WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
79
Josh Gidding :
This is a question for Professor Hartman. ( think there is
a missing master here in our discussion-Wordsworth. We've been talk–
ing about two great autobiographical artists of the twentieth century–
Kafka and Proust. Lenny quoted from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"
so it seems to me that we should also talk and think about Wordsworth
and his expansive formlessness (in which he anticipated Proust by a
hundred years!), and Wordsworth's fifty-year struggle, in "The Pre–
lude," to achieve an imaginative form that would be compatible with
autobiographical truth (whatever that is!) Now, it has always seemed to
me that
Remembrance of Things Past,
regardless of its artistic inten–
tions, is lacking a coherent form. Or rather, that it takes on so many
forms in its odyssey-novel, autobiography, criticism, meditation-that
this is maybe the same as having no form. With regard to Wordsworth,
it also seems to me that "The Prelude" is lacking, or perhaps struggling
towards a form that it never achieves; and this struggle with form is part
of its greatness-perhaps its greatest feature. And Kafka, it seems to me,
was a failed novelist-perhaps one of the great novelists, despite his
failed quest for an appropriate long form. I'd like
to
hear your thoughts.
Geoffrey Hartman :
('m glad
to
hear the question of form has been
raised by Lenny, and now by you, but ( don't think ( should take time
to answer it now because Stanley Crouch has just arrived. Perhaps there
will be another opportunity. If you had any doubt that Stanley Crouch
would appear, that doubt has now definitely been dispelled.
Stanley Crouch is a jazz critic and social commentator for
The New
Republic
and a columnist for the
Daily News;
his most recent collection
of essays is
Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives. Don't the
Moon Look LOllesome
is his ground breaking novel.
Stanley Crouch:
Today ( would like to discuss a variation on my ongo–
ing theme, no matter the domestic topic, wh ich is "BI ues for America."
The subjects for this afternoon are certain works written by Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Ernest Hemingway, who is
everybody's favorite, either as influence of epic proportions or as alI-pur–
pose whipping boy. What these men have in common is the blues as an
aesthetic vision. What [mean is not necessarily uses of the blues in a lit–
eral way, as with Ellison and Murray, but surely in terms of sensibility,
which is how Hemingway and Wright get there. They are all connected,
as well, by what] call tragic optimism. Tragic optimism is recognition of
the terrible ways in which the world often works, but it is also an equal
recognition of the fact that we, as human beings, can do a fairly good job
