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It's my pleasure to welcome our destiny university here are students and faculty members who were present for this first session of the first international writers conference at this university. For the benefit of our many guests here from abroad especially those who are participating in the program I'd like to set you straight about the pretension these. Literary cultural intellectual which the conference may impart. The room in which you are meeting is also a part of the educational establishment of our country. This is a room which is a landmark in the borough of Brooklyn the old Paramount Theater building it's a room which in our typically American fashion we've converted for the uses you see. Where I'm standing there were once accommodations for another two thousand seats now it's a spot where a championship basketball team plays games. A short distance from where I am standing and I say this with a great deal of. Thought from the. Because I know George is going to be standing in this spot in a moment near where I'm standing is ones where. Fanny Brice rolled her eyes and Eddie Cantor told his jokes and Rudy Vallee held forth George so you will have. A considerable standard to live up to. This session will conclude in about an hour and fifteen minutes the second session is at two o'clock in this room. And at the information center in the main lobby of this building as you come in there are people who can help guide our guests from other parts of the city in the country to conveniently located places to have lunch. George style is a writer or critic. A mining who can stand on his own credentials. And whose credential as I well know. He currently is a fellow at Churchill College Cambridge University. He has been a recipient of the O'Henry Prize for fiction. He is the author of the book Death of tragedy which has now been translated into its eighth the language and Tolstoy or ghosty of ski. He is one of those rare critics from the Western world and in the western world who has had much opportunity and desire for contact with the East. And he is one of those few who writes with a critical pen from the platform of the West whose works have been translated into Polish and Czech and hug area. But it's an especial pleasure for me to present George Steiner here because we're over friends and formerly fellow students at the University of Chicago where we first met. In fact George reminded me this morning that it was almost twenty years ago now that he and I confronted Robert Hutchens who was then chancellor and persuaded him we'd be students to give us enough money to hold in the year in one nine hundred forty seven I think it was George the first collegiate model United Nations in the country and as I remember advice Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Douglas where are our keynoters on that occasion. George was very difficult to get along with even then. I last crossed paths with him this last summer when we both were on the faculty of the Europa forum had out lock in Austria and experience which for us we being among the very first I think people of American citizenship to have been invited to teach on that faculty it was quite an interesting and in some ways tense experience for us George will be taking a sabbatical for a year from Cambridge next year to assume a distinguished professor chair at a neighboring institution whose call letters or N.Y.U. here in New York Georgia gives me great pleasure to present to you from this platform and to this group and on the occasion of beginning this conference Georgetown thank you all who brought us ladies and gentleman. That a critic should open and address a meeting with very many distinguished novelists poets calls for a word of gratitude and embarrassment a critic is a servant of the right and his task is to the best of his ability to make the writer's echo more living and sometimes in our period where the critic seems to dominate we have forgotten this. But the defense might be one to which Michelle was with us this morning draws attention in his very important recent essays on more then more tens cunning amused observation that there are very many good writers and very few good critics. My theme this morning is that of silence and the poet silence and the writer in both Hebrew and Greek myths solid and Greek sort of there is a video ancient fear the idea that language is itself a kind of mirror Oculus outrage not a natural privilege not a gift taken for granted but a gift fraught with danger as we know from that tower broken in Babeu. From the poet Orpheus torn apart alive from the many legends that speak of those who because they could sing and speak well went blind as if sight had to be given up for insight. In ancient Misawa Gene again and again we come to this motif beware of the poet beware of the writer who is a master of the human word. In the Platonic CRATYLUS in the dialogue Socrates warns that the mystery of the origin of speech must not be pursued too far let us wonder at it and examine it but we shall not find an answer. Possessed of speech but also possessed by it. The word having elected man the infirm in my out of man's condition men have broken free from a great silence the silence of the world before they mastered it but this breaking free the human voice sowing Echo where there was none before. Is both Miller cool and outrage sacrament and blasphemy first it has cut man sharply from the world of the Animal Man's ancestor and sometime neighbor the animal which if we rightly grasp all those legends of the Centaur the Sphinx the Satre the animal which only slowly retreats from man's body and only unwillingly gives up its housing in man's blood. Reek missile logy is an easily aware that this break with the animal. Has put a very great burden upon man. And this ancient sort finds its modern versions again into great Misawa G.'s of the twentieth century in Freud's intimation that they were saffron man which was tending back to an earlier silence to an earlier in articulacy and in the sort of the great living French anthropologist Claude Levy spose that man self banishment from nature hinges on two acts is mastery of fire is decision to eat cooked and not raw flesh and his mastery of speech. If speaking man has made of the animals his mute servant or more often his enemy that just remember the ancient Persian proverb which defines an animal as one who cannot understand when a man cries for help if we have broken away from that Kingdom we have also see through the act of speech challenge to the gods the power of the gods that is why the Tower of Babel was cast down and Tantalus the Greek using the vessel of speech to bring down the gossip and secrets of the gods to men and doomed forever for his act the Apostle speaks of them lock us in the beginning was the word that strange and haunting scriptural theme if this is so and if the word as same Thomas Aquinas says if the word in God is total communication without misunderstanding. If language in God creates what it refers to how then does human speech relate to the luggers How does human speech bear upon this greater model of instantaneous understanding now in the poet in the writer and this danger and this glory they are both most manifest it is the writer and I think this is our main theme perhaps in this conference who guards and multiplies the vital being of speech in him old words are kept resonant new words a brought up to the light from the active dark of his consciousness the poet makes and already at the beginning of Greek literature we find a sought again taking up the more pain sorts on Homer and many times since in all our minds that when the poet creates he's doing something very difficult to understand and which at one crucial point challenges the gods or God if you will namely he can first of one gift man was not given the gift of lasting life and already in the Greeks the idea of Homer's divine power to make Agamemnon and Helen and Achilles live live for ever or as long as men will speak and remember this act of miracle was felt to be both divine and rebellious there is danger in it. If the gods ever wish Achilles an egg a man and Helen to stay to outlast the accident of the death of the body because the poet can give them the one thing man was not to have survive and enduring life and every time in our language we use a future tense of a verb when we speak in the future tense this too is as a great Marxist dream last reminds us a kind of radiant scandal annoying at mortality the sea urn the prophet in whom language our most vital seas beyond beyond your life and mine and beyond his own he anticipates empty only so usurps and these two words to anticipate and to usurp define the word presumption to presume to look ahead to say no to death home or the Master Builder and rebel against time in whom we find again and again the boast my we need Word will outlast your death Homer goes blind or fierce is torn to blind and bleeding shreds Yet such is the power of the writer of poetry that the word will not stop it sings out in his dead mouse membre Yassin P.B.S. media doom lobby tour on me me me a room mere room of it cries out Miriam wonder miracle Marvel but also a scandal to the gods a dead head pouring out living sparks of words out of the gates of death he will not keep quiet. And in that strange legend of Apollo and my C.S. of Apollo the god to the divine poet among the gods for laying a life torturing to deaths his rival his mortal rival Masi asked do we not hear again a bitter warning of the intimacies and necessary vengeance is between the guards and the writer the finest of living Polish poets had a bat is written on this seem saying as it were that the poets are not the sons of Apollo that would be too easy they are the sons of mass Yes the Guard is already turning away the guard with nerves of artificial fiber walking along the gravel pass between box trees the victor departs wondering whether or not out of Marcy as howling there will someday arise a new brand of art let us say concrete suddenly at the Gods feet for the petrified Nightingale Apollo looks back and sees the tree to which mossy ass was fastened has gone white haired completely to speak to assume the privilege singularity and solitude of man of we who use language is dangerous to speak with that utmost force of the word which is a Pulitzer and the writers is supremely dangerous thus to the writer perhaps more than to most of us there is the temptation of silence silence as a place of shelter when Apollo is too near. Now these seem of the ambiguity in the genius of language languages rivaling the gods and languages our greatest heritage this seem goes through western literature from medieval Latin poetry to Mahler May and to Russian symbolised verse the motif of the necessary limitation of the word do not go too far do not speak too well do not speak of too many things we find it again and again we find it in the Elizabethans in their distinction between the writer as a richer a richer out and the writer as an overreach or the man who has gone too far and who like Marlowe's Faust the Somali himself seems to risk damnation what is said on the other side of language the question is asked very early it is asked in the great mystical Perth's the medieval and Renaissance period in St John of the cross you remember his warning in three May done the no soupy quidem no sub yet no don't ask yet I say again do not think that you will go on a ladder of words beyond what is allowed you care for draw back at the limit and this sense of drawing back let us not try to say everything let us be careful of our speech this becomes the center the principal metaphor in downplays parody so as Dampier sends nearer and nearer to the vision of God words begin to fail him the words for behind him on his path at first he hopes that he will be able to tell a spy speech something of what he's experiencing. And then there comes a marvelous moment very early on in the tense canned of the but I do so when he were arms us ill come to me and I'd be queerly he known Simpang now seek a law suit very dull MUITO I suspected windy lot of em that MUITO suspected if you want to know says done to what I'm trying to say to you I ask a person who cannot speak MUITO the mute person the person who has no words adoring may perhaps be able to report to you the truth of a divine vision I the poet who have too many words and no longer able to tell you this is early on the tense can go but he keeps moving and moving higher up the ladder of light and he finds he cannot translate anymore the truce of the vision is complete to him but the words die in his mouse and we can see the exact moment where this occurs in verse fifty five of the last cando of Canto Surtees three in patent law Nostra our language fails him and he says this is a terrible and a wonderful thing and what does our language become this is I think a miraculous moment in poetry done to you at the height of vision perhaps a man who more than any other poet that has ever written knew his task accomplished knew himself the master of words and of language who had expressed more than the human mind had ever dared contemplate and now he's standing on the stretch shoulder of God in what happens to his speech the writer of writer the poets of poets Oh my eyes are puke or. My story will be short or will be Sylvia. Tritium fun there than that of an infant child been young. Who is still using his mouth and tongue at his mother's breast who has not even begun to speak I the poet at the summit of my of my act really become the unweaned baby who only makes nonsense syllables who still at his mother's breast for I have no other words at my command the circle is complete at its outermost limit at this sound river like speech returns to the helpless inarticulacy of the infant those who would urge language beyond its divinely ordained limitation says Done day who would turn the log us into the word out as men thrusting their hands into the fire when they merely seek to gather light if one tradition in Western literature has found at the limits of language a great light a great blaze of light another finds music the notion that language might tend towards music that music is a greater form that it sounds more that it says it more deeply this is a very very ancient idea as Ancient to supply SAG Orian. Design of the universe as a series of harmonic relations of essentially musical relations music astronomy and mathematics three languages which in neoplatonic and by Sagarin doctrine are more eloquent more so than the language you and I in the right use that difficult paradoxical language of work about which it is so hard to agree music seems more powerful it moves old men with an immediate literacy and in the garden at Belmont in the Merchant of Venice look how the floor of heaven is sick inlaid with patterns of bright gold there is not the smallest orb which thou behold sed but in his motion like an angel sings still quieting to the young I'd care to be him such harmony is an immortal serves such harmony which alone tells us of immortality and which expresses love Shakespeare says this over and over as a poet cannot as a writer can not. And thus we see the development of a doctrine very important in modern literature that poetry is a kind of preparation for music a first step a premise you would to the realisation of the composer that the poem is always a libretto a lyric waiting to be set by the composer music I want to chose as valet and say yes and the influence of this idea is tremendous Hence the many novels for example in which the artist batiks A long is a musician such as mom's Dr Faustus the idea that in the musician the final mystery of art is more revealed more demonic is a greater energy than in the man who only can use words this thought with its powerful backing in the German Romantic movement culminates of course in Wagner and Wagner is of literature as crucial is of music and he makes of the relationship between the word in the music the crux of his vision in the total work of art in the give some construct bows will be reconciled he says in a higher unity and thus in act two of Tristan the words become outcry first and then a kind of pure stutter of swooning consciousness and then music reaches out for them to embrace him and Wagner says now they are united but I think a writer must be careful because music is a master of this bargain and the union is one in which music necessarily governs the word. Now this sort that we who try to use words or to be writers are somehow. Servants of music that language is not the highest form has a tremendous influence on literature from body layer to prove it and on the philosophy of language from meter to the early valérie there's an early letter valiantly to She'd in April eight hundred ninety one which admirably summarizes the torment in the anguish he says I'm listening to Lohengrin all the time I'm studying the score dear she I shall write no more what is a use for me to write poems I defy you my dear friend to name to me any page ever written by a novelist or dramatist or pert which rises the height of the few simple opening bars of the motif of the Graal and of the Lohengrin prelude Why then should a man be a writer and this question runs through the whole of the symbolist movement from bowed lair to bear Lennon Malar may. But all is not loss in other poets and writers the sort of being near to music of being almost music breaks forth and a kind of jubilation. Of intellectual and moral triumph that's real summits to office and a body of poems on the edge of music saying I am almost music and this is my glory. Today the principle energies the habits of mind of the symbolist movement in a Wagner ism I'm no longer a strong as they were though we still remember T.S. Eliot's anxiety to call those poems the four quartets and the many present poets as repond John Berryman who speak of their poems as songs of kind and the strengths of the musical metaphor in the poet's account of his own task. And this idea has an extraordinary relevance I think to many of our lives many of us who come home from an evening predict belief words are our trade and who turn rather to music to music which seems to fulfill less language cannot the two fold ideal it is pose untranslatable it is unique to itself and it is immediately comprehensible thus argue modern philosophers such as Levy Straw's who speaks of the composer is a creature truly like unto the gods even more than the bird and who asks by what Mystery does a man invent a melody We're back with by Sakura's or much more humbly many of us today particularly the young live in rooms where the record cabinet has replaced the bookshelf but both these ideas that outside language there is light or that there is music there are positive ideas and not ideas of defeat and the spare. The surge aspect of my seem this morning is different it is the notion of the cessation of language the entrance of the novelist or playwright or poet into silence the idea that the word borders on night. I may be mistaken but this motif is I believe a new one or relatively new the dramatic miss of a philosopher choosing silence because of the inexpressible quality of his message or because his civilization is not yet ready for it this motif we hear in antiquity in impaired a police on Epona and in the gnomic aloofness of head a collectors but the poet the writer who elects to keep quiet who chooses silence who chooses to break his instrument in mid-song this is something rather new as a decision as an act of spirit it seems to occur for the first time in two of the principal masters of our own modern sensibility in holder Lynn and in Rambo each of these two poets is among the Supremes poets in their respective languages holdall in is at the summit of German poetry in him as perhaps in no other European poet each poem seems inevitable no other words can possibly do and with both with Rambow poetry demanded and won the rights of the modern city those privileges of difficulty of indirection of technical autonomy which are the privileges we all recognize in the difficult modern poets but both men stop. By the age of certainty holder Lynas accomplished nearly his whole work and a few years later he enters on a quiet madness which last thirty six years certain six years of almost total silence and yet hauntingly broken now and again as in a very famous incident nine hundred twelve by flash of poetry of great poetry as great as Sat which he had seen to give up and Rambo it eighteen leaves his genius behind him and goes into a quite different kind of life from which they are poor hundreds of eloquent letters on everything under the sun but never on a line of poetry and never any reference back to what he must surely have known was a work of overwhelming genius and importance why these two men chose silence is much disputed by scholars What he certainly is that their example and the mists of that example has had an enormous impact There are many who feel believe particularly in German philosophy that Holden's entrance into silence was not a defeat not a hideous loss or tragedy but the natural summit of a great poet that in some way which is both mystical and yet very simple very concrete the poet reaches a summit beyond which he enters into silence and of Rambo we hear that he chose the deed rather than the word the act rather than the poem but poetry and language and literature for those who cannot perform who cannot actually take the world in their hands. And execute their sots in action and the dust even at its summit literature is in some way a smaller thing than the human deed both sees gestures of silence. With a still but there is a certain even more recent one a temptation to keep quiet which is strong in the present condition of literature and of many of our lives as expressed in the last sentence of that brilliant recent American novel James Purdy's cabin right begins principal character says no I won't be a writer in a place and time like the present. Coughed I would have known precisely what this sentence me. As you recall Orton's says of Kafka the diff there is a figure creative in representative of our age as Dan in good a word of theirs it is he to which I think we must rejoin that the representation is a tragic and paradoxical wop to cast out the act of writing was a mere wreck till a scandal a near impossibility. Accomplished if a toll at the cost of abandonment of personal life and hope and happiness so radical as to be almost intolerable Kafka writes a style which is Bose more and less and style a kind of live nakedness no syllable is ever taken for granted Kafka names the objects of life again as Adam did in Eden but this time in a garden of ash and out. Hence a marvelous scrupled the tormented honesty of his language the letters in the letters to me may not the greatest of Modern Love Letters come back and back to the impossibility of verbalizing of finding language which is not yet sullied we're on to cliché made empty by our meditated waste the entirety of Kafka's creative effort seems to be governed by the twofold impossibility which expressed to his great friend Mark's broad and I quote the impossibility of not writing a story or the impossibility of writing in German or in check or in any other language available to him. Tough got because he listened more than any other writer to the desk of the fear growing inside language because he knew that language can betray good the coming of darkness as no one else did not in any varied allegoric sense but in minute prophecy if ever there was a great writer to whom the cliche hope that the writer is our prophet applies it was indeed he the metamorphosis that great story is a piece of literal history a report Tosh of man's reduction to and him ality see for vermin the word applied to Great God some is that which was to be applied a very few years later to six million other human beings and in the penal colony Kafka says more icing than any man has said since of those camps which did not yet even exist it were as if he had seen a would have Birchers occurred in German a boon volved and then heard the other name inside the simple word. Kafka knew that a great engine manatee was coming upon man and that language would serve that in humanity and be made vile bite that the act of writing in such a time can be either frivolous the cry in the poem or the play or the novel drowning out the cry in the street beautifying life when it should not be beautified or the DID might be impossible to write in Kafka we see the emergence of a crucial and tragic insight covered in another formula by the title of this conference the only nation a commitment the insight that there are times when silence is the truest or perhaps the only form of humane speech nine years off the cuff caused deaths on the eve of barbarism shouldn't there concluded the libretto the incomplete libretto for his great opera Moses and our own an opera a dramatic parable of inarticulate revelation which ends with Moses cry as he falls down on the stage oh word now word that I lack I have no more speech after which came the events for which words indeed should and must fail us after which comes a period in the heart of our civilization which is in the full technical in very simple sense unspeakable the time of unspeakable history unspeakable as outside the most humane of human acts which is speech which is the word that unspeakable it has put the nature of the legitimacy of literature in shop question. Because language served at Auschwitz because words could be found for all those sings and men were not struck dumb for using them the poets sometimes have found their instrument broken or unusable again. In the song of exotic our scale proclaims that the true word the Quicken voice of the living spirit is that it will not be a thousand they helped us above the spot these taught if you have a sow's and words the word the word is dead one thinks of another poet's despairing witness Elisabeth's Pasha I break open starts from far away and find nothing and again nothing and then suddenly a word but its a word in a foreign tongue she cannot use it as a poet what had been the conclusion to an exercise in linguistic logical analysis a proposition intentionally neutral stripped of all emotive content had suddenly become a strange and terrible truth or possibility for all writers I mean if it can shines conclusion to the truck. Where of one cannot speak there of one must be silent but this sense of a desk in language of the unspeakable is by no means limited to one language by no means limited to the German poetic tradition in the crisis of one thousand nine hundred thirty eight man who was later to become one of the leaders of our present see it or Adam of asked himself whether the sort of being a writer was not a sinister joke in a period such as this whether the writer would ever again have a humane idiom at his reach and I quote. He said already as a child we knew that the name of God couldn't come very easily any more from our mouths it's been overused degraded it's almost meaningless but what of all the other words if I or a writer need words wish life fine them today they seem to crumble in my hands there are no more names no more sharp forms I'm not sure words to survive and then in one thousand nine hundred forty one needs diary said Now today words are used up worn down frayed they've become the carcasses of marvelous words of long ago phantom words which we mows in our jaws without meaning and last year writing in his journal UNESCO's says the following It is as if through becoming involved in literature the writer has used up all possible symbols without really understanding their meaning they no longer have any vital significance for me who try to be a playwright words have killed images or are concealing them a civilization of words a civilization distraught words create confusion limberness or are difficult to translate words are not the word perhaps with a capital the fact is that word say nothing he goes on if I may put it that way there are no words anymore for the deepest experience which men and women have the more I tried to explain myself as a writer the more I try to explain myself to my readers the less I manage it of course not every scene is unsayable in words only the living truth pause here for a moment an important writer saying that what you can't say in words anymore is only the living truth a grim sarcastic. The plays of Beckett are often possessed of this insight they in the see it or they represent seem at times to be straining toward silence we can conceive I think of a play in which nothing will be said amiss you begets characters in which each personage will struggle toward the futility or blasphemy of speech only to have the sound strangled in their grim azing mouths a plane which the first word spoken will be such a shock that it will bring down the curtain or to put it quite simply in the words of the German philosopher of language Ardor No no poetry after Auschwitz Now these are today no macabre fantasies no shimmering paradoxes for grim Marion's the question of whether the poet should speak or be silent of whether language isn't a condition of the service purpose is a real question has our civilization by the sufferings it has endured and wrought forfeited for a time for a moment of history perhaps its claim to that indispensable luxury which we call our literature and one is tempted to make brave and lifting noises particularly at the opening of a conference to which one is privileged to be with important writers one is tempted to regard it as what they are saying and writing as a sufficient answer and proof but is it in how much of what we read today and of how much is produced Do words become word. Does loom all become harder. Here perhaps is where our main task lies we who are not principally writers who are students teachers critics all of which are more or less pompous ways of saying we in this hall together today who are readers readers privileged to have the writer among us perhaps we must learn to listen very carefully so that the poet can hear again to take no word for granted lest we forget that language is a precarious miracle not something guaranteed to us not something which is invulnerable or cannot be destroyed and we need to understand. That silence is an alternative though a tragic one at certain moments in history that the poem unwritten can speak loud very loud when the words in the city are full of savagery and full of lies and I think we this morning can very simply understand it if we remember that two of those whom we had invited to be with us can do nothing but not be here today and that there not being here is or so a great and important act if we learn to interpret it here again Kafka seems to have known everything that is upon us you remember is strange his haunting parable on a disuse and the sirens. For more than two thousand years men had read the story of a disused sailing past the sirens stuffing his ears was wax because their song was of such supernatural beauty and charm that it would destroy those who would listen and draw their ship on to the mortal rocks it took Kafka to look at that story in a way no man ever done before he wondered what would happen if the sirens did not sing now the sirens he writes have a still more dangerous weapon than their song namely their silence and though admittedly such a thing is never happened still it is conceivable that someone might escape from the power of their singing but from their silence certainly no man can ever escape. And we today I think as regions as fellow beings of some of the writers here know how privileged we are that they are with us both those who speak and those who speak like the sirens without singing because from their silence we hope we believe no tyranny no lies of politics and oppression can in the long run a skate I thank you. I am a of. I said I think we'll begin by having the writers introduce themselves and say a few words about themselves Mr Burgess can you hear me. My name is added to the. First goal and. Is good. For this hour on three million. Or soothing hold of I'd like to have. All. The pieces you still will describe yourself as a writer. I suppose the best voice in the only boy writing all. Of that you know the things that I am four years away. Writing my poems from an old till I was thirty eight has been but this was because I mean reversing the process that was more did to us this morning of giving up words and taking to music I began with musician I began as a composer as I wrote so too simple is I wrote string quartet just like I played jazz piano I discovered I was not a very good musician and the words has to go over the job that notes could not do. I had to earn a living. In the Batman you could deny when I became genuinely professional not not just a gentlemanly amateur I had to write so fast that I was accused of over writing I wrote five Milton one year. And had to discover new pseudonyms very awkward so this process of alienation more recession of persona is well known to me that is who I am and I believe that we. My I made my. I am a poet hired have also taught slated to put three mainly from the German. I have also tortured universities. Germany has been the subject. At the moment. I am not teaching at university and I am only writing but I still can't regard myself as a professional writer because thanks to an American ground I don't have to be at the moment. And in fact I don't think I could face it. And therefore probably go back to university when the ground ceases and that where I certainly differ from Mr Burgess I haven't got the capacity. To turn out so much work and also perhaps I am. I am a bit closer to what. Doored Steiner said about side of silence has always been something that has interested me as well as words I need fact I have written put most on that subject I will submit and poems about the relationship of words and music I again I've also been very much attracted to music I've never been a musician but I've been times in my life when I would have wanted to be a musician well the writer. Then there is thing I have come to that in my professional life that's been. I have done a book of Beethoven's letters and conversation and dates have been this big safe it of my time extremely keen on. But I think this is a nice introduction. My name is. My name is Sawyer ik I'm a novelist an American I've just got a novel I just had a novel published in August and another one is coming out in May of this year. And that's all I do I just write what you hear me. That Mike. Was. My name is years of come from Brock Osip dimensions today in the morning. A city mentions to the ends of morning by Professor Stein in connection with the governor. For professional cycle service to resist. The writer of. The last year I am much more but my my writing back home as it is painted by the in America something to discuss baby psychologists are not paid so much. I would like my glass to be here and look forward to the discussion thank. My name is. Never sure. I've spent the. Inconvenience of going to the long messy name and shortened it to just. To hear. That checks always come up with novel ideas. Take me. Anyway I'm a what you might call a. What is it a cop up cop out there's a cop out five of. Which as you know is way out of the Middle East. I've been in the United States seven months. I'm a novelist and essayist. Began originally by writing on the Middle East. And found myself more and more involved in problems of the rest of the world as well my latest book was. A rather sinister pad a book or a bag. I hope to stay in your country after the conference for another few months and enjoy the benedictions of the country thank you. Thank you. My name is really van I come from Italy. My name is a totally than they come from Italy and they write short stories. I used to write poems then I went on to writing short stories from the Shard stories I went on to writing novels and my first novel just came out to day before yesterday titled The goodly bit. I write about to know what his and what might have been and the mystery that even a small matter holds. It isn't exactly a pleasure and it certainly isn't a pastime. But through it I think I've come in some of the brightest and clearest and calmest moments of my life. I'm beginning to think that this is a Mr Steiner's latest comment on silence. I topic is. Literature social is on is way out cop out are in and I think I'll begin by defining the terms you know this is kind of a planetary metaphor and it implies a hatred for the middle classes cop out of place between way out and. I'm going. To have a really really it's something. Violent last word of the. Way out means that you have left the establishment and left everything else behind you when you are doing something that nobody else is doing Joyce for instance in his time would have been considered way out to come about is not necessarily to sell out for money but is just to give up the struggle. Hypes silence again and in means that you have created around you a small nucleus of faddists who only know the true word and consequently these people are sort of prophetic back I suppose we can use these terms of the kind of a jumping off as for literature a socialist I don't think there is any other kind all writing a social or writing has behind it. And accretion of social meaning which every word takes on and carries with it now I just want to make one comment about this morning speech about Mr Steiner all I have to say is that as for those who are silent they were consigned to the others silence I think is no answer whatsoever it is up to the writer to be as it were a saboteur to make life as uncomfortable for everybody around him and show it to. Road test and protest and keep on protesting not what I'd like to know. Now what I'd like to know from our compatriots here is how they regard this problem how they relate to it in their own writing and in their own country because we have people from all over the world some from behind the so-called are encouraging some not. And how how they how they feel about and they relate to it. How do they feel about this social content or do they regard themselves as possibly going to ten years with a very good and well if I may say this to begin with the the novel is a popular form that beams that if one sets up as a profession mobilized one is trying to earn a living out of it and you can't earn a living out of selling say two hundred or one hundred fifty copies of them over. The publisher who sells at the end of call business lost money already and he will not be willing to a publisher another you can do the treadmill of all the publishers to your dying day publishing a few coppers and. Possibly accumulating a Ronaldo a number of families but he seems to me that the great work of the normal has been done by solid members of the bourgeoisie who sold a few thousand copies at least. That this tradition. Doesn't merely begin with a novel but begins with that piece as of the novel in this week in England the play if Shakespeare had been living today he would probably have been a novelist as it was he was a dramatist it was the only popular form available he practiced in this popular form because it satisfied a particular artistic desire but also because it made money I don't mean the tricks bear was primarily a man who was concerned so with buying a fine house in Stratford on Avon wondering around the streets of Stratford in a fine hung gallery and cloak of red velvet spending money at the rate of three thousand pounds or nine thousand dollars a year. The fact was that he recognized that the social aspects of the arty practiced. Derive from the people all for whom he practiced it was not possible for tricks but to think in terms of he's thirty years of turning words into pure music of turning verse into an arcane form which with appeal to a very very few Congo's Chante a very very few in this year it's this tradition that began with him and that began in Spain with a worm to its. Was developed and has still to be developed I feel in the novel that the popular novelist must to some extent be. A man or woman willing to compromise we must be to some extent intelligible we have to go all the way. But we must use forms we must use characters we must use situations we must use means all sin which bears some relation to the noon world otherwise our work will just dry out. Become a mere desert pettish of a realty or it on the unity in a nation that is the term the Jane Austen term and for this reason I'm very dubious when I hear expressions like Cope our way out in the light I see that James Joyce has been instance as one of the authors who went way out I would disagree James Joyce was a great bush one writer Ulysses is probably one of the greatest BUSH Well novels of the twentieth century it deals with all three people deals with more than a city Dublin ordinary day June the sixteenth one hundred four it preps for all time the exact rhythms the exact idioms of ordinary speech demotic speech where it cunningly tries to go further where it demonstrates a slight content or quality of way openness is in that it imposes on a purely naturalistic scheme an intellectual scheme a symbolic scheme which however one need not take any notice of if one doesn't wish you listen this is a good example of the linear novel adjustors Shakespeare's Hamlet is a good example of the lay a play you can appreciate this play this novel on various layers the grand Ling's went to see him look for a blood them from the play very like couldn't spend his tragedy they could take it on that level. There was another level better educated who could take it on an intellectual estatic level. And the possible the other layers metaphysical theological layers too involved the series through Ulysses The same is to a certain extent true with Finnegan's Wake which again is abortions are normal this by the language study of ordinary people living in an ordinary suburb of Dublin Joyce's greatness doesn't lie in the fact of the attempted to cut away to take off from the existing achievements of the popular novel the demotic novel it's lies in the fact that he added something to it. We haven't heard the name of I think of any considerable American writer who were kept out of America namely William Burroughs in this connection of the of on guard of the experimentalists bill but as the good man a man who reads Jane Austen a man who word displays the good solid virtues of Bush about America remember the name barbers was long known before the Naked Lunch as the name of the inventor of the adding machine William barber's has cut off from all the real life he's done a variable thing in that he's shown that it is possible to take a new look at language by cutting language of bombs by taking an ordinary newspaper sentence using the scissors using the paste We always in that sentence he can perform the useful task of making the reader see it as something new Forget about the clichés forget about the world and we have a content and come to it with a freshness appropriate to a new creation part of the content of William Burroughs his work over express not Naked Lunch which is a very nectar istic work similar to Dean Swift's Modest Proposal no EX-PRES Soft Machine the ticket of exploded the content has flown away totally from the traditional Bush to our content of the novel and all these works but it seems to be trying to present a metaphysical thesis. Here's the world the world of the bad day the body is dangerous you learn how dangerous the body is when you start taking drugs is about as did you learn how dangerous the body is when you submit to the transports of sex the weight of the body the body will burn up into a new bomb that a furnace is prepared with it knew that we must ally ourselves with a new of a piece of those who will fight against these forces we must concentrate in other words on the non-corporeal call it is of existence for ideas and the like this if we have any appetite This seems to me to present a joiner which is not novelistic as we have known it and to my mind at least because it doesn't relate to ordinary people but pretends to seems to on the surface because there are people with names because there seem to be places because there seems to be something like genuine conversation because we seem to have a novel with them all bitterly disappointed when we find that one but of these cheating merely using the novel form as a means of presenting a purely intellectual thesis. Her I am in tune perhaps TIM LEE helps weakly but remember as a professional novelist as a person who has to make some sort of living out of writing that we do to cut off from the bush more traditions of the novel which are best exemplified in the novels that we still like to read which are not transgressed against a novel like Ulysses or novel like Finnegan's Wake and let the future of the novel possibly line. In the willingness to admit the viability of the popular form. Not to crowd into the popular form to produce a layer after layer in the popular forms of added elements so that the normal in the future maybe take don't all live as may not fly off from the surface alone may fly on one level but on another. Level state very much their only grown and it may admits the intellectual it may I admit the psychic mayor admits metaphysical it may admit Earl sorts of new elements but it must solidly be that I feel with real people known situations and exact record of the rhythms of speech. No attempt to cut away from. What seems to be life as we know it. To start with that to add to it but not to get rid of that because once that happens the novel is an art form has become something else and can only be discussed asked them. From here it is. Actually before commenting on the other and the first like to comment on what he has said regarding silence I'm in complete agreement I think that. Silence can be as destructive as irrational rebellious ness and perhaps often is more destructive I think in view of all the problems that exist in view of all the injustices all the. Persecutions all the police stations to Body and Soul or the properties or the famine and so on that exist in the world. But I like her to remain silent is to evade his responsibility after all if you have accepted the responsibility to write you must it seems to me grapple with reality and reality today as we know is unfortunately a repeat with all sorts of horrendous problems so that by demanding silent the writer and I might add not only that Idol but the artist as well. Is. Meaning others involved in similar. Occupations. Implicitly or in directing he heard Petula ting injustice. I think that. There are too many problems in the world today and certainly as I said the injustices of all sorts psychological social economic and political precisely because too many. People have remained silent I'm very emboldened and encouraged by what I see for instance in this country and I'm happy to say elsewhere in the world certainly this applies to the Middle East as well a great number of young people and students who are taking active part in. The problems of the day who are voicing their protest. And I don't think that this condition existed in yesteryears so I'm sure the American student off let's say the early fifty's was far more passive and was certainly not as as much of an activist as he is today and I think perhaps this can be applied to the right as well there's certainly applies to that I that in my part of the world. I think that the. The great majority of writers in the Middle East up until the second world war who could be considered top our. Writers in that. They did not deal with the problems they. Sat under the proverbial three by the stream and drug war of fantasies and poetry and so on. And. Evaded the the main issues and I think this is not too difficult to understand. I think that had ever heard of social systems are repressive and the thought of Teddy and individuals are from the earliest years of their lives. The mask you later or sort of robbed of the opportunity to challenge authority to challenge the status quo to seek to deviate and find a new way to express the world and so on and the individual from earliest years is. That alligator to a position of absolute submission and this submission has been sort of reflected in our literature the united in the Middle East and I think in most. Repressive societies in the world and oppressive I don't mean at the political level only but at the social level as well. Has. Dealt really more with the with the superficially versus in my part of the world years of poems about nightingales and about her gardens and about the mountains and the evidence so one. That I did in these parts of the world. Is unwilling to look inward Lee he's unwilling to question his own emotions because that would entail coming face to face with a whole lot of resentments and hostilities and. That is. What he believes in this perhaps a whole lot of what can be considered ego alien emotions emotions which under no circumstances is he willing or more of prepared to face and that isn't is the alternative is that he looks the other way and then of course we have what's going to be called shame cultures and this applies I think to European countries as well and certainly to oriental cultures where individuals from earliest childhood. Inculpated to the notion of shame. Versus when a writer from these parts of the world is published abroad. I think the very first and the most urgent concern of his compatriots is has he written anything that might shame us before the foreigners. And here again that he course of the writer has been to sort of look the other way and pretend the problems didn't do NOT exist. And then of course we have in the society is political repression which also has caused her first to cop out in other words tool rather than grapple with problems and thus face the threat of persecution or exile or even in some cases assassination he has had to deal with superfluid and superficial matters. Now as for a way out literature I think that again highly traditionalist societies as a rule do not encourage way out literature because as I said the individual really very has the confidence to question the status quo and therefore to deviate. And therefore he sticks very close to tradition now in their these parts of the world I think very unfortunate trend that has been noticeable since the beginning of the Second World War when the contact of cultures has flushed people out of the protective traditionalism upsetting horn of socio economic systems and that is until is that in these parts at long last writers artists are beginning to face reality are beginning to question the status quo and they are beginning to grapple with even basic problems such as the parent child relationship such as problems of sex such as the problems of religion and the Fatherland and so on and I think that progressive regimes and I would consider a person and not sort of Egypt's regime a progressive one I think and do much to as they have to encourage this healthy pattern certainly reactionary and archaic regimes such as the one in my country do not help us help the patter. I cause to sum up in view of all these problems that I have just mentioned economic problems social problems political problems I think that literature can be significant can be meaningful only if that right is willing and able to face problems to grapple with the realities rather than to look the other way and evade the problems already made side and which is even more as I said destructive thinking. Of the.