about The Woman Warrior: how do you get a usable past out of the layers
and layers of secrecy, partial narration, fragmentation that you get from parents telling you
stories about your past and about their past? Well, you have to stitch it together. So, her argument
is that the past is what you make it usable for; the past becomes its use for you. She builds a self
out of that past. In the face of these difficulties, empathy and sentiment come to be much more
powerful, and I think the writers in this part of the syllabus, this last part of the syllabus, depend
a lot on sentiment, and because of that they look back to the nineteenth century. Edward P. Jones
is very busy using the tools of the nineteenth-century narrative. The omniscient narrator is very
much characteristic of nineteenth-century novels. So, if you read Harriet Beecher Stowe for
example, if any of you have taken English 127a and have read that novel, you'll remember all the
very broad addresses to the reader about what's going on. There is that omniscient sense that the
narrator has all the pieces under her control. Jones looks back to that tradition and borrows from
it, also, fearlessly. This has been, since modernism, quite a less distinguished mode of narration.
So he's trading modernist limitation of knowledge. If any of you have read Henry James, my
favorite example is this novel called What Maisie Knew, which is told in free indirect discourse
through the consciousness of a child, Maisie, who is the child of an aristocratic family, the
parents of whom are always having extramarital affairs. It's a very confusing family to be living
in, for this young girl, and the narrative is extremely confusing. Well, Jones will have nothing to
do with that kind of partiality, that kind of limit on perception, so he has left behind those
modernist experiments with transcribing the very limits of human consciousness, and he is up in
the God consciousness of the nineteenth century. Is that God consciousness any consolation?
Well, if we look at page 51, this is just one tiny example. They're all over the place. This is one
of those tiny interpolated stories about the woman who opens the box of walking sticks and Rita
is hiding inside. She's escaped from Robbins' plantation. So this is her little story, the bottom
paragraph.
Mary O'Donnell Conlon would never live comfortably in America. [She comes over from
Ireland.] Long before the HMS Thames had even seen the American shore, America, the land of
promise and hope, had reached out across the sea and taken her husband, a man who had taken
her heart and kept it, and America had taken her baby, two innocent beings in the vastness of a
world with all kinds of things that could have been taken first. She held nothing against God.
God was simply being God. But she could not forgive America, and saw it as the cause of all her
misery.

So, God is seen, in this little, tiny snippet, to be totally arbitrary and I think that's the sense you
get in most of these passages about the divine, that God allows violent actions to occur without
seeming cause, without reason, and it's up to the human beings to try to stitch stories together
that can make sense of them. And Mary, in this passage, chooses to be angry at America, instead
chooses America as the story that will unify these deaths even in a negative way. It doesn't offer
consolation, exactly, but at least it offers a target for her anger.
And, now I just want to see on 176, to look at this with you. In addition to these tiny thematic
visits to some of these questions throughout the novel, the question of stitching together--can you
stitch together the events of the world according to some larger consciousness?--this becomes a
question with formal implications. This is in the middle of 176. If you remember, this is about
the trial of Jean Broussard, who has killed his partner. He is the original person who brought
Moses into Manchester County, and this is what we learn. We've just--at the top of page 176-heard about what happened to Broussard's family in France.
If Alm Jorgensen, [this is the partner] the murdered man, had any heirs, no one knew about them.
[Now listen as we go on.] The records of the Jean Broussard trial, along with most of the judicial
records of nineteenth-century Manchester County, were destroyed in a 1912 fire that killed ten
people, including the Negro caretaker of the building where the records were kept, and five dogs
and two horses. The Broussard trial took one day, actually part of a day, the trial itself all that
morning and the jury deliberations a portion of the summer afternoon. One of the jurors was a
man who had studied the law at the College of William and Mary where his father and
grandfather had gone. When that man, Arthur Brindle, returned from college
Okay, and I'm not going to go into Brindle's story quite yet. Notice how, sentence by sentence,
we get from the erasure of the past--there are no records for a whole century because of this
fire--to historical detail that makes us ask where the details come from. "Destroyed in a 1912 fire
that killed ten people, including the Negro caretaker of the building." It gets more and more
specific: where the records were kept, "and five dogs and two horses," animals who you'd think,
maybe, wouldn't be part of the public record, their loss wouldn't necessarily be recorded. We're
told, even, in the absence of the trial papers, that it took one day, and then it gets even more
specific, actually part of the day, and more specific still, which part of it was in the morning, the
regular trial, jury deliberation in the afternoon. It was a summer afternoon. We know more and
more and more, as we go from sentence to sentence. How do we know all that? How does this
narrator know all that? Where does this knowledge come from?
The knowledge becomes more and more intimate as this passage goes on, as we learn about
Arthur Brindle, his insomnia, the way he liked to talk to his wife as a mode of relaxing himself
before trying to sleep, and then we get his reflection, finally, on the trial and why Broussard was
convicted, and this is on 177. He says it was not the insistence on his American citizenship that
was the problem; it wasn't the fact that his partner wasn't an American citizen that was the
problem; it was the accent. The accent gave him "the stench of a dissembler." You want to know
where that quotation comes from. It feels like we're hearing Broussard's voice. Who is there with
them in bed to tell us this?
Everything Broussard said came out warped because of the accent, even when he spoke his own
name. The jurors, the merchant told his wife, would have been able to accept why the partner
was killed if Broussard had sat on the stand and told his whole story without an accent.
Well, what's interesting here is that Jones and Brindle do tell the story without an accent. Brindle
is convinced of the man's--not innocence--but the way he should not be convicted, and yet he
votes with the others to convict him. He tells the wife this. We hear the case without accent, but

when we do hear the accent it's very telling where we hear it. If you look back on 171, and sort
of flip through this, when we feel most Broussard's alienness of voice, it's when he calls slaves
humans. This is on 171. "See, see, Monsieur Bill," [he's talking to Robbins] "finest humans, good
humans, the finer of the slaves," Broussard said, "but, Monsieur Bill, they are finer human
beings," and so on.
It's in those moments that he speaks something closest to the truth, right, that we can hear him
speaking to us the truth of slavery, and to his interlocutors the truth of slavery. It's the accent that
actually reveals the truth. So, when we hear the accent, even though we're hearing it through the
narrator that doesn't speak with an accent, we hear the critique of slavery shining through that the
people in the situation living there and listening to his accent cannot hear, but why? Remember
that little sentence I read at the beginning. "If Alm Jorgensen, the murdered man, had any heirs
no one knew about them." What an odd caveat. If this narrator knows all this, why doesn't he
know about Jorgensen's heirs, his family? So, what accounts for the lapses in knowledge? How
do we know where this knower is situated? So, I'm going to stop there, but before you pack up,
what I'd like you to think about for next time is what it means to make something so that it exists,
and think about that in relation to the novel. If knowledge is this complicated to produce, what is
the status of those things that are made with care and intention, and made as whole objects? So
think about the art forms, the different art forms in the novel, and think about those individual
small stories, and the whole novel itself.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 23 Transcript
April 16, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: My first lecture on The Known World focused on the question of
knowledge and the problems of knowledge that the text raises for us throughout, both at the
formal level and at the thematic level. So, I ended up with a reading of the account of the
Broussard trial and how more and more detailed knowledge comes to us through the voice of the
narrator, and we're really left with that question: where does that knowledge come from? Now, I
suggested in the first lecture that my second lecture was going to be about an equally abstract
subject, and that is: how can anything exist in the world? I'm going to get to that about in the
middle of the lecture, beginning from this question, though, where we ended last time, about the
Broussard trial and the problem of knowledge, where knowledge comes from. If we look a little
bit earlier in the passage about the Broussard trial on 171, 172, you find what I think is quite a
striking model for the very problem of this novel as a whole. And this is when Skiffington is
trying to write an account of Broussard's crime, and here it is on the bottom of 171. He's having
trouble filling out this form.
Skiffington picked up the list of questions. Now he would have to start all over again. Nature of
the alleged crime. Are there witnesses to the alleged crime? Can such witnesses be believed?
So, the problem of evidence and the problem of whether witnesses are to be trusted, the problem
of enumerating a crime, these are all problems that the novel as a whole takes up for the crime of
slavery. So, we can think of the novel itself as a version of Skiffington's report. Now, it's
important that Skiffington has such a problem writing it. The very difficulty of writing is
thematized over and over and over again, not just in moments like this where it's actually talking
about writing, but, I'm going to argue, in a number of ways that are much more subtle. And to

show you one of them, I want to look on 192 with you. This is the scene where Stamford, the
slave, is trying to remember the names of his parents, and this is how he does it. This is the
middle of 192.
He closed his eyes and took his parents in his hands and put them all about the plantation where
he had last seen them, his mother in his left hand and his father in his right hand. But that did not
feel right, and so he put his father in his left hand and his mother in his right hand, and that felt
better. He set them outside the smokehouse, which had a hole in the roof in the back. "Hants
come down that hole and take you to the devil," an older boy had once told him. Stamford was
five, and it had not been long since his parents had been sold away.
And you get more of the story, and he finally comes to remember the parents' names, his parents'
names. Why does he take them in these specific hands, his father in his right hand and his mother
in his left; "that did not feel right so he put his father in his left and his mother in the right"? I
would argue that this is for two reasons: a figure of Jones' own writing, first of all in the obvious
sense that it's an act of recovery, of recovering a past that needs to be imagined, or somehow
entered into, not through rational thought, but through an imaginative act. So, that's one reason
that Stamford in this moment is a double of Jones. But the other reason is this "handedness"
that's noted.
I'm going to tell you, throughout the lecture, a few things about Jones' life and his work outside
of this novel, and so here's the first piece of that story. Edward P. Jones was the son of a very
poor single mother living in D.C. He had a younger brother who was mentally disabled who had
to be given away to an institution because the mother could not support him. Jones' mother was
illiterate. So, here is someone writing this novel, and his background is an illiterate mother. This
matters enormously to him. He, in his first story collection, has a story called (I think it's called)
"First Day," where he tells the story of a young girl going off to school for the first time, holding
the hand of her illiterate mother. Jones reveres his mother. When he talks about her, it's with
incredible reverence and love. Jones sees his mother very much as a source of his writing. So,
here's that first tension in the act of writing, that here is a writer who takes as his source, spiritual
source, an illiterate woman. That's why the mother has to go in his right hand in this scene.
Now, of course, not everybody writes with their right hand, but I think no matter whether Jones
is right or left handed--and I thank Andy Heisel for pointing out, our wonderful TA Andy Heisel,
for pointing out that in the photograph of Jones he is wearing his watch on his left hand, and so
this would suggest that he is, perhaps, right handed. But even if we didn't want to rely--Oh, Neil,
you're going to give me trouble--even if you did not want to rely on that little piece of evidence,
we can say that in the cultural vocabulary of handedness the dominant hand is the right hand for
writing. So, I would say that whenever you see right-handedness or left-to-right movement,
Jones is meditating on and figuring the act of writing, and I'm going to show you some more
examples 'cause it's quite striking. It's subtle and strange, but quite striking. So, the mother has to
go in the right hand because she is the source of inspiration.
The father--Jones' father--was very distant. He only met him when he was much older, and he
was not really a part of Jones' life at all. It really revolved around his mother. So, if writing is
undermined by the shadow of illiteracy for Jones, it's undermined in other ways, too, and I want
to look at one of those stranger episodes. This is on 142, 143. This is the story of how Henry
began to court Caldonia at Fern Elston's dinner table, and this is a very detailed scene. This is in
the middle of 142. He's telling Caldonia that she needs to look up when she rides her horse.
He took the pepper shaker in his right hand, extended his arm before him, and moved the arm
from right to left. Everyone at the table was now watching him. The hand with the shaker moved

smoothly, gracefully, from the right to the left. "That's how everybody else rides," Henry said,
"me and everybody else." Henry put the pepper shaker in his left hand, tipped it, and moved his
arm less gracefully from the left to the right. As it moved pepper poured out of the shaker onto
Fern's white tablecloth. He said, "I'm sorry to say this, but that's how you ride." Henry did this
with the shaker several times. Going from right to left, the pepper shaker was upright, but going
from left to right the pepper flowed down. Fern thought there was something rather sad about the
pepper falling and it was all the sadder because it really didn't have to be that way. She said to
Anderson, the pamphleteer from Canada, this was his clumsy way of telling Caldonia she was
losing something by not looking up.
How odd, that insistence on the movement left to right, right to left. It figures Henry's mixed-up
relation to both language and the act of creation. It's mixed up, because when he is moving in the
direction that text is read and written, left to right, he's using his left hand, and the correlative of
that left handedness of his relation to language is in the dialect. He doesn't speak correctly in
Fern Elston's house no matter how hard she tries to teach him. So, he is clumsy, not only in
spilling pepper on the table, but also in not being able to speak proper English. But the other
thing about that movement is that when it goes left to right pepper spills on the table. This is an
image of ink flowing out of a pen--it is black on the white tablecloth--and it's an image for
language in jeopardy because of course it's dust; it's powder; it will never cohere; it's the sign of
his uncouth table manners. So, it's never going to be a redemptive medium for him, and it's
represented by this pepper that then he can scrape into a little pile.
This is the fragmentation of language in its very literal sense. There are other examples of this,
on 189 when you get the first account of the frozen dog that Calvin is so interested in, in the
photograph from New York. Once again, direction is carefully noted.
In the front yard, alone, was a dog looking off to the right. The dog was standing, its tail sticking
straight out as if ready to go at the first word from someone on the porch. [And I'm going to skip
down.] He had a very tiny hope that when he got to New York he might be able to find the house
and those people and that dog and learn what had transfixed him. There was a whole world off to
the right that the photograph had not captured.
"Off to the right" is the direction of flowing narrative, a world, a possible world that his
imagination is drawn to, and it's a visual image of the imagination and its seduction. But because
of this obsessive direction noting, I would read it as a textual imagination, that there's a narrative
off to the right. And you can see that Jones' novel works this way. There is always a narrative
proximate to wherever you are, a little narrative that arises from the next character who shows up
on the road, and you'll get that narrative. So, this is just one of those that doesn't quite get
articulated, but Calvin can imagine that it's there; he can see, as if he can see the form of the
novel that Jones is writing.
And then there are just even tinier ones. On 162, this is John Skiffington sitting and reading the
Bible after visiting Clara's house. "Skiffington looked up and followed a male cardinal as it flew
from the left to right and settled in one of the peach trees." They're all over the place once you
start noticing them, so I think this is why: that it's a constant meditation among the multiplying
versions of meditations on the composition of this novel within the novel. So, we'll get to some
others. The problem is that the written word is always threatened.
So, if writing has all this static that surrounds it, it also has some more direct and aggressive
enemies, and on 375 you see one version of that. This is the account of Barnum Kinsey's grave
marker that his son makes after they leave Manchester County and he dies. This is at the bottom
of 374.

Matthew stayed up all the night before he was buried--[this is Kinsey's son] putting his father's
history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father's name on the first line, and on the next
he put the years of the father's coming and going, then all of the things he knew his father had
been. [And it then lists this whole set of things.] The boy filled up the whole piece of wood, and
at the end of the last line he put a period. His father's grave would remain, but the wooden
marker would not last out the year.
Text is simply fragile, as a material object, so that's what this scene tells us, in a poignant way.
But, of course, the most poignant example of this is when Augustus's free papers are eaten by
Travis. So, the real terror of the written word comes in that scene. Now the terror is of course
that it's an exercise of power--arbitrary, violent. It will end in Augustus' death back in slavery.
There are lots of ways of imagining what the terror is. I'm going to go into some of them, but this
is the sign of it, that even though Augustus has memorized every word of his free papers-remember, we're told that he has them read to him every day for a month. He's illiterate. He has
them read to him every day for a month until he has them totally memorized after he gets his
freedom--even though those words will exist forever in Augustus' mind, his freedom is nowhere,
once the written word is gone.
So, this is my question: How can something exist in the world? Here, the ultimate thing to which
that question applies is freedom. How can freedom exist? What makes freedom exist? Well, in
the law, those free papers make freedom exist for Augustus, but the law cannot guarantee that
freedom exists when the physical artifact of the text is gone. That's how weak writing is. It seems
to be everything. This is something that Mildred understood quite early on. On 113, when she
and Augustus are worried about Henry hanging out with Robbins, she says, in suggesting that it's
okay to let Henry go about with William Robbins, "'Them free papers he carry with him all over
the place don't carry enough freedom,' she said to her husband, 'with slavery behind him.'" She
wanted her son to go about and see what had always been denied him, so she wants the world to
be a big place for him. She sees that freedom is something much more than those papers, but the
problem is that freedom cannot be without them, and that once they're gone, it is gone too.
So, that is one of the threats that is associated with writing, but there are more of them. On 311
and 312, one danger is that, in the effort to write justice in law, it's simply ineffective. So, here is
the story we get of Skiffington trying to write up this crime, the crime of selling Augustus, a free
man, back into slavery. This is on 312. He's been in contact with a man named Sanderson in, I
think he's in Georgia.
He got a letter from Sanderson three days after that. The crime had indeed been committed, he
wrote, and Sanderson included material he had copied from books saying so.
So, Skiffington wasn't sure whether it was really a crime. Somehow he began to get confused,
and you can see that confusion--I won't read it--on the prior page, on 311 in the middle of the
page. So, when Skiffington once again starts writing up the crime, he becomes confused. Did he
really have a crime to describe? He gets confirmation that he does.
But Skiffington heard from Richmond [yes, it's a letter from Richmond] again four days later, in
handwriting he did not recognize. Graciela Sanderson let him know that her husband, Harry, was
dead and that she was now charged with keeping up his correspondence. He read the eight-page
letter twice, but he found nothing in it about what Virginia was doing about the crime of selling
free Negroes. The widow told him about her husband, how she had met him when he vacationed
in Italy, how he had wooed her, brought her to America after their wedding and made her a
happy woman in Richmond, " where the governor is in residence." [And then she closes with
comments about the weather.]

So, the law's effort to deliver justice through the writing of a crime, the documenting of a crime,
is displaced by a woman's effort to recover her lost husband by telling that story. So, there are
competing claims on language in this scene: the widow's and Skiffington's, and more distantly
Augustus' and Mildred's. None of these claims are adjudicated in any kind of way that puts one
above the other, and Skiffington's weakness, of course, is that he will never seek to right that
balance. He resigns himself to the weakness of writing.
More chillingly, and I think more complicatingly, writing also carries the risk of reinstating the
master-slave relationship, and I think it does this by direct reference back to Jones himself. If you
read slowly through the scene of Augustus being sold back into slavery, it's quite striking the way
contingency or happenstance plays a part in the scene. So, after Travis has eaten Augustus'
papers--this is at the very bottom of 212--"a wagon twice as large as Augustus' came up to the
four men. Driving it was a large black man, and beside him a much smaller white man." And
Travis teases Darcy, the slave trader, about how he's never known the time in his life, but
suddenly here he is at exactly the right time. Then he later says--as he's formulating the idea of
selling Augustus to Darcy, he says--"God works in mysterious ways. This ain't exactly what I had
in mind when I stopped this nigger but this here will do just the same." Who made that wagon
appear? Why does that wagon appear? Jones made that wagon appear. What we're given is not a
fiction about Travis intending to sell Augustus back into slavery, but what we're given instead is
a surprise on the road. Who makes that surprise appear? Only one person, the person in charge of
making the narrative.
So, the problem with writing is not just that it's shadowed by the fact of illiteracy. It's not just
that it's vulnerable to physical decay. It's not just that it's weak and it can't make anything exist in
law. It's not just that it's demanded by multiple people for different purposes that come to cancel
each other out. It's that by writing, by taking on that quality of masterfulness, you begin to be
complicit in the very crime that you're describing. The imagery of God looking down on his
creation is everywhere in this novel, and it's applied to all kinds of characters, including Henry,
who thinks that he will look down on his slaves the way God looks down on his creation from
heaven. That position of mastery and that geographic remove of being above your subject is
associated with the slave-master, but it's associated very much with Jones. And I'll come back to
this in a minute when I talk about the tapestry, because of course the tapestry at the end of the
novel--Alice's tapestry--is the most dramatic figure for the whole novel. There are lots of figures
for the novel, including the map of the "known world," but foremost that tapestry at the end
which mimics the novel in every way. Even that has the perspective of little figures looking up,
so it even puts Alice in that masterful position, or indeed anyone who looks upon that tapestry.
So, if writing is so weak, if it entails such terror, are we given any alternative for creative
durability? And I think we are, in the plastic arts. Now, I'm sure you've noticed how much
carving goes on in the book, not just because Augustus is a woodworker, but because Elias
carves for Celeste; that's his first act of love. And, if you read Jones' stories, this is rampant in his
stories. He has carvers everywhere and various kinds of workers in plastic arts. Alice is another
example working in textiles, clay, paint, some amalgamation of sculpture and painting. On 279
the two arts, the verbal art and woodworking, are put in competition with one another, or in
juxtaposition with one another, and I think you see who has the upper hand here. This is an
account of Skiffington's bookcase, which Augustus made.
In Winifred and John Skiffington's parlor there was a wondrous-looking bookcase, lovely oak, a
lion's growling face at each edge of the top ends, three shelves, a secondhand item made by
Augustus Townsend not long after Augustus bought his freedom. He had first thought he would
keep it for himself and the family he would buy out of slavery, though none of them could read,
then. He and Mildred would never learn to read. [There is that shadow of illiteracy. Our attention

is called to it the minute the books are mentioned.] He would keep it as a kind of symbol for his
determination to get them, but then he realized that what he could get for the bookcase would
bring his wife and child closer to him so he put a price on it, fifteen dollars. It had been
originally sold to a man of two slaves who lost his sight, [another risk to reading: you can go
blind] and so, as he told Skiffington, lost his hunger and thirst for books. Skiffington bought it
for five dollars.
Augustus' art is durable. It can be passed from person to person, and it maintains its figurative
power. It's important that all of his work is figurative. It suggests narrative, and so it's aligned
with Jones' art, in that way, but it is not subject to the vulnerability of text, and here in this
bookcase you see the vulnerability of text set right next to the wondrous durability of the
bookcase. There are other examples. When Rita is discovered in the box of walking sticks, when
she is sent in a box out of slavery to New York, she hands the boy who is looking down at her the
walking stick with Adam and Eve and all their generations. It's as if in that act Rita's freedom is
instantiated, that she and all her descendants emerge into this new world, and that that is a kind
of gift to the family that takes them in, in the North. So, it has a very evocative narrative power
that doesn't depend on people's being able to read it, and we're told in that scene that the boy
receives it as if this is what he had been waiting for all along, suggests a perfect receptivity, no
going blind here, perfect receptivity. There is also on 219 one of Augustus' chairs that I think is
worth looking at. This is when Travis is reflecting on, or we are being told about, how Travis
first came to know Augustus.
He had first come to know Augustus Townsend many years ago through a chair Augustus had
made for a white man in the town of Manchester. The man weighed more than four hundred
pounds. [And then I'm skipping down.] In the man's parlor was Augustus' chair, plain, not even
painted, but smooth to the touch, and when the man sat in it the chair did not complain, not one
squeak. It just held up and did its job, waiting for the man to put on another three hundred
pounds. Travis examined the chair, looked all about it trying to discover its secret. The chair gave
nothing. It was a very good chair. It was a chair worth stealing.
The chair gave nothing. Well, it gave nothing in terms of knowledge to Travis. It would not give
up its secret of durability, and that's, in a way, what makes it durable, that it can hide the essence
of itself, keep it to itself. It takes the weight without one squeak. Its very silence is what marks
its invulnerability. It's also what enrages a man like Travis.
So, the novel sets up a competing set of art forms, carving foremost among them, against the art
form of language. The tapestry at the end answers one of our questions from the first lecture,
which is who knows the known world, known by whom? What we come to find out is that Alice,
although she seemed insane, is the one who knows Manchester County. She has walked all over
it, in the freedom carved out by her insanity. One thing that's interesting about Alice is that she-despite her insanity, seeming insanity--is the one most in control of her language. She is the most
successful storyteller in this novel. So, if you think of other alternatives, Moses--He tells
Caldonia stories that finally fail to persuade her imagination that any slave she owns could be
free. We're told explicitly, as Calvin tries to persuade her at the end of the novel, that it's her
failure of imagination that keeps her from emancipating her slaves after Henry's death. Despite
all of Moses' stories, she still cannot see him, or anyone else, as a free person.
So, Moses' storytelling is a complete failure in this way, but Alice's storytelling about the mule
that kicked her in the head, we find that out early in the novel that the story about her--that's why
she is said to be crazy we're told--so vivid, so sad, that everybody believed it. The very control
she has over her crazy chants is what persuades the whole world around her that she is not worth
bothering with, as she wanders around the roads with impunity. It also gives her occasion to

mock the master, the structure of slavery, the patrollers, and she can do it with impunity, as well.
So, she has a freedom of mind as well as a freedom of movement that nobody else in the novel
has who is a slave. So, she is doubly marked as an artist in language and in the plastic arts, but
she is--importantly, I think--not a writer.
You'll note, if you look at 384, 385, where the tapestry is described, there is still some whiff of
that fragility. And I see that in the admonition that is hung next to the tapestry and that Priscilla
repeats when Calvin reaches out to touch it. She says, "Please do not touch." There is that sense
that this is still something that needs to be protected. Now, why the terror? Why the fragility?
Well, I think this has a lot to do with how this novel was composed. Edward P. Jones wrote his
first book of short stories in the 1990s, in the early '90s. I can't remember the date exactly. And it
was very successful, but not successful enough to support him, so he worked as an editor at a
journal called Tax Notes. It was a journal of tax law, scintillating. Jones was working there, and
I'm going to tell you a story, now, that he tells in some of his interviews, but I heard first from his
agent, a guy named Eric Simonoff, who I had up to visit one of my classes when we were
studying this novel. Eric says that he heard from Edward that Edward had this idea for a novel
about a black slave owner but he said, "Don't tell anyone. This is a stealable idea." So Eric, when
he went down to D.C., would occasionally stop in over the years and see Edward and he'd say,
"Well, how's the novel going?" Didn't seem to be much on paper, and time passed, ten years or
so, and Eric thought, "I'm not sure if this novel's ever going to get written." In the meantime
Jones had amassed about a hundred and twenty five books of history of the period that he is
working in, in the novel, because he felt that in order to write a novel like this he really needed to
master that history.
It was very intimidating to him, though, so that--combined with his Tax Notes job--he had about
twelve pages written. So, he went on vacation after a long time. He hadn't had a vacation. He had
about a six-week vacation, and he finally got a start, and one of the ways that he got himself to
start was he decided that he was going to forget about the history; he was going to make it all up.
So, all the historical sources-- if you read the back of the book you will know this--all the
historical sources are fictional, here. The census reports, every detail is fictional, so that was his
first move. Then he got laid off from Tax Notes right after this vacation. Edward P. Jones then
wrote this novel in three months, and Eric says that it became clear to him over the years that
Jones had in fact memorized entire chapters of what became this novel. It was all in his head, all
the words in their order, and so when he had the time and when he freed himself from the
obligation to history, out it came.
I think this says a lot about the images of writing that you see all over the novel. Imagine the
kind of terror that you would feel, knowing that you had all this in your mind and knowing also
that it didn't yet exist on paper, that you had only twelve pages. Maybe if you're writing papers
now, you feel this terror of the blank page. It's possible. That's a real terror for a writer. Combine
that with the shadow of illiteracy, the feeling of possible betrayal, for a son to be a writer when
his beloved mother had no access to the written word. This is a very vexed, complex
psychological relationship that I would suggest--my guess is--that has a lot to do with how he
imagines the relative fragility and the relative power of fiction versus these other arts. So, Jones
models his narrative on those other arts in an effort to solve the problems that are presented by
the terror of the written word's fragility, its very uneasy relation to existence. Does a novel exist?
Does it not? And I think there is, actually, even a figure for Jones in a particular character, one of
these tiny characters, on 343. This is a young man with a wonderfully complicated mind.
Wilson had learned a great deal at that university, and his mind would have contained even more,
but well in to his second year the cadavers began to talk to Wilson and what they said made far
more sense than what his professors were saying. The professors, being gods, did not like to

share their heaven with anyone dead or alive, and they sent the young man home in the middle of
his second year.
Here you see a figure for someone whose imagination is so powerful that it makes the dead talk,
and think back again to the image of Stamford finding--by placing the image of his parents all
over the mansion, all over the plantation--finding their names. That's a little like talking to
cadavers. They are dead, those parents. It verges on insanity. This is another problem with the
mode of composition, that a mind this powerfully populated by an alternate reality comes to look
insane, and I think this is another reason why Alice is what she is as a character. If she is going to
be one of the major doubles for Jones, her insanity is part of that picture. We can think of it as a
willed insanity, but it has the residue of doubt about it. Maybe she really is insane to some
degree. Is there a sharp line between an imagination that can produce a narrative so thoroughly
populated as this one and a mind that sees cadavers talking to you?
Another thing that is remarkable about Jones' work--and this relates back to what I was saying
about postmodernism and grand narrative last time--Jones' work is seemingly very fragmented.
There are lots and lots of narratives, but they don't all come together in one narrative, so it seems
fragmented, and when you start to read it, it looks disorienting. If you read his stories, you will
see that all of the stories are interconnected back to the novel, to Jones' life. So, for instance
in All Aunt Hagar's Children, his most recent story collection, and I think it came out in 2007,
there is a woman who has a walking stick that is clearly made by Augustus, in the twentieth
century. What I was saying about the durability of the plastic arts is imagined in that quality of
his fiction. These objects of carving turn up throughout his stories. Also, people are related to
each other in separate stories. They're related to people in this novel. The title of this novel
appears in a story called "Tapestry" in All Aunt Hagar's Children. He is obsessive about putting
the locations of all the places that he lived in D.C. into his stories perfectly accurately. When an
editor at The New Yorker tried to get him to change one of these descriptions and the address, in
one of the stories that he submitted for the magazine, he was very resistant. He finally changed it
for The New Yorker, but when it went into the story collection it went back, because he wanted it
to be absolutely accurate to what it was like when he lived there, what it actually looks like on
that corner in D.C.
What I think Jones is doing, in the largest version of his project, is actually one of the most widereaching and ambitious unifying efforts that I know of in contemporary fiction. So, this is not
about the fragmentation of grand narrative. It's about the enormous, large-scale accumulation of
wholeness. He is piecing a world together, bit by bit by bit, as he adds to his literary oeuvre. So,
this is a vision of unity that goes way beyond generic boundaries. Is it a short story? Is it a novel?
This is something more like an opus that Jones is building, and, more importantly, it's something
that lives in his mind very clearly. These people, these characters, live in his mind. There is no
one doing what Jones is doing today. If there is something truly postmodern, I would say Jones is
it. He looks very different from what comes before him, in modernism, and its ascendancy in the
mid-twentieth century. He is making pretty dramatic claims for the power of fiction, for the
power of narrative, to put the world together, but at the same time, as I've noted, acknowledges
the very difficulty of that project, the very weakness that lies at its heart.
And I think that's what, for me, makes his work extremely powerful, that for all its ambition
we're never allowed to forget its ambivalence. That ambivalence is always there on the surface,
and it's bodied forth in the kinds of moral problems that this novel dwells upon, the question of
how human love can exist in slavery, whether it can exist, all its complicated forms, what the
forms of freedom look like, how freedom can possibly exist, how you build it, how it can be
maintained. All these things are there in an incredibly ambitious literary form. That's what Jones

is doing that nobody else is doing at this moment. So, I will stop there and we will think about
what Foer is doing on--I will think about what Foer is doing on Monday.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 24 Transcript
April 21, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: All right. So, today we're going to talk about Everything is
Illuminated, and Eli has actually agreed to stand next to me for the whole lecture and translate
my lecture into Ukrainian dialect. Thank you, Eli. I'll call you up in a minute. For anyone visiting
the class today, what we are doing is talking about Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is
Illuminated. This book was chosen by the class as the last book on the syllabus, and Eli here
gave a wonderful presentation, reading from it in a very funny Ukrainian accent, and I think
that's why everybody chose it. God knows if there would be another reason. No. Just kidding.
Now, when you meet a new novel, there are various things you need to do after you've decided
whether you like it or not, that is, if you're either a professor in an English class having to teach
it, or you are a student having to talk about it or write about in your papers. Beyond that, even
beyond vocational necessity, there is the desire, I hope, that many people have, to understand
how new work fits into the body of existing literature. And, especially, I think that's the case
when an author is as openly ambitious as Jonathan Safran Foer is. It is very clear, the minute you
open this up and you start reading, that Foer is aiming at a conversation with literature that has
preceded him. It's also clear from his interviews, and I was particularly struck by something he
said in an interview about his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is
about 9/11. And, I'll say a little bit more about that novel, which I haven't read but I've read
enough reviews of it to know a few facts about it which I think are relevant to this novel. He said
about ithe was asked by an interviewer, "Well, doesn't it seem risky to take on 9/11 as a
subject?" And he said, "Well, what seems risky to me is not taking on the important subjects of
your time. That seems like the risk for a writer." And he says in another place, "You have to
justify the fact that you're sitting alone in a room writing all day. What you do has to be
somehow world changing."
So, for a twenty-something-year-old writer, this is a heavy task. And I think you can feel the
heaviness of it in the novel, partly in its formal ambition, and partly in the subjects that it takes
on. It doesn't take on 9/11, but it does take on the Holocaust. So, I will have a whole argument
about that aspect of the novel and how it fits in to literature of the post-45 period, because--lucky
you--I happen to have written a book on this that came out in 2003, about genocide in literature.
So, this is actually a perfect novel for me to lecture on in that respect.
When you first meet a novel of this kind, with these ambitions, there are certain things that you
do, and for me those things include noticing just about everything I possibly can about the novel
and then thinking about what other things that I've read seem to be speaking to it, or it seems to
be speaking to those things. Now, I promised that I would not conduct this entire lecture in
Q&A, but I did not promise that I wouldn't ask any questions, so here goes. What novel seemed
related to this novel, from our syllabus, to you? Well, you can go outside our syllabus. That's
okay. Did you have another idea? Yes.
Student: Marquez"s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. That's certainly in dialog with this novel, yes, and Foer talks
about that as a novel that really was important to him. Okay. What else? What from our syllabus
seems to be related to this novel? You've never seen anything like this before? Yes.
Student: Lolita?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Lolita. Why? What in Lolita?
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes, some of that humor. Yes. What else? What else from
our syllabus? Yes.
Student: --Oh, I was going to extrapolate on Lolita.
Professoer Amy Hungerford: Yes. Sure.
Student: experimenting with speaking through the voice of a character.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah. Absolutely yeah, inhabiting a voice that seems very foreign.
Yeah. To the writer. Yes. What else? Yes.
Student: Barth?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes.
Professor Amy Hungerford: And what was it about Barth that you think Foer learned from?
Student: I think kind of writing about writing.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yep, definitely. What else? Roth? Did
anyone not see Roth in this novel? Okay. Roth is certainly here. Pynchon is very strongly here, if
you think about the episodes in Crying of Lot 49 with the Paranoids, all those funny jokes and
their songs. Foer learned a lot from Pynchon, and certainly even more from Pynchon's other
novel, Gravity's Rainbow, I think, particularly, than from Crying of Lot 49, which doesn't-because of its length-- doesn't quite go to the operatic, playful lengths that a longer Pynchon
novel can go to. Pynchon is also very interested in the eighteenth century, and so that interest is
something that Foer shares, in this novel. Foer is someone who learned a lot from the group of
writers that we would call "postmodernist" and that I would call "late modernist." He learned to
be very self-conscious about his language and to make that evident on the surface of the novel.
He also learned, though, from Toni Morrison. (Come on in.) He learned from Toni Morrison. In
particular, I think, he learned the value of time travel in a novel. This was something that I
brought up with respect to Edward P. Jones, as well, but it's certainly here, and there is one very,
very clear reference to Morrison. This is on page 51, when he's talking about the name of the
shtetl and how it was called. Now, my Ukrainian is not very "premium," so I will butcher this
name. "Of course no one in Sofiowka called it Sofiowka. Until it had such a disagreeable official
name, no one felt the need to call it anything, but now that there was an offense that the shtetl
should be called that shithead's namesake, the citizens had a name not to go by. Some even called
the shtetl Not Sofiowka and would continue to even after the new name was chosen."

In Song of Solomon, written in 1979, I think, Toni Morrison has a street that's called Not Doctor
Street, because it was given an official name at odds with what the black community called it.
And so, they had called it Doctor Street. The town christened it something else, I think Main
Street or something, and so then they called it Not Doctor Street. So this little, teeny piece is
lifted directly from Morrison. You can see her footprints on here in that sense. Toni Morrison
was, of course, a teacher at Princeton when Foer was there. I don't know if he took courses with
her. He certainly studied with Joyce Carol Oates, but Morrison was around and I'm sure he has
read that novel. It would be surprising to me if he has not. So, the other thing that he takes from
Morrison is that sense of collective history, that history is something passed down in oral
tradition in an intensely verbal culture. So, the Jewish shtetl culture that Foer imagines, and the
black community that Morrison imagines, are both intensely verbal cultures. Now, the Jewish
community of Foer's novel is also intensely literary, in the sense of literate. They write
everything down, also, so that's a slight difference between Morrison's vision and Foer's.
I want to go in to some detail about what I think Foer has learned from Roth, because Roth is the
person I see most strongly behind his writing. We didn't see the playful, metafictional side of
Roth very much in The Human Stain. Roth's work is straddling both sides of that line, between
realism and very hyper-metafictionality. So, some of his novels have alternate endings. He has
several novels that feature Philip Roth. So, Foer takes the conceit of naming a character after
himself directly from Roth. So, there are ways that he is, on the surface, citing Roth, but there is
a more profound way that he is working in Roth's terrain, and that is in the terrain of desire. So,
thinking back to Roth's first novel, Portnoy's Complaint, which is all about masturbation, Alex
Portnoy's masturbation, we see that he's taken the name Alex, Alexander Portnoy. Alex appears
in this novel as well, and then we have Safran, who is this sort of love machine. So, he is a
double of Alex Portnoy, with a difference, though; so, instead of masturbation, it's sex with the
needy, essentially, sex with the love starved, virgins, older women, widows, etc.
So, the immediate difference that Foer is pointing to, is the difference between something like
solipsism or narcissism, desire as the fuel for that narcissism, versus desire as the fuel for
community and connection. This is not without trouble, though. And it's the trouble that interests
me, and that I think he takes from Roth: and that's the impossibility of ever actually making that
connection, of it ever finally coming home. And you see that in the story of Safran, just in the
fact that--by the time he finally gets married, and finally has a proper orgasm--what he falls in
love with, at that moment, is not his wife, but the baby that he is engendering in that moment
(and of course it's a baby that doesn't even exist yet). So, the very absence at the heart of desire,
the blankness or the impossibility, is demonstrated even in those moments of overwhelming
connection.
And, I think it's telling that Foer imagines sexual energy as light, rather than some other kind of
phenomenon. So, "Everything is Illuminated"; remember, there is that image of the world being
lit up by people making love, that it actually generates light that you can see from space. It's not
a concrete engendering act, even when it is. It creates something else, and that something else
seems to be related to knowledge; how can you know your past? This is a problem in the novel,
and it's a feature of the quest element. And I'll say more about that in my second lecture on the
novel, but I think it has to do with a vague understanding that is imagined to illuminate the world
as a result of desire's fulfillment, or almost fulfillment. But that theme of sex and desire is
abstracted into lots of other forms. And the couple that I want to look at--one is sort of religious.
This is on 140. Here, we're learning about the veneration of Brod's husband, the Kolker, who is
then bronzed and made into a statue in the town after he dies, still with the saw blade embedded
in his head. This is at the bottom of 140.

Those who prayed came to believe less and less in the god of their creation, and more and more
in their belief. The unmarried women kissed the Dial's battered lips although they were not
faithful to their god, but to the kiss. They were kissing themselves. And when the bridegrooms
knelt, it was not the god they believed in. It was the kneel, not the god's bronzed knees, but their
own bruised ones.
This little moment of reflection on religious ritual, or quasi-religious ritual, is related to some
things that I want to say about the role of Judaism in my next lecture. But, as a practice, it is a
practice of negativity, of acknowledging the impossibility of connection to that god and the
impossibility of fulfillment from that god. But, nevertheless, it is committed to the fulfillment of
the effort to make that connection. So, it's belief in belief. And, in fact, the book that I'm writing
right now is all about belief in belief, and so this confirms my sense that this is an important way
of imagining how belief works in the current moment. You believe in the act of belief.
So, that's one kind of negativity. Then there is a visual image that we get over and over again,
and that's of the hole, the empty hole. There are a couple of examples here, on 135. This is after
Brod and the Kolker have separated themselves with a wall because the Kolker keeps beating her
up. He's deranged in part--part sane, part deranged--by his saw-blade embedded in his head. And
so they have this hole between them through which they can communicate, but the wall protects
Brod from his rages so he won't beat her up.
They lived [This is on 135.] They lived with the hole. The absence that defined it became a
presence that defined them. Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and
for the first time it felt precious, not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing but like
the last breath of a drowning victim.
So, here we're offered two versions of negativity. One is all of the words that had come to mean
nothing, and the other is this physical emptiness, the hole. So, the words that mean nothing are
an emptiness that is frustrating, a blockage, but the emptiness that is the space, the visual space,
comes to be a space of imagination, that gets filled with imagination. So, they see each other
from a distance for the first time, and are overwhelmed by the connection that can then be
formed between them. So, it's the very absence of the physical presence, one's distance from it,
that becomes the fulfillment for this couple. So, I hope you can see the structural similarity, or
the logical similarity, between believing and belief. And we're told of Brod, remember, also, on
page 83, that she was constitutionally unable to love anyone. This is at the top of 83.
When she said, "Father, I love you," she was neither nave nor dishonest, but the opposite. She
was wise and truthful enough to lie. They reciprocated the great and saving lie that our love for
things is greater than our love for our love for things, willfully playing the parts they wrote for
themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.
So, if this is the lie, that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things, the
truth is that our love for our love is greater than our love for actual things or actual persons. It's
the same structure as the belief in belief. Of course, that story of Brod and her father telling each
other stories--both about their love for each other, and, in her father's case, Yankel's case, about
her mother, her fictional mother, who he says died before she was old enough to remember her-all of the stories that Yankel makes up become the fullness of his life with Brod. So, they replace
the loss of his first wife who abandoned him.
And so, this gives fiction a very powerful brief in the world. This is not unlike the structure that I
was pointing out in The Human Stain, where the blankness of Coleman and Faunia allows
Nathan to re-inhabit life by imagining onto them all the dynamics of their desire, all of the facts

of their life, all of the details of their biography. So, likewise, Foer uses blankness as a way of
pumping up the power of fiction. It plays this role despite the threat it will always pose to fiction
that you get here, or on that little passage I just quoted before, about the nothingness of words.
So, the nothingness that gives fiction its blank space to inhabit, also can seep into and infect
words as in the repetition of a word like "Malkovich." It is an infection that bothered critics
about this novel. They felt that the postmodern play of the novel was essentially trivial, because
these kinds of play had been conducted in novels thirty years, forty years before (and many more
than that if you count Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century, but took powerful hold in
American fiction in the '60s). They felt that Foer was simply taking out those tools and deploying
them again, but not for any new sort of payoff. So, some critics were frustrated with this.
Now, this brings me to a second kind of context that I would bring to this novel, or I do bring to
this novel as I think about it. In 2001, Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections won the
National Book Award. The Corrections attempted to make a marriage between the postmodern
novel, as he understood it, the novel filled with those kinds of verbal play [and the social]. And
Franzen modeled his novel on William Gaddis' novel The Recognitions, which is about an art
forgery. It's about 900 pages of incredibly experimental prose. It's extremely hard to read. But for
Franzen that novel had enough in it of character development and human investment to go along
with its verbal playfulness that it made him want to keep reading it. So, in homage to that novel,
he called his novel The Corrections and tried to give us a story where the verbal play would not
drain the sentiment from the novel. So, he described it as the social novel coming to meet the
postmodern novel. He announced this to great fanfare in an essay, and of course the novel then
became famous.
And he became infamous when he was invited by Oprah to go on Oprah's Book Club with The
Corrections, and he refused. It was quite a scandal in the literary world. And then he tried to go
back on it and say, "Oh, okay, Oprah. I really wasn't being a snob. I'll come on your show," but
then she said "No. Sorry. We're scheduled for that week now." It was really a mistake on
Franzen's part, but it also demonstrated his own ambivalence about the very project he had set
out to accomplish, which is to make a novel that people really want to read, that has some
sentimental purchase on you, that has characters you could care about, as well as being
extremely ambitious in this way, in this formal way. Now that novel, the way it tried to get
sentiment and verbal play to line up, was in part by making one of the central characters an
Alzheimer's patient. So, it's about a family, a midwestern family, and the two parents get
extended treatment in the novel, as do the three children, grown children, in the family. And the
father has Alzheimer's, and so there's a very Pynchon-esque scene, when his, actually, his shit
starts talking to him, and this is taken right out of Gravity's Rainbow. There's a scene very similar
to this in Gravity's Rainbow.
So, Franzen tried to make that poignant by making it something that the modernists tried to do,
which is the representation of the actual workings of the human mind in a daily situation. And
the terror of it, for that character, I thought, when I read the novel, came across quite powerfully.
So, for me, in part, it worked. Foer is doing something that is related. He is trying to have both
sentiment and formal play. How many of you felt for these characters? How many of you felt
that they were really inaccessible to you, flat, unemotionally interesting to you? Okay. Just one.
So, I think he succeeded, probably, to a greater degree, if you read the critics (and you can read
that in this incredibly bulked-up blurb section in the packaging of this novel). A lot of critics did
really like this novel, and I think that's why, that for most readers, he did succeed. Now, I have
things to say about that, but in a minute.
I want to say that there is another kind of context that I think you could attend to productively,
and that is the quality of this novel as a campus novel. Now, that's probably not exactly what you

were thinking of when you read this novel. It's a campus novel because it was written on a
campus, and it's also a campus novel because it is in part a coming of age novel about someone
who goes from needing a lot of help with his writing to kind of writing on his own. So, what you
see is the displacement of a narrative that looks very much like Foer's development, or you
would imagine the development of a writer in a writing program at Princeton over time, at first
needing suggestions from a mentor. And, a lot of the way that we come to know the character
Jonathan Safran Foer in the beginning, through Alex's letters, has to do with things that he has
said to Alex about how to write, suggestions he's made. So, Jonathan Safran Foer remains as a
sort of shadowy presence for much of this novel, but we see his wise sayings to Alex about
writing.
It's an interesting inversion of the situation that the author was in fact in. He was in the class,
taking the class, not teaching the class, when he was an undergraduate, and this was written
when he wasI think it was published when he was twenty one. The bar is not high. Don't
worry. No. I'm just kidding. The bar is very high. Let me say that. The bar is very high, but don't
worry. Life is long. You have plenty of time. This is not just about Jonathan Safran Foer, the
man, and his particular biography of being a student in the writing program at Princeton. It is
also about an institutional history of writing in the second half of the twentieth century. If you
remember, way back when, when I lectured on Flannery O'Connor, I mentioned to you a critic
named Mark McGurl at UCLA who is writing a book called The Program Era (or has written it,
and I think it should be out very soon, called The Program Era). And it's an analysis of how
writing programs leave their mark on the fiction of the last fifty years, because what's
particularly striking and new about writing in this period is that a lot of it happens on campuses,
and a lot of authors are writing for campus audiences.
So, Foer's novel is a version of that kind of fiction, and we can read it that way, I think, quite
easily. It fits in that story that Mark McGurl tells about the development of this period. So, just as
when I read it, I see that notation about belief in belief and the love of love, and it fits in to a
story that I'm telling about the evolution of religion in literature in this period, so you can ally it
to other arguments that are made about the period, too, and that help you to see why certain
things might be in the novel and what kind of work they do there.
And finally, there is a last context that I saw pointed out. I think it was in the review in The
Nation, and that's of trips of Americans to post-communist Europe and post-communist Russia.
Apparently, there is a whole spate of novels that came out right about the same time, where
Americans, almost invariably young men, went to the former Soviet republics and had comingof-age experiences. So, this certainly fits that genre. I don't personally have a lot to say about
that. I think it's interesting to see it as being aligned with a group of novels that do that. It
doesn't, for me, provide any particular insight, but that's not because it's- because it wouldn't. It
just happens that that didn't strike a chord with me, or lead me to other points of analysis. This is
another point that I want you to take away from my engagement with this novel. That is, that no
matter what context can be brought to it, you as a reader bring your own particular one, your
own particular set of knowledge, your own particular training, your own life experience.
So, we're getting to the end of the course, and, in a way, you have now the opportunity to
approach these novels, any new novel that's written, with several kinds of stories about the
period in your mind, because now you have read--I hope you have read--many novels in this
period, and you can see where the connections are. So, you're starting to draw those. You'll need
to do that on the exam, but far more importantly, I hope that you will continue to do it when you
read on your own outside of class. A lot of you are seniors. You may not have a lot of time after
you leave school to read novels. When you do, I hope it will be part of your pleasure to approach
them with a sense of empowerment, that you can know where they fit in the history of the art

form they're engaging, apart from your own pleasure in reading them, which will I'm sure be the
primary reason you'd pick up a novel to read it, but there is that other intellectual pleasure that
you now can have. I want to encourage you to feel that you can do that. It doesn't mean that it
will always produce insight for you. So, I have been thinking about this novel for approximately
two weeks. Most novels that I lecture to you about, I have been thinking about for at least two
years. Your insights over time change, and you notice different things. And it's nice to allow time
for that, and that's the value of rereading in a few years what you read before as a student. So, I
hope you'll maybe return to some of these novels, as well.
Now, that was my little digression about after-college reading, or outside-of-the-class reading,
but let me return to this question of sentiment. Foer wants it both ways, and one of the ways he
has it both ways is by internalizing in the novel a reader figure who is our double. There are
actually three doubles for us, at least. One is Alex, who is reading Jonathan's story as he sends it
to him. Embedding a critical reader within the novel, as we have seen with Barth and in Pynchon
(where Oedipa was that double), allows a certain set of metafictional tricks. One of the most
reliable functions for that internalized reader is to cue you, me, the actual human readers, to
notice or feel certain things, or (if you are Nabokov) to be misled in certain ways. Think of the
prologue from John Ray Jr. which misleads us in reading that novel. He's our double, but he's
there to trick us. I don't think that Alex is here to trick us. And, just to note how he cues us, let's
look on 142 and 3. This is one of the letters where Alex is less busy with self-presentation by this
point in the novel, and he is really responding to what Jonathan has sent him. This is in the
middle of 143.
Those things that you wrote in your letter about your grandmother made me remember how you
told me on Augustine's steps about when you would sit under her dress, and how that presented
you safety and peace. I must confess that I became melancholy then and still am melancholy. I
was also very moved--is this how you use it?--by what you wrote about how impossible it must
have been for your grandmother to be a mother without a husband. It is amazing, yes, how your
grandfather survived so much only to die when he came to America. It is as if, after surviving so
much, there was no longer a reason to survive. When you wrote about the early death of your
grandfather, it helped me to understand in some manners the melancholy that Grandfather has
felt since Grandmother died, and not only because they both died from cancer. I do not know
your mother of course, but I know you and I can tell you that your grandfather would have been
so so proud. It is my hope that I will be a person that Grandmother would have been so so proud
of.
We're being cued to be moved, to be moved by the story in these particular ways, to take his
reflections on his grandmother, which are indeed very lovely, and to be moved by them. But one
reservation I guess I have about the success of this move is just its boldness, I guess. I'm being
told that I should be moved by these passages. There are also moments when we get reflections
that seem like they would never stand if they were not embedded in Alex's voice, and this is on
68-69. This is Alex talking about how he came upon Little Igor, his brother, crying.
I knew why he was a little less than crying. I knew very well and I wanted to go to him and tell
him that I had a little less than cried too, just like him, and that no matter how much it seemed
like he would never grow up to be a premium person like me, with many girls and so many
famous places to go, he would. He would be exactly like me, and look at me, Little Igor. The
bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive
in life is something you have earned. [And then I'm going to skip down. So, he starts to laugh
then at his brother and he is not quite sure why he is laughing.] I attempted to rise so that I could
walk to my room, but I was afraid that it would be too difficult to control my laughing. I
remained there for many, many minutes. My brother persevered to a little less than cry, which

made my silent laughing even more. I am able to understand now that it was the same laugh I
had in the restaurant in Lutsk, the laugh that had the same darkness as Grandfather's laugh and
the hero's laugh. I ask leniency for writing this. Perhaps I will remove it before I post this part to
you. I am sorry. As for Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, she did not eat her piece of the potato.
Those reflections on laughing and crying: I think they might sound quite maudlin if they were
not in Alex's voice, that a writer needs to judge very carefully whether to reflect in those direct
ways about big themes like laughter and crying or how you hate. So, these are the topics that will
be a pitfall for any new writer sitting down to say, "I am going to write about love."
I used to teach creative writing, and one of the exercises that I did was, I would sit my students
down and I would say, "Okay. We're going to have a little in-class writing today. Here are some
topics that I want you to write about just for ten minutes," and I would give them "love," "your
childhood"--what else--"death." I can't remember what else. And so, then, they would very
earnestly do it and then I would say, "Okay. Now I want you to take your paper and I want you to
underline every single clich that you wrote," and they would come up with papers full of
clichs. And it was a little exercise just to get them to understand that choosing a topic can get
you into trouble if you choose a very abstract, big, important question. Of course we want books
that move us and tell us about death and love and separation and desire, but how do you get
there, and how do you talk about those things?
So, I think that Foer has taken a risk of a sort, here. He can do it because it's in Alex's voice. Is
the distance achieved, the self-distancing achieved, by inhabiting a foreign voice, with its little
funny jokes that come up because of its incorrect usages? Is that enough to prevent
sentimentality, rather than sentiment? Is it powerful enough language, in the abstract, that it
moves us as a discourse on laughter and loving? Is the detail of Little Igor and Alex's love for
him enough? Now, remember we know nothing about Igor as a character, his brother as a
character. Do we feel that the relationship between the two is earned for us as readers? Maybe
we do. Sometimes I did. Other times I didn't. So this is something that I'm still thinking about.
Does it succeed at what Franzen, too, was trying to do, which is to infuse intellectual word play
with human resonance? Does it succeed?
If you look at the dedication to the novel, I think you learn something too. This is under the
acknowledgments. Did any of you read this? These are the acknowledgments. "At least once
every day since I met her, I have felt blessed to know Nicole Aragi. She inspires me not only to
try to write more ambitiously, but to smile more widely and have a fuller, better heart. I am so, so
grateful,"--and you hear that "so, so" again from the passage I just read--"and it is my pleasure
and honor to think of the wonderful people at Houghton Mifflin as family," so on and so on,
"whose advice in literature and life seems always to boil down to "feel more," which is always
the best advice." So, feeling is very much on the surface of the effort here. What would it mean
to read this as a sentimental novel? Does the playful treatment of shtetl life disable our
connection with those characters?
One of the things that I think succeeds wonderfully about this novel is Brod as a character. I
think you do want her to have a good life, as Alex does, and you feel the tragedy of the life she
gets. And, I think you get that payoff because she is developed; she has time to develop, in the
course of the story. So, for all its time travel back and forth, for all its playfulness, for all the
jokes and riffs, Brod has time to develop, especially in relation to her father and in relation to the
Kolker, her husband, and we learn things that make her more complex over time. And so, when
we finally learn what she asked the Kolker to do after she was raped and before she agreed to be
his wife, when we learn that--and I won't reveal it 'cause I don't know if you're all there yet--it
gives us a much more complex version of what she is as a person, of who she is as a person. So, I

think he earns it, with Brod. That, to me, is a kind of achievement, because of the role that riffing
plays in the development of that story. Riffing on Jewish behavior in a novel by a Jewish writer
is certainly well-trodden ground. Roth has been treading that ground for many decades. I think
what Foer does, that Roth didn't do, is fully identify with the community in a convincing way,
while he's doing it, and this is related to what I will say about his use of the Holocaust in my next
lecture. I am going to stop there, and I hope you will be sure to finish the novel by Wednesday.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 25 Transcript
April 24, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: The exercise of inviting you to choose our last novel, as I think I
explained in the very first class of this term, is an exercise in thinking together about what
defines a period of literature. So, for all the other books in the syllabus, I came with my rationale
for why I included them, and for this book, I'm invited again to think about whether I would, if I
were teaching this again, and you had not chosen it. So, today I want to reflect on that, and it will
lead directly into my analysis of what the Holocaust is doing in this novel, and then I will have
some parting words for you to conclude the course.
When I think about books to include, I have four categories that I think about. One is books that
are somehow representative. So, the books in this course that fit that bill, you might think of the
ones that feature the Identity Plot. As I argued in that lecture at mid semester, the Identity Plot is
a reigning narrative structure in this period, and some of the books in our syllabus culminating
in The Human Stain--and I think this book, too, could be included in that group--all are
representative of different versions of that narrative structure. So: representative.
Innovative: I include works on the syllabus that I consider innovative in the form of the novel, in
the genre of the novel, or for their subject matter. Somehow they think about something in a way
that I haven't known anything else to think about before. I think Lolita fits this model very well,
and in its own way The Bluest Eye, at that time in the 1970s, took up a subject that had also been
neglected and was innovative in its subject matter.
Is a book widely read? Well, this book certainly meets that criterion, and some of our other books
do, as well. Lolita is one; The Human Stain is another, The Woman Warrior, pretty much any
Morrison novel you can choose: there are lots of books that fit this criteria. And usually what I'm
aiming for is a book that will be both widely read and something else on my list, so that it covers
more than one base.
And finally, and this is the most evanescent category, is it somehow excellent or important in
some other way? Generally, for me this is an aesthetic category. So, is it an excellent example of
writing? is it an excellent example of narrative art? is it important in what it thinks about
somehow philosophically, topically, in a way that nothing else quite can match? I talked to you
on Monday a little bit about Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitions for this novel and his ambitions, in
general, as he expresses them in interviews. I think, when I consider this novel, I know that this
is where Foer's interest truly lies. I'm sure he wants to be widely read. I'm sure he wants to be
innovative, and that's probably connected with the excellence or importance that he's aiming at.
He probably doesn't want to be representative. Most writers want to be singular rather than
representative. But this is where the investment really is, and it's in that category that, I think, we

find his use of the Holocaust. It's in the effort to be important, to be writing about something
important in this novel, that the Holocaust comes to have such a place in it, or that he chooses a
story that has the Holocaust at its center.
Now, I myself am reserving judgment on the excellence or importance of this novel, but I will
say that it is certainly representative of two things. One is a version of the Identity Plot. It is a
novel of a young person, two young people, coming to seek out their past and somehow gain
from that search some sense of themselves; so, it is a version of the Identity Plot. It is also
representative of late modernist formal characteristics; so, this is clever in the way that John
Barth is clever with language. It is funny in the way that Pynchon and Barth are, just drawing
from our syllabus. It makes some of the kinds of moves thatThe Woman Warrior makes. So, it is
representative in that way. I do not think it innovates formally. There's nothing I see here,
formally, that I have not seen elsewhere and before. So, for me, it doesn't quite meet that criteria,
but "representative" and "widely read," certainly.
Now, there is a way in which I think it could be understood as innovative, and my sort of kernel
for thinking about this is on 185. This is in that harrowing scene where the woman they think of
as Augustine has told them the story of the murder of the Jews of Trachimbrod, and then
afterwards the grandfather confesses to his complicit conduct with that murder. And Alex, as he's
translating for Jonathan his grandfather's words, he says in the middle of 185:
You cannot know how it felt to have to hear these things and then repeat them, because when I
repeated them I felt like I was making them new again.
That phrase, "making them new again," is loaded for any ambitious writer coming after
modernism. "Make it new" was the dictum that Ezra Pound held out as defining literature that
could matter formally, aesthetically, innovatively; so, to make it new in writing is very closely
allied with the project of modernism, a formal project. To use that phrase in this emotionally
loaded moment suggests two things.
One is, it draws on a whole history of discourse about genocide, and particularly about the
Holocaust, that could be encompassed under the banner of trauma theory. Now, some of you may
have encountered trauma theory. It's a sort of mix of psychoanalysis and literary criticism that
has been powerful in the past couple of decades. Its power is waning, I think, although there is a
new interest in Sociology in trauma, now. In the former literary critical version of it, trauma
theorists argued that to tell the story again, to tell the story of a trauma again, was to reexperience it. This was a way of understanding representation as human experience, as actual
experience unmediated, and the special thing about trauma was that it was the only kind of
experience--this is what most trauma theorists argued--that it was really the only kind of
experience that had this quality to it, this peculiar quality to it, that it remained real in the sense
of remaining experience and not becoming language, somehow.
This was a way of imagining language, also, conversely, as being experience. And, for some
trauma theorists, this analysis of language spread out to other kinds of language, so that any
language could be understood as in some sense traumatic, and this is a far reach of it. Much of
this work, I have to say, was done at Yale by two scholars, Cathy Carruth and Shoshana
Feldman. Both have now left the institution, but Yale was very well known for trauma theory. It
had its applications in Holocaust Studies, in particular in the building of the Fortunoff Archive of
testimony which is housed here, I think in Sterling. The effort to make videotapes of survivors'
testimonies was, in part, of course, a historical effort to get that knowledge secure before that
generation passed away, to gather as much as could be known of the human experience of the
Holocaust. But there was a reason, I think, that it was video. There was a great desire among

people who wrote and thought about and studied the Holocaust to have that immediacy that
video was thought to give; so, rather than have transcribed testimonies, or written testimonies,
you get to see the actual face and expression of the person telling that story.
This is something that scholars have--since the founding of the archive--have spent a lot of time
thinking about and theorizing. In the course of that theorizing, the word "witness" has come to
have a very specific and powerful meaning. The interviewer was to think of herself or himself
as--not a questioner or as an interviewer in the way that we would usually understand that role-but rather as a witness to that person's story, a witness in the sense of a judicial witness, someone
who would be in a court to affirm that something had, indeed, happened. There was a sense that
validation was needed, in the context of gathering this evidence. Witnessing was theorized in a
much more complex way by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, a psychiatrist who is--I think Dori
Laub is still in New Haven. I think he's still at Yale. But, together they wrote a book
called Testimony that had a lot to say about exactly how the witness functions in relation to the
person who is testifying. And I think you can see the mark of all of this thought about how the
Holocaust is received in the present, stamping Foer's work. So, you see it, in part, in that little
sentence that I just read to you, and saying it again it was "making it new." It's as if it's a moment
in which trauma is transmitted through language, and is imagined to be transmitted in an
unmediated way; so, the repetition that we experience as readers, all of these horrible things are
said twice, because we see Alex translating them, and that's dramatized for us by the device of
Alex as translator. So, its debt to modernism, or the way it has its eye on modernism behind it, is
closely allied to this understanding of language and its relationship to trauma.
Now, by the time Jonathan Safran Foer is writing this book, not only has Holocaust Studies
established this whole body of thought about language, but there are also many examples of what
you might call the American Holocaust Novel, and the one I'm going to use in my lecture today,
to think about in relation to this, is Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. How many of you have
read it? Okay. Good, a bunch of you. For those of you who haven't, it's the story of a character
named Art Spiegleman, and you'll recognize that device of course from Foer. Art Spiegleman is a
cartoonist writing a book about his father's experiences in the Holocaust and in concentration
camps. He goes through the novel alternating between scenes of Art interviewing his father,
Vladek, and then it sinks in to Vladek's story, and there are lots of extended scenes where we just
see Vladek escaping from camps and making his way through them and so on, doing all the
things that he did to finally escape with his wife, Anja. We find out fairly early in the first
volume of Maus--it's a two-volume graphic novel--that Art's mother killed herself well after she
arrived in America as an immigrant, having escaped, and we see her in an inserted cartoon in a
different style in the bathtub. She slit her wrists in the bathtub.
What's striking about that graphic novel--It's extremely smart in its meditation on the
relationship between a son and his father and the relationship between growing up in America
and surviving the Holocaust--but what's really striking is its meditation on the problem of Art's
insignificance. How can his childhood and his child's problems--being bullied at school or
whatever it is--how can those compete with his father's experience of having survived the
Holocaust by his own wits and by luck? That dramatic story is impossible for the son to match,
and so there are certain ways--I have argued in print--certain ways that Art appropriates his
father's story and imagines himself as a survivor. So, it's a way of transmitting the trauma of the
Holocaust from one generation to another. And there are lots of graphic devices and linguistic
tricks that Spiegelman uses to effect this, and I won't go into that detail, now, but it's something
that I've argued at length.
What makes Everything is Illuminated different and, I would argue, innovative is that it, for me,
represents the third-generation effort to recover the Holocaust. So, by the time Foer is writing,

these stories have been told, not only by Spiegelman (His books came out in 1987 and 1991, or
'86 and '91, the two volumes of Maus, so, well before Foer wrote this, when Foer is just a child).
That was not the only book on the experience of the Holocaust. Those would include Cynthia
Ozick's The Shawl, a very famous example, a little later a European writer, a German writer
living in England, W. G. Sebald wrote Austerlitz,had a very similar structure of a child of the
Kindertransport, someone who had been taken from Prague to England along with all of the
other children, Jewish children of his neighborhood, to save them. He discovers this as his own
past, and he tries to go back and find the traces of his parents in the concentration camps. And
finally he finds a snippet of film from one of the concentration camps where his mother was--his
mother was a singer--and he slows it down further and further and further just to try to glimpse
her face. This is a story of the hunt for the beloved parent and for the ground of a child's identity.
This story has been told many times by the time Foer is writing this novel. In addition, most of
these prior versions in fiction, and some in memoir, have to do with the first-generation
American experience.
So, Foer finds himself belated in two ways: one, because the story of the Holocaust and of
finding out that secret has already been told; and two, because he's not second generation. He's
not the child of a survivor but the grandchild of a survivor. So, what do you do to make that story
your own? If you are committed to its centrality to who you are, how do you make that into an
unmediated kind of experience? One way that that's done, both in second-generation stories and I
think in this third-generation story, is by playing off of and excavating the Jewish cultural
veneration for memory. So in Jewish tradition memory of parents, of the dead, of past events, is
at the heart of religious practice, but also of secular versions of religious practice. This novel is
full of those secular versions of religious practice, and it explicitly talks about children's relation
to the memory of their parents. This is on 268. Oops. I got my page wrong there. Sorry, 260. He's
describing here the itch to remember that the novel imagines as particularly Jewish:
But children had it worst of all. For although it would seem that they had fewer memories to
haunt them, they still had the itch of memory as strong as the elders of the shtetl. Their strings
were not even their own, but tied around them by parents and grandparents, strings not fastened
to anything, but hanging loosely from the darkness.
So, you can imagine this story of Jonathan going back to find the woman who helped his
grandfather escape as an effort to tie that string to something concrete. The fact that he never can
really find that woman suggests that, already internalized here, is something that Holocaust
literature coming before this has been intent on examining and questioning, which is: can you
ever have that unmediated relation to the past; can you ever tie memory back to the event in a
way that feels like it's a real connection? So, here there is a fairly easy, if also wistful or elegiac,
admission that you can't ever really tie that string up. This is why the hunt is never going to be
successful in the novel; we will never tie up all those little details. It's meant to be that way,
because at this late date it's clear that's the only way it could be, and that's not innovative. It's
simply where the genre is right now. However, this novel is loath to part with the drama that
earlier stories made from the recovery narrative.
So, for Jonathan, the mystery is not what happened to his grandparents during the Holocaust.
That's the classic question. The parents won't talk about what happened. The child wants to
know. The child knows there's something back there, and the hunt is to find out exactly what
happened, and usually it's hidden either because the parent left a prior child, lost a prior child, or
somehow felt guilty about surviving, either because of explicit acts where they were forced to
sacrifice someone in their family in order to escape or in order to help someone else in their
family escape; they were forced to choose. And we see that choice thematized in the Holocaust
sections of this novel. So, there is that hiddenness of the Holocaust experience. That's not what's

hidden in this novel. That history is not what Jonathan doesn't know. He knows his grandmother
survived the Holocaust. That's not a mystery. The mystery is: who helped her? Who helped his
grandfather? Sorry. It's the grandfather. Who helped his grandfather to escape? That's the
mystery. Augustine is the mystery woman. The photograph represents that missing or hidden
knowledge. That this drops out of the picture of the novel relatively painlessly--he'll never find
her--is, I think, the mark of how the story of hiding something that's hidden gets displaced onto
Alex.
So, what I see here is the transfer of the story of the hidden past from the hidden past of the
victim's side of the Holocaust to the hidden past of the perpetrator's side. This is a displacement
of that narrative onto the perpetrators; so, now it's Alex who is looking to find the secret buried
in the dysfunctionality of his family. Now it's Alex who finds, in speaking to his grandfather,
some explanation for why his father is such a tyrant. And the same logic of memory and
genealogy that you see in the way Jewish families are talked about in their relation to memory
and history between generations, that is reproduced as the father says, "You are responsible for
your son," the father is responsible for the son, somehow the father is reflected in the son. So, the
choice that Alex's grandfather made--to point out his friend, Herschel, as a Jew and to thus give
him up to the murderous Nazis--this is somehow played out in the dysfunctionality of the family
in the present, in the terrible rages and drunkenness of the father.
It's interesting to me that this novel is about making the relationship between grandchildren and
grandparents as immediate as possible, and so I think it's really interesting that we have Alex
disowning his father. "You are not my father," he says at the end of the novel as he throws his
father out of the house, essentially. It's a way of getting the second generation out of the way and
hopping into that space, so you can see it in the second- and third-generation structure. You
swipe the parents out of the way, and you hop into their place, as immediately descended from
the people who experienced these events.
A problem for Americans writing about the Holocaust is that, even if you immigrated here as a
survivor, this is not the land of those events, and so I think this gives us some insight into the use
of the European setting. Europe is where the important history happened. That's why a novel
trying to be important in these terms has to be set there. So, if you set out looking for an
important subject matter, you need that historical grounding, and it's not in America; it's in
Europe. On 117, you can see very clearly how the story of Augustine and Alex picks up the trope
of witnessing, and it's of course accomplished through Alex's butchered English. This is on 117,
where he holds the photograph out to Augustine and he says:
"Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?" She examined it for several moments.
"No." I do not know why but I inquired again. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in this
photograph?" "No," she said again, though the second no did not seem like a parrot but a
different variety of no. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in this photograph?" I inquired, and
this time I held it very proximal to her face like Grandfather held it to his face. "No," she said
again, and this seemed like a third variety of no. I put the photograph in her hands. "Have you
ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, but in her no I was certain that I could
hear "Please persevere; inquire me again." So I did. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the
photograph?" She moved her thumbs over the faces as if she were attempting to erase them.
"No." "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, and she put the
photograph on her lap. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" I inquired. "No,"
she said, still examining it but only from the angles of her eyes. "Have you ever witnessed
anyone in the photograph?" "No." She was humming again with more volume. "Have you ever
witnessed anyone in the photograph?" "No," she said, "no." I saw a tear descend to her white
dress. It too would dry and leave a mark. "Have you ever witnessed anyone in the photograph?" I

inquired, and I felt cruel, I felt like an awful person, but I was certain that I was performing the
right thing. "No," she said, "I have not. They all look like strangers." I periled everything. "Has
anyone in this photograph ever witnessed you?" Another tear descended. "I have been waiting
for you for so long."
Here that effort, through witness, to come to an unmediated connection with the past and with
the violence of the Holocaust, it's acted out. It is, as Alex said, performed by that almost
liturgical repetition of the question and the answer, and the way that Augustine's body gets closer
and closer to the photograph; she touches the faces; she finally merges herself and the
photograph by letting her tears fall on it. So, the question is: have you ever witnessed for these
people? She has not, yet, because no one has come to hear her witness, and I'm reminded, then,
of the structure of those survivor testimonies on video, where a witness is required in order for
the story to be told. And so, Augustine, now, she has not witnessed, because she did not have a
witness. Now she has her witnesses, and she will witness to them.
And so Alex comes to be undone by what he finds about himself, what he finds out about his
grandfather and his family. In the second-generation story, often it is the family of the second
generation, the child of the survivor, who is undone by what they find out about their parent. So
here, again, the structure of the narrative is transferred to the perpetrator's side. And who is lying
in the bath with their wrists cut? Not the survivor but the perpetrator. So, you get that image
from Maus transferred into the perpetrator's family. What I find quite remarkable about the
formal techniques of this novel is how they finally reflect on that transfer of the narrative from
the Holocaust literature to the perpetrator's story, and if you look on 160 we can begin to see how
this works. If you'll recall, they are sitting in the silence and darkness together peeling corn for
Augustine, and Alex takes Jonathan's diary and opens it and he says on 159:
This is what I read. He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his
saying it to make it true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. "What?"
he asked. "What?" And Sasha told him again that he would take care of the family, that he would
understand if his father had to leave and never return, and that it would not even make him less
of a father. He told his father that he would forgive. Oh, his father became so angry, so full of
wrath, and he told Sasha that he would kill him, and Sasha told his father that he would kill him,
and they moved at each other with violence and his father said, "Say it to my face, not to the
floor," and Sasha said, "You are not my father."
So, in this scene Alex begins to understand that Jonathan is using him as a character, and
moreover that Jonathan has penetrated right into the most intimate and painful part of his family
life, his relationship with his father, and is fictionalizing that. And of course if you turn to the
end, I hope you recognize this, on 274. This is, in fact, this passage from his diary, what we are
given as the letter from the grandfather to Jonathan, and there it is. This is what happened.
He told his father that he could care for Mother and little Igor. It took his saying it to make it
true. Finally he was ready. His father could not believe this thing. "What?"
And so it goes, on to the end of that paragraph, and you can see culminating, as in the diary, with
"Say it to my face, not to the floor," and Sasha said, "You are not my father." What are we to
make of this? So, this is a bit of postmodern cleverness, if you will, raising questions as have
been raised in The Human Stain about who exactly is writing this account, whether it's Coleman
or Nathan in that novel, how it is that Nathan knows what Coleman thinks, how he knows all that
happened, all that he says he knows that happened in Coleman's life.

Well, here at the very end of the novel, when Foer brings out this passage that has been provided
much earlier in Jonathan's notebook, we are led to question the authorship of all the letters in the
book. Now of course we know it's a novel, we know it's all written by Jonathan Safran Foer, but
in the logic of the novel its self-awareness now verges towards this question. It's not just the
reader who's meant to question this, but the novel asks us directly to question it. So, what does it
mean that Jonathan is revealed to be the author of this letter? Well, there are a couple ways of
looking at it. There are those passages in the Book of Antecedents--remember the Jewish book of
memory that the Trachimbroders write over time--some of those entries are prophetic. They tell
the future, and we're given an excerpt from that book that describes the disaster, and so we know
that something like prescience is a quality of Jewish writing, imagined in this way as a kind of
religious practice. So, either we can understand Jonathan as carrying on that tradition, that what
he writes in his diary is similarly proleptic, it looks towards the future and transcribes the future,
or we can see it as constructing the future itself. So, we can see it either as imagining what will
inevitably happen, or as making the future out of those words.
I think we're meant to feel both resonances to this formal trick, or this formal device, but the
resonance of control, of making it happen, leads us to I think quite an interesting place, and leads
me to wonder whether this is not a novel of revenge. To transpose the story of a survivor of the
Holocaust who later, much later in their life, finally comes to terms with that terror and commits
suicide, to transpose that well-worn story, well-known story, into the perpetrator's life and family
is a way of giving back to the complicit the pain of the victims. So, I think this is quite
interesting. Even though there are so many moments where that sense of fault is mitigated:
"would you not do the same?" That question gets asked: Who would do differently? How would
you decide what to do? We're given examples of Lista's father, who won't spit on the Torah even
though he is not a religious man and watches as his entire family is killed and then finally spits
so that he can be killed too. We're given all kinds of morally ambiguous, impossible situations,
situations really where moral machinery isn't appropriate or possible to think through. But still,
there is that sense that a controlling author has scripted this future for this particular family in the
present.
So, that makes it quite interesting to me, and I just want to look on 262 at another way that
transposing the story outside of the Jewish community radiates out in this novel, and maybe
mitigates that suggestion of a revenge plot, and this is on 262 when suddenly the first-person
plural appears. I don't know if you noticed it when you were reading. I found it quite striking.
This is talking about the people of the shtetl in their last months of life. "They waited to die. And
we cannot blame them, because we would do the same, and we do do the same." They ask that
question implicitly, "Would you do anything differently? Would you go about your normal life?
What would you do?" And he says, "We would do the same," but he also says, "We do do the
same," as if mortality, the fact of mortality, the fact that we all are, all of us, waiting to die--and
in the meantime not thinking about that inevitable end, going about our daily life with joy and
play and all the range of human experience and emotion--he says that that is analogous to what
these people were doing, even though their end looked so different from the one that Jonathan
Safran Foer, the character in this novel, expects to have for himself.
So, the Holocaust story and the reflection that it causes back on the activities of life radiates out
in a universalist sense. It doesn't just impose its narrative on a new set of participants in the
Holocaust, that of the perpetrators or those who are complicit, but it radiates out to all people
past and present. So, it becomes a quality of the human condition. This is a softening move I
think. It suggests the tragedy involved in all sides of this story, the tragedy of the simple man
trying to save his wife and child and in doing so becoming complicit to the murder of his friend.
So we see that moral complexity, and it feels like tragedy because of these softening moves.
Now, I want to stop there and say that it's in this innovation, this change to an established

narrative about genocide and its relation to literature and writing, that I find this to be an
innovative novel, and if I were teaching a course, which I used to teach regularly, on genocide in
literature, I would probably be very happy to end with this novel. For that line of analysis of this
period, it's very appropriate as an innovative ending. I think, though, in this novel, it is partly
there as a way of taking on something really hard.
So, I talked a little bit on Monday about the quality of this novel as a campus novel, as the
product of a young person, and I was joking with you a little bit about the bar being set high for
the achievements one can pull off by the age of twenty-two. I want to use that fact about Foer-that this is a first novel, that it's especially an overtly ambitious novel--to reflect on something
that's closer to life, and this is I think something that I've earned because literature is about its
address to life. After all, that's why we read it, because it strikes us as a comment on things that
are important to us. If we read that's one reason why we read. So I want to use that question of
ambition, also, to address something that comes up in the advising that I do here for students
year in and year out, and to get at that question I want to read you something, as a good
postmodernist, from the nineteenth century. This is from Walden, Henry David
Thoreau's Walden. So we have read a lot of books together. This little part I'm going to read to
you fromWalden comes after Thoreau has talked about the pleasures and the virtues of reading,
and then this is in a section called "Sounds." The last section was called "Reading." This section
is called "Sounds."
I did not read books the first summer. I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were
times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether
of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes in a summer morning, having
taken my accustomed bath, I sat on my sunny doorway from sunrise 'til noon wrapped in a
reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the
birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house until the sun falling in at my west
window or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway I was reminded of the lapse
of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of
the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and
above my usual allowance.
I hope that your summer will have a lot of time like that. I hope that that time might also have
latitude for reading, and that reading will be not only what you have been now trained to do,
which is reading that is informed--if it's contemporary novels you're reading--informed about
where these writers come from, what kinds of projects they might be busy with, what kinds of
questions they might be responding to, but also that it will give you time to enter into and
pretend with Nabokov--and remember back to the beginning of the course--to pretend with
Nabokov that you can climb a mountain of the imagination and meet a reader there and forget all
the kinds of context that I've been teaching you to pay attention to. Because it's in that meeting in
the imagination that I think literature can most powerfully speak to you. So, I hope you will go
and have that kind of summer.
[end of transcript]
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The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 26 Transcript
April 28, 2008

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Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. I'll go ahead and start, just 'cause I am not sure how many
people will end up being here. So, as promised, today I will tell you a little bit about the exam,
and I'll show you some questions from a past year so that you can see what they're like. We
rewrite the exam every year. Even makeup exams are all different, so I have a lot of these in my
files. The exam is two-and-a-half hours in a three-hour slot. We have two rooms, 'cause we have
a big class. They have given us this room and 102, so you can come to either room for the event
Friday, May 9, 2:00pm to 5:00pm.
It has three parts. The first part is identifications, and that's small things from any of the novels.
That could be a character. It could be a place name. It could be even a couple of words, a
quotation, and you have to give the author and title that it comes from, of the book that it comes
from, and tell us what it is and a couple of sentences about its significance, so why that thing is
important.
Passages will be little chunks of text from a novel. Again, you'll have to know author and title,
and then you will have to do an interpretation of the passage. And then you have to say in a
couple of sentences how that passage as you have interpreted it is important to the book as a
whole. Oh, and you have to say the context of the passage. Now this might differ. I'll give you a
couple of examples. This'll be different. It might be a matter of saying where in the plot it occurs
or who, which character, is speaking, what's going on in the scene from which it's pulled, some
sort of relevant context so that we know that you understand where the thing comes from. So you
have fifteen minutes to do each of those.
The essay is 40% of the final grade. You have a half an hour, and--I'll show you--I have a special
way of doing these essays. Usually, they're big, general questions. A good way to review for that
is to look at the old essay questions, the essay topics. You'll find a lot of clues there about themes
that unite all the works on the syllabus, so that can be a good way of studying.
In each of these sections you will get to choose. So, in the IDs usually I give nine, and you get to
choose six. In the passages, I aim for seven and you choose four. In the essays I always give
three and you choose one. Within the essays you can choose between two lists of books to use to
answer your questions. You get to choose three of four on each of those two lists, and I'll explain
a little bit why I do that when I show you one. The one restriction on the essay is that you may
only write about one novel you've written a long paper on, so only one of the three novels that
you choose to write about for the essay question can be one that you wrote about in a paper. So
your TF who will be grading the exam will know what you wrote on, so just observe that
guideline. It's written in the directions of the exam.
Now, so, let me show you now what these look like. First of all, I'm going to give you a couple
IDs and we'll play a little game. Who can identify this? So, "sea horses." Yes. No, I'm not going
to call on you, Sarah. That's not fair. Only if they're all washed up. Can anyone except Sarah
identify this? Okay, Sarah, go ahead.
Student: That's in Housekeeping.
Professor Amy Hungerford: That's right. Okay. Did that seem hard? Judging by the paucity of
answers it was. Yes, that's exactly what you need to say. You need to say Marilynne
Robinson, Housekeeping,and you'd have to explain that she always wanted to look at this little
drawing that her husband made for her. Let me think of another one. The dancing bear. More of
you know that. Yes, Helen.
Student: Blood Meridian.

Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes. Very good. So you-- That's the end of Blood
Meridian. You would have to say that it's at the very end in order to get full credit for that ID, so
you need to know that. Let me think of another one. Oh, Lane as a name, Lane. Yes.
Student: Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, absolutely, and you might want to say what he represents. So,
what would he represent? If you were going to give a sentence about what he represents, what
would you say, why he's important?
Student: He represents kind of the ideas of education, and that education isn't always a good
thing.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes-Student: And that he's not necessarily educated at all in the way that other characters think is
important.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, that's true, and he's pretentious. So, he's much more interested
in his possibilities for publication and how well he's done in his course than he is in the wisdom
that Franny and Zooey both value. Okay. Yes. So you get the idea. That's what an ID is. So, now
let me show you a passage and we'll do some of these. Now the important thing about passages is
that you talk about the language of the passage as well as just what's in it. So, these will be
chosen for the interest of their language, and you will want to note the words and talk about why
things are said the way they're said.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. So here's one. Take a moment. "Now is the time and folks, I
just couldn't. In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully she also turned and still hell
screamed its counsel and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied
creature." What is this from? Uh huh.
Student: It's from Lolita.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, and what is going on in this scene?
Student: Humbert is contemplating killing Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Very good. Yes. That's all the context you would need to identify
this passage. Now, take a minute and look. What do you think in the language of this passage
would be useful to comment on? What do you notice about it, about the language? Yes.
Student: They're using "folks."
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes.
Student: He's addressing the reader.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely. You would have to talk about that to get full credit for
an answer on this one. It's an address to the reader. You'd need to talk about why he says that, so
what would your account be for why he says that?

Student: Because he's making a plea for his innocence, and he's addressing people in this formal
manner to try and sort of reach them on a friendship level
Professor Amy Hungerford: Exactly.
Student: Yes, and then he just wants to sort of paint a picture of his own morality.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes. Very good. That's a very nice way of putting it, when
you say he's making a plea for his innocence. That is the whole context of the novel. That's what
sets up the novel; that's the frame of the novel. And so, just by making that observation, you've
done an important thing for the passage identifications, which is that you have drawn its
significance in the context of the larger novel, the whole novel. What else might warrant your
notice here, what other bits of the language? Yes.
Student: The attention to bodies.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. What about that?
Student: The opposition he sets up between Charlotte's body and Lolita's.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Absolutely, yes, so that would be perfect, nice and economical.
What else? What else do you see there that you could comment on? Yes.
Student: The way that he frames the explanation like he's a hero.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. Yeah, and what would you make of that in an answer?
Student: Well, that as much as he's trying to prove his innocence, he also really thinks he's
actually doing the right thing there.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes. Well, we're laughing about it. You would probably want to
note that it's a comic use of that literary convention, and so you could say something about his
deployment of conventional language, either for satirical use or for comedy or to play up the
drama of his self-understanding. So that would be a nicer point, a somewhat more subtle
observation, that would set your exam-grading TF into a state of happiness, much to be desired.
All right. Let me see. I'll show you another one. Okay. This one. Take a minute and read it. Okay.
What's this from? The Known World. Okay. Sometimes we will take out character names. I've
done this with Oedipa, in the past, in Crying of Lot 49, just because it's so identified with her that
it seems like too much of a dead giveaway. I don't do that very often. Here, Augustus is an easy
identifier. What would you want to say about this passage? What do you notice about it that
seems worth accounting for? Uh huh.
Student: You can probably, with the phrase "I know what I know," connect to the title of The
Known World and make a comment about how our world is defined by what we know and the
perception of God's truth and how that fits in.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Absolutely, yeah, and if you could tie that notion of God's
truth to the godlike omniscience of the narrator in The Known World that would be a great thing
to do, and that would be a way to tie your analysis of this passage to the concerns of the novel as
a whole, so that would be good to do. What else do you notice that you could make use of
thematically or formally here? Uh huh. Eli. Privilege

Student: You could connect it to a vision of morality, like the way Mildred and Henry treat their
slaves, related to the way God treats his children
Professor Amy Hungerford: Right. So both in your example of Mildred and Henry--not
Mildred, Henry and.Now I've lost her name. What is her name, his wife's name? Caldonia.
Henry and Caldonia have this vision of a pure morality that they could sponsor in their slaveholding life, and, similarly, this is Barnum Kinsey speaking. You'd want to identify the speaker
here. Barnum Kinsey dreams of a pure space in which he could do the morally right thing, but as
Eli was saying this is a novel in which no such space or light is possible, so you'd want to note
that. That's more a thematic element of this, but you would want to note that. That's really
important. Anything else that we might want to say? Yes.
Student: Well, in the language he repeats "a body could say" and " a body could stand," and it's
kind of a way of preventing literary means of being excluding the illiterate.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Yeah. I think you can definitely talk about that. I think
there are a couple of ways. One is to associate it with literacy so that just being is a way of
testifying, somehow, that Barnum, in behaving the way he would have wanted to behave, could
have done the moral thing. But there is a contrast here between saying it, being the moral thing,
and his having stood by as a body in that scene and allowed Augustus to be sold into slavery. So,
you could certainly make hay of that elocution. And, for any example that uses dialect in this
way, you do want to interrogate it. So, don't just say, "Well, that's just trying to sound like
someone would sound like in this social situation." Don't stop there. Know that the passages will
be chosen so that any irregularity of language, even if it's for the purposes of realism and dialect,
is probably going to be something you can talk about. So, just be aware of that and creative in
thinking about what that variation in language could mean. Okay. Let me show you another.
Okay. What's that from? Yes.
Student: On the Road?
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yes, it's from On the Road, and what would you want to say about
it? What's important to notice about the language and what's important in the thematics of it and
the content of it? Yes, Sarah?
Sarah: You could talk about the way that Sal looks at Dean's language as a way of getting at a
more intimate way of understanding language
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely. So words like that--You'd need to talk about
Dean's language and, just as Sarah has done, put it in the context of our understanding of Dean's
language and its evolution over the course of the novel, so that does the work of getting your
interpretation into the context of an entire interpretation of the novel. And there is that sense of
immediacy; so, making up words in an attempt to get at an unusual proximity to experience.
Okay. What else would you want to notice? Well, what's he talking about? Yes.
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Amy Hungerford: Okay. Yes.
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Amy Hungerford: Especially in what? Sorry.

Student: [inaudible]
Professor Amy Hungerford: Yeah, absolutely. The language and the way Dean's language falls
apart over the course of the novel is one way that he's trying to get at a different kind of
language. But music is the figure for another way, or it's another figure for that effort to get
beyond the limitations of language. And here the way jazz is being described, its ability to
capture some ineffable thing, "it," is what you'd want to highlight. So, you'd want to connect that
analysis of how jazz is being described, here, with the role of jazz in the novel as a whole,
especially in the novel's linguistic ambitions, its literary ambitions. You might want to notice the
empty space that's highlighted here. It's another version of the vagueness of spirituality in a
couple of our novels on the syllabus, but certainly in On the Road, the vagueness of that thing
that they are looking for.
And also, you could talk about the communal dynamics of meaning-making, here, and you could
connect that with how it's important that Sal and Dean operate in this larger set of people that
sort of ebb and flow throughout the novel. This is not the individual artist sitting alone, but rather
a dream of an American identity that is somehow built in a free-thinking community of people,
or a free-acting community of people. So, you get that, and all of a sudden, somewhere in the
middle of the chorus, he gets it. Everybody looks up and knows. There is a dream there of a
shared meaning-making moment that everyone will know. It will be immediately compelling.
"Rehashes of old blowing." He's talking about how jazz musicians are in conversation with a
tradition. You could use that little piece and talk about the way that On the Road is in
conversation with other literary traditions, how it imagines itself as a revision of modernism. We
had a wonderful paper that I think some of you saw as a sample about the relationship between
Hemingway and Kerouac in this novel. I didn't lecture on this, but if any of you saw that paper,
that's an example of what you might want to say about the relationship between tradition and
innovation, which is thematized here in jazz, but it's acted out in the novel as well.
Okay. Do you get the idea of how these work? Okay. So this is what I'm looking for in the
passages. Now, in the essays, usually, we have extremely broad questions, some of which are
more theoretical than others. Some are more thematic. We had one I'll show you in a minute
about work that looks quite different from this one, but here is the question: "It is often said that
many of the humanistic disciplines of the second half of the twentieth century are marked by
their interest in language itself. In other words, language becomes not just a medium but a
problem. To what extent are the problems of language foregrounded in the novels of this period?
What are the consequences of this turn for the writing of fiction? How does such a foregrounding
affect the traditional terms of the novel, concerns of the novel, the creation of character, the
relationship between style and content, problems of verisimilitude, etc.?"
Now, you would have to choose one of those groups, and then within one of those groups of
novels you would need to choose three of the four to talk about. So, the essay will be bringing
together three novels around one of these questions. The reason I group them this way is because
some of the novels on the syllabus you could put together and have a very partial account of
what fiction in this period looks like. So, say your novels were Barth, Pynchon and Foer. All of
them have very similar formal ambitions. Okay. I would not make it possible for you to do that.
So, I'm looking for you to be able to take texts that seem unlike in their concerns and in their
formal elements and put them into conversation with each other around a particular question.
Okay. Similarly, I would not ask you to do Woman Warrior, Bluest Eye, and Known World. I
wouldn't ask you to do probably Woman Warrior, Bluest Eye, and Human Stain, either. It's all too
much about identity in somewhat similar terms, so I wouldn't ask you those novels together. So,
you can see that I mix them up. Don't forget Black Boy. That will be on the exam. If you joined

the course in the middle of reading week--in the middle of shopping period--you might want to
go back and fill that into your reading, if you haven't read that.
Let's see. Questions about the essay questions. I highly, highly recommend that you take the time
to outline. If you're not used to taking essay exams, or even if you are, it is a huge help. It's
actually a time saver. It ensures that you don't get bogged down in sentence constructions. When
we grade these, typically what we do is make checks in the margin every time you make a
specific point and use a specific citation of a specific part of a novel. So, you can't quote 'cause
you don't have the books in front of us, in front of you, although if you do want to use passages
that are on the exam you can quote from those. You can use parts of the exam for quotation in the
essay, but you do need to say, "When Morrison starts each chapter of The Bluest Eye with that
quotation from the primer, she is highlighting how learning language is also learning a kind of
racial prejudice and it's a kind of racial prejudice rooted in aesthetic appreciation. She highlights
the colors that appear in the primer and prettiness of Jane's dresses." Okay. I didn't quote
anything from The Bluest Eye, but I'm pointing to it in such a way that that would have several
checks in the column in the margin, and basically what we do is we rack it up and we see
whether for each novel you've made a number of specific points that add up to an argument.
Now, in this essay this is the only place where we really don't want you simply coughing up
lecture or something that you've discussed in section. This is, like the papers, something of an
opportunity to draw things together in an original way. There are lots of threads that connect the
novels in the syllabus. If you've been attending the lectures, you will already have lots of those in
your notes, so you can draw from that, but you should be thinking about it on your own. For the
passages, when you start to make claims about why the passage is important, in the context of
the novel as a whole, you may find yourself using arguments that were made in lecture or in
section, and that's fine. So, it gives you the larger context in which you can show us that you're
able to look at the specific words on the page and tell us something about them. That's the skill
we're testing in the passages. Here, it's more your synthetic knowledge and your way of bringing
things together. So in studying for the exam portion, as I say, read over the paper topics and
make little lists for yourself of kinds of evidence that you would point to, maybe four or five bits
of evidence for each novel, or for a number of novels, that might help you answer a question like
that on the exam. Or, sit and think; read a question and think to your mind, "okay, which scenes
would I note; which scenes would I want to talk about?" That's a good exercise for studying. Any
questions about this? Okay.
Let me show you one more. So, that's a very, sort of, literary kind of version of the exam
question. Let me show you something of a more, perhaps a cultural studies version. Here's one
about work. The quotation is from Plot Against America, Philip Roth's recent novel, which is
what I taught of his last year, so that obviously would not occur on our exam. ""The men worked
fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week. The women worked all the time with little
assistance from labor-saving devices." Discuss the status of work in the post-1945 American
novel. Who works and who doesn't? How is work represented? What kinds of work are
valorized? What kinds are vilified? What is the place of labor in these novels' vision of
America?" So, that's a more thematic question, but in all of these we really want you to be noting
how narratives are put together, how language is used, what choices the novel made in
privileging either description of character and development of character, development of setting,
creativity in voices and tones.
So, all those formal things that have to do with language choices would still be relevant. Here
you might want to talk about the work of the writer as that novel imagines it. We've talked about
that over, on and off over the course of the term. What is the literary project? What does the
literary project have to do with other kinds of work? So, generally, partly because this course is

cross-listed in American Studies, I like to have something of a balance between those very
literary formal questions like that first one I showed you and this one, which is a little bit more
about a vision of America. Okay. Any questions?
You probably have your ways of studying by now. Even freshmen have been here for a year. Let
me just say a couple things about the process of studying and of taking exams that maybe will be
helpful to you. My ideal way of studying for an exam is to use sleep strategically. Sleep can do
amazing things for the consolidation of knowledge in your brain. Maybe some of you have
discovered this already. Maybe some of you have discovered its negative, what it does not do for
you when you do not sleep. If you can arrange it so that you spend time so you get all your
reading done, read over all your notes, then sit down with those paper topics, and while you're
sitting with the paper topics, that's when you move from going from the passive mode to the
active mode. So, you review all your notes, sit down with the paper topics. In that active mode,
do what I was suggesting. Think of scenes that pertain to those topics for a number of the novels,
for each one. Just work through that for awhile, until you can't do it anymore, and then go to
sleep right away. Do not check your e-mail. Do not browse the web. Do not shoot the breeze
with your roommate. [laughs] Just go to bed. There is a lot of research that's been done about the
effect of doing this without distracting yourself. You still get a benefit if you distract yourself and
then go to bed. You still retain more of the knowledge the next morning, but it's even better if
you do it without distracting yourself. So, take it to bed with you, so you can sink right into bed,
into sleep, later. Even if you can only nap even for twenty minutes or half an hour, it still has an
effect. So, say you have to study for this exam during one half of the day, and then you have to
go and take another exam during the second half of the day. Take a nap in between. It's probably
worth the half hour you don't spend thinking about more paper topics, or reading your notes over
again, or looking at the novels to do that. It's probably worth it. Okay. So that's my first tip: Use
sleep strategically.
My second reflection on exam taking is that--you may dismiss this out of hand, given the
profession that I then took up--but I actually used to like taking exams. And the reason was that,
once you went through that work of reading things over, processing it, after you took the exam
itself, I always felt that the knowledge of a course was really my own then. It came together in a
way that was much more solid for me than before I took the exam. So, right now the themes of
the course might just be a collection of memories, or partial memories, and in your notes, and
sort of chaotic. But once you study for the exam, and you get some distance from it--with sleep-and you actually write the exam, that knowledge is really your own. So, I would encourage you
to see exam period, not just in this class but in all your classes, as a real time, an important time,
of consolidation. You worked very hard during the term in all your classes, I hope, and whatever
you did can really become yours in a new way during this time. So use it well. And, I hope that
you'll-in some way, some part of you--will enjoy that process of really coming to own that
knowledge. Okay. Any questions about the exam? Okay. Any questions about anything in the
course? Eli.
Student: I wanted to ask why "1945" is particularly important.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Why postwar? Well, in America that marks two things for me. One
is the rise of the mass market and that changesWell, actually I would say three things. The rise
of the mass market changes the relationship between readership and the literature that's out there.
So, it used to be that "high literature" was not published in paperback, but the rise of the massmarket paperback meant that suddenly books that would never be accessible to a sort of average
middle-class or working-class person suddenly became so. So, it's a huge watershed in the
demographics of readership. So, that's one reason.

A second reason is related to this, and that's that hundreds of thousands of men came back and
went to college on the GI Bill who had never been to college before. Nobody in their families
had ever been to college before. This also changed the readership dramatically. It was a time of
an enormous boom in college enrollments, and part of that was a huge boom in English
enrollments. Literature was a way for people who had never been to college before to feel that
they were entering in to the upper middle class because it was a kind of pursuit that was marked
by its bourgeois prestige, or its prestige marked you as bourgeois. So, for people interested in
raising their class status, and that was lots of people, coming into the educational system, higher
education, for the first time, literature was very important. There is a whole story about why
literature is no longer that class-marking enterprise that it was at mid century that has to do with
the rise of writing, the competence in writing being more important than the competence in
literary tradition to mark you as an educated person. So, that's an interesting story in itself, but in
general 1945 is the beginning of that.
The third thing is that, by 1945, the innovations of modernism are really very well established.
The big careers of early century literary enterprise are totally established, and they have been
assumed almost fully into the institution of the university through the New Criticism. The New
Criticism was that method of reading literature that was determining how people were reading in
classrooms, how all those new college students were reading in classrooms. That set the agenda
for what would come next, so in that context someone like John Barth, trained intensively in the
New Criticism, had to decide what he was going to do as a literarily ambitious writer to innovate.
So, it was a question of, how could literature carry on and do something new? And there are lots
of different answers to that.
And another answer to it, that is partly the result of the GI Bill explosion of education, that's the
changing demographic of who gets to read and who gets to write. So, women, people of color,
begin to change the agendas of modernism simply by getting that education and entering into the
academy. So, Toni Morrison is a great example of that. So is Maxine Hong Kingston. There was
this sense that modernism had not even begun to touch on the experience of vast swaths of
society, and writers like Morrison and Kingston were very busy wanting to rectify that. So, it
marks a change that's beyond just a change in readership. The demographic change in readership
and in education really begins to change the agenda of literature. So, that's why '45 is my marker.
It's a crude one, like all these things. You can't say, "Well, why not 1942?" It doesn't quite work
that specifically. Okay. Other questions about the course, about terms, about books. Yes.
Student: Of the novels you read, what are your favorite ones? I know you have them, too.
Professor Amy Hungerford: You do, do you? Gosh. That's really, really hard. I do love The
Known World. I really admire it. I think it's genuinely doing something new, and that's hard to do
right now; so I love it, and I loved it as a reading experience, even when I first read it. It really
captured my imagination. I have always loved and hated Blood Meridian. I love and hate
Cormac McCarthy. I've spent a lot of time thinking about him, writing about him, reading his
work, and while I am really in awe of his ability especially to use the far reaches of our
vocabulary in English. Talk about someone who really makes room in the language. He can
really do that. If you read the first few pages of one of his earlier novels, Suttree, you get a
fantastic image of this. It's a very Joycean novel, that one. The vocabulary-- You just have to
look up every third word. It's really incredible.
And I'm really interested in the way he is focused on craft, both as a writer, but all kinds of
crafts. He has this play called The Last Stonemason. I think it's called The Last Stonemason or
just The Stonemason. The Stonemason. He's interested in these old arts, physical arts like
forging. There's a great chapter on smithing in a novel called The Child of God where the

language of the smithy is folded into this meditation on aesthetics, talks about what color the fire
and the metal should be at every moment of reforging an ax handle. Of course, in true McCarthy
style, the ax handle will then be used to chop up dead bodies and skin people, so that's very
McCarthyesque too. But at the same time I just find him frustratingly empty.
The Road I adored. It was a terrifying read. I had insomnia one night, and I started to read it at
about 1:30 in the morning, and I finished it about 5:30 and I was terrified. Have I told you
about The Road, what it's about? It takes place ten years into a nuclear winter, and it's about a
father and son making their way down from Appalachia to the Gulf Coast, for no apparent reason
except that the father seems to think that somehow they'll be able to survive better once they get
to the coast. Meanwhile, in this world, there are all these cannibalistic gangs that have started.
Women are used to produce babies that they then eat. It's really completely bleak and terrifying
and the relationship between the father and the son is extremely touching, and I have a little boy
who is about the same age and oh, my God, I was just--it was really terrifying to read this all
alone in the middle of the night. I sort of got in bed with my son later and just kind of cuddled
with him to remember that he was still alive.
But, at the end, there is this sense of the boy carrying the light. The father says, "We're carrying
the light. We're the good guys." And the son sort of repeats that. By the end--and I won't tell you
what happens 'cause you should read it--but there is this affirmation of that light, but what the
light is, who knows? There is sort of a Promethean narrative there. There is also a messianic
narrative there. I think, personally, my own meaning of it, is that it's McCarthy meditating on the
end of his own life. McCarthy is a very old man with a very young son, and I think he was
thinking about his own death. And the fate of the father in that novel, I think, is very much about
McCarthy's sense of himself. So yeah, McCarthy is a tough one.
Marilynne Robinson I like a lot also. I like the beauty of her prose. That biblical cadence that she
and McCarthy both have I really like. I love the outdoor imagery, the nature imagery, of that
novel. And I love Roth for my own obscure and perverse reasons. Yeah. So I sort of have my
favorites, but I like them--I, really, there are things that I like about all of them. An interesting
story about liking novels: I hated Salinger. I really hated Salinger, because I found him so
pretentious and affected. I just hated that tone of voice, until I was working on this book on
religion and I read Franny and Zooey. And here you can tell most of my great thought happens
in the middle of the night. So, I had been thinking about Franny and Zooey, and I suddenly woke
up in the middle of the night thinking, "I know what style is for inFranny and Zooey!" So, I got
up and I wrote it down, and that lecture that I gave on Franny and Zooey is part of my new book.
And when the book was reviewed for presses, a part of it, one of my readers said it was the best
reading he had ever seen of contemporary fiction. And it made me love Franny and Zooey 'cause
suddenly I had something to think about other than well, this is so pretentious. I had a reason
why that tone and that style was there. So, thinking about books can really change your sense of
whether you like them or not in a self--I know--in a self-serving way. Now who's pretentious?
Okay. Other questions. Oh, yes.
Student: I really love Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, and I was talking to my roommate about
it, wondering why it isn't on the syllabus. I know it's taught in American literature courses, but he
thought it might be like, academic snobbery, because it's popular, and Oprah Winfrey talks about
it
Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh, no, not at all. I used to teach Beloved, and I stopped because
of that, because we put it on the 127 syllabus, partly. And that wasn't here when I first started
teaching; so, the first time I offered this lecture course, 127 didn't exist. And then we put it in
place in the department, and because it was on that syllabus, I held off. I still think Beloved is an

amazing novel. I also have the length problem in that part of the period. I'm sure you didn't
notice that the novels are long in that part of the syllabus. Beloved is another really huge novel,
so that it's a problem. So, I decided instead of putting it on, to rely on the fact that most people
would either have read it in high school, or at least a majority would have read it in high school,
or in 127, and that I could count on that knowledge, at least in a contextual sense. But no, it has
nothing to do with academic snobbery. Now, I used to get pissed off because when it was on the
syllabus I would always get, certain evaluations would come in and say, "I don't know why we
read Beloved. It's so overrated." That was the snobbery, and that made me upset 'cause I thought
well, that's just a failure of openness as a reader, not to think about why it was so powerful, even
if you don't like it yourself. But, your answer was right. It's simply because it's taught a lot
elsewhere, and then those other practical reasons of length. What else? Uh huh.
Student: Are there authors that you would have included, if it were a longer semester.
Professor Amy Hungerford: Oh. Well, I'm sure, yeah. So, let's see. What else would I put on
there? Well, let me think. Louise Erdrich is interesting to me. There is a long novel of hers
called The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which I think is an imaginative
conceit. It is really fascinating. The premise of the novel is, it's this young woman who is a
wonderfully gifted pianist who goes--I can't remember where she's heading. It's been now a long
time since I read the novel. She's traveling, and she gets washed away in a flood, a freak flood of
a river. This is out West. And, when she finally surfaces, she crawls up on the bank, and she finds
the body of a young priest who was on his way to be the priest at a mission on a reservation, on
an Indian reservation, I think, in the Dakotas. So, she cuts off her hair, and she puts on the
priest's robes, and she pretends to be that priest. And she becomes--she cross-dresses and is the
priest at the reservation for her entire life. And I just think it's a fascinating premise for a novel,
and it's very well done and her language is quite wonderful. Again, I am ambivalent about it,
because I find the ending facile. It finally resolves all the problems that this situation produces in
a way that I don't find complex enough, or challenging enough. It's just too easy to make it all
come together the way she does. So, that's one.
Let me think. There are many, many other novels. I'm perpetually torn whether to put The
Road on, or Blood Meridian, or some other McCarthy novel. I've taught at least four different
Roth novels spanning the period from 1960 to the present. Other writers Now, I don't know
why I'm blanking, now that I think about this. Who else would I like to put on there? Oh, Eggers.
Now I "fess up." I really would have loved to do What is the What as our last novel. Now, Eggers
started out immature, in the same way that, I think, Jonathan Safran Foer is. But he grew up, and
it's a beautiful thing. So, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has a lot of that sort of
kind of clichd, postmodern trickery in it, but by the time he gets to What is the What, that novel
is like nothing else. There is no equivalent of that novel, to my knowledge, anywhere in our
tradition. It's just an astonishing inhabitation of another person's life, but in real time. I was able
to have dinner with him and some other people when he came as the Schlesinger writer a few
years ago, and I said, "Did you find it confining to give yourself over in that creative way to this
other person's story?" And he said, "Yeah. It was terrible. I'd be writing 'The truck went down the
road.'" He'd have to call Valentino and say, "Valentino, that truck--was the road gravel, or was it
paved? And was it dusty? Was there stuff kicking up, or was it just flat?" It was just amazing, the
degree to which he put his writing pen at the service of another person and their story. It's really
remarkable, so, given that extremely confining setup, he makes that novel truly literary, in my
mind. It has a real form, it has a very lively voice, and it's extremely powerful and affecting. So,
that's something I would love to have, but again it's a huge novel, so this is the problem. It's so
long. I think I just need two semesters. I think that would be better. Yes.
Student: What about Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book?

Professor Amy Hungerford: I haven't read it yet, but I have to say the reviews that I hear about
it--so, was it Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?--the structure of the plot makes me doubt, a
little bit, because it's just another hunt. So, it's this nine-year-old boy who loses his father on
9/11, and he finds in his father's effects a key that's marked "Black," I think. It has a little label
on it, and so he goes around in New York City finding everyone by the name of Black that he can
find. So, it has this structure that's so similar to Everything is Illuminated. That hunt structure just
made me think, I wonder whether this is just a one-trick writer, that he has this idea and this is
what it's always going to be? That doesn't necessarily mean that someone is not a great writer.
Roth is kind of a one-trick pony, in this way, too. He has his own repetitions from novel to novel.
Most writers I know do, but that seemed a little too--It was a little too close for me, so I don't
know. I have to find time to read it. Denis Johnson: I did actually-- I was very interested in
having Jesus' Son as the last novel, too. I'm going to write a review for the Yale Review on Denis
Johnson's work by the end of July, so by then I'll know what I think about him, too. Other
questions? Or shall I let you go? Any other questions? Okay. So I will see you at the exam, and I
think some sections are having review sessions, so check with your TF.
[end of transcript]
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