Changing Values in American Society

20TH CENTURY REFLECTIONS The 1969 Alumni College Lectures—I

We begin this morning an examination of the crisis of values in a changing world, a crisis which will be studied by a biologist, an anthropologist, a student of political science, and a student of literature. I am especially concerned with changing values in American civilization and suggest that we go at the problem by looking at three major novels taken from different periods of our history and representing different parts of our country. Huckleberry Finn was completed in 1884 and is set in the pre-Civil War southwest; Light in August was completed in 1932 and is set in the Mississippi of that time; InvisibleMan, completed in 1952, is set in the deep South and in New York City. I think these novels taken together can tell us something about America. Other novels could have been used, of course, but these three especially can help us understand ourselves as Americans. Other nationalities can know themselves more easily than we can. Most of us were English, French, German, Dutch, Italians first, only gradually becoming Americans as our families lived here, died here, and were buried here, and as our country began to have a meaningful history. Robert Frost has a very fine poem about this process. He called it "The Gift Outright," and he read it at the inauguration of President John Kennedy:

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, Such as she was, such as she would become.

And we have begun to have a history, though only a few hundred years of it; we have stories now and art; and the realizing westward, though vague and undirected, has been finished. (Huck, at the end, you remember, "lights out" for the territory, whereas our young people light out for San Francisco.) All of us and our families have given ourselves to something, and to a degree we are possessed by our land. This land includes Faulkner's South and Ralph Ellison's New York. Ellison's New York reminds us that one out of every eight persons in our country is black. And the land includes Huck and Jim's mighty river flowing down the heart of our continent. These three stories can be regarded as visions, if you will, of life on our land, life in America. They are intensely individual, to be sure. Each writer has his own style, and you could say that the stories contain the private truths of three of our most perceptive and articulate writers. But these private truths overlap and coincide with public truths about our country and about human nature itself.

Each of these novels has as one of its important themes education, or growing up, learning to come to terms with life. And in each case education ends in a kind of failure. Huck's friend Jim is freed, but Huck says that he is heading for the territory ahead of the rest, "because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." Education here ends in running away. Joe Christmas has been looking for peace, just as Huck had (and Huck, of course, found it temporarily on the raft), but he ends up murdering, running away, and then turning himself in and becoming a horrible sacrifice to social prejudice. Invisible Man - note that he has no name, not even the article "the" before his title - who asks, "Who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you?" - ends hibernating in a black hole in the basement where there are exactly 1369 light bulbs, the power being stolen from the Monopolated Light and Power Company. All three had sought peace, and all three had sought freedom, too. "The land of the free and the home of the brave" wouldn't let them achieve their own freedom.

Another theme the three books have in common is that of alienation: society will take these men only on its own terms, terms which each of the heroes knows to be unjust. Huck is a dropout, escaping his father and the village society. As for Joe Christmas, everybody tries to make him into their own image of what they think he ought to be, old Doc Hines, McEachern, Joanna Burden, even Percy Grimm. And he is weakened in his means of fighting back because he does not know who he is. Invisible Man is alienated because he does not behave as everyone expects him to behave, because he does not follow his grandfather's advice: "Overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." He is alienated, too, because no one wants to see him, and consequently no one does see him. He is invisible.

The books also contain much violence and deal profoundly with the racial struggle between blacks and whites, two points that will concern us; but the last theme I want to mention now is that of the conflict between reality and illusion. Man is the dream animal, and each of us lives his own illusion of what he is and might be. Old Hightower, you remember, is the galloping Confederate cavalry soldier. This is reality for him. It gives him identity, purpose, direction. Joanna Burden and Mr. Norton derive their meaning from helping the Negroes of the South with little knowledge of the realities they are dealing with. Hightower says, "Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth." Mark Twain has Huck begin his book with a reference to truth, when he says, in speaking of the author of Tom Sawyer: "He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly...." But the truth is not so easy to come by, for our illusions are protections which we are reluctant to let go. The irony is that Hightower's illusions of past glory deny him meaningful life in the present. Percy Grimm's illusions of himself as the protector of law and order result in his lynching Joe Christmas. The illusions of Invisible Man, going through what he calls "the rites of Horatio Alger," keep him from seeing his own invisibility.

Some of you will recall from last year's Alumni College that I tried to argue that tragedy is the central fact of human experience. Although there is tragedy in these novels, I do not think that any of them could be called tragic. Yet none of them offers any way out of the world that is depicted. Invisible Man ends up having to live with his own invisibility, knowing that society has, in fact, castrated him even though it was in a dream. Joe Christmas never escapes the circle of his life - it is a closed circle - except by giving himself up; and he does so, walking a straight line to the center of the circle and certain death. Lena Grove and Byron Bunch show that life will go on, perhaps for a long time. The Lenas will always be bringing babies into the world, no doubt about that. But Lena doesn't promise the birth of a new Christ, and even if she did, we know what was done to the first Christ and what was done to the baby called Joe Christmas, brought to the orphanage by his mad, Calvinistic grandfather on the day honoring Christ's birth. As for Huck, there really isn't any way out either. That floating on the raft can never be recovered. In the territory to which he is going there won't be the raft, and soon, in history there will be no more territory. No, Huck's story ends when the King sells Jim as a runaway slave for $40.00, and Huck is trapped in the moral, adult world which you and I know led to the bloody Civil War. He has to act, now, and be responsible. He has to join the miserable moral struggles of what Mark Twain later called the "Damned Human Race." There is no way out of the world depicted in HuckFinn except that of the bloody Civil War, which Robert Frost said was one of the deeds of gift of ourselves to our land, a war which Mark Twain would not depict, a war which he, in fact, in his own life fled. (He joined the Confederate Cavalry for a little while as a volunteer and then went off to Nevada.)

But if these books do not offer any way out of the world depicted in them, they do give us a means of coming temporarily to terms with the world, and that is laughter. In his posthumously published The Mysterious Stranger, Twain has the character called Satan say about the human race: "Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push it a little - weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No, you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No, you lack sense and the courage." Laughter is seen as a weapon here, but I should like to stress the fact that weapons can be used for both attack and defense. Laughter can blow a colossal humbug to atoms at a blast; it can also be a means of coming to terms with a world which is too horrible to contemplate. Traditionally ridicule and satire have been exercised to destroy hypocrisy, falsehood, vice of all kinds. They have been exercised in the name of virtue and justice. In Huckleberry Finn we have the pious Miss Watson talking to Huck about heaven; yet she is unable to resist selling Jim down the river for $800.00, even though doing so means his leaving his wife and children and she had promised not to do it. But laughter can also be a means of endurance, as Byron noted in Don Juan when he wrote, "I laugh that I may not weep." I think that it is a truism that one can contemplate the human condition only so long before having to laugh at human nature. Twain, I think, knew this early on in his life, and this understanding is one of the things that make Huckleberry Finn a great book. (Huck is always saying things such as, "I want to see where the watchman was sleeping.")

Laughter in this book is both an attack and a defense in a way that reminds us of Chaucer. Let me give an example of this. When Huck's father is first introduced, he is a sinister figure. The boy is frightened. He sees that footprint in the snow, and there is the cross made out of nails in the heel of the left boot to keep the Devil away. He threatens the boy, and there are the drunken beatings. His whiteness, and this is one of the themes of the book, is the whiteness of the belly of a tree toad, or the belly of a dead catfish. He is a sinister, frightening figure, and we have a sense of moral outrage that he has control of his boy. Then there is the great scene where "Pap,", as Huck calls him, takes off against the government. He is pretty drunk by this time, but he hasn't reached the stage of DTs yet:

Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it's like. Here's the law a-standing ready to take a man's son away from him - a man's own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin' for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call that govment! That ain't all nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o' my property. Here's what the law does: The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up'ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can't get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I've a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I told 'em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of 'em heard me, and can tell what I said. Says I, for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never come a-near it ag'in. Them's the very words. I says, look at my hat - if you call it a hat - but the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till it's below my chin, and then it ain't rightly a hat at all, but more like my head was shoved up through a jint o' stove-pipe. Look at it, says I - such a hat for me to wear - one of the wealthiest men in this town if I could git my rights.

Well, heightened only a little this is just like the tirades that you and I have heard about the government: that man in the White House, Johnson, and so on. But here we have the horror of the human ego, freed from all inhibitions, expressing itself. Laughter alone allows us to contemplate it. Otherwise, taken seriously, it would be too horrible.

Now, one of the marvelous things about HuckleberryFinn is that Twain's laughter can sustain him in his contemplation of life for so long as it does, and enable us to look at this life. As you know, this novel is filled with vice, violence, cheating, hypocricy, and the worst kinds of cruelty. His humor has to be extended into areas which we normally think of as serious. And he is able to laugh right up until the time that Huck discovers that Jim has been taken and sold by the King. Up until then Huck simply protected Jim by his wits. You will remember the smallpox episode, and many others. But when Jim is taken to the Phelps' farm as a captured runaway slave, laughter is inadequate; and so we have the fairy-tale ending of the novel. Humor has been unable to complete the vision, and I think that Mark Twain knows it. What the vision has been is something I want to discuss in my next talk, but I can say now that it has certainly to do with natural goodness as seen in the heart of Huck. Huck's words at the end: "There ain't no more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a' knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't 'a' tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more" - these words may possibly express Mark Twain's own dissatisfaction. The solution to light out for the territory may have been an answer for Huck and one in Mark Twain's time. But there isn't any more territory now, and I doubt that heading out for the territory any more than heading out for the moon ever saves man from the necessity of working out his vision of life and human destiny to the very end. When he does this, we find him writing not comedy, but tragedy, and the tragedy was written by the blood of thousands in our Civil War. Mark Twain stopped' short of this part of the American vision, for even laughter can not defend us here.

II

THIS morning I want to turn to Huckleberry Finn and delineate what I take to be Mark Twain's vision in this book. Perhaps you know that the book has not always been as highly regarded as it is today. Today, it stands as one of the two or three great books that America has given to the world, but when it first came out critics regarded it as vulgar, rough, inelegant, irreverent, coarse, semiobscene, trashy, and vicious. Huck, in a way, taken from one point of view - we must admit - is a real threat to us. After all, I am an English teacher, and what am I going to do about his grammar? What would I do with him in freshman English?

Recently, other critics have come to regard HuckleberryFinn as one of those books which is a key to understanding the United States. Bernard DeVoto thinks of it as the American novel, and T. S. Eliot said, "In HuckleberryFinn Mark Twain wrote a much greater book than he could have known he was writing. Perhaps all great works of art mean much more than the author could have been aware of meaning. Certainly, Huckleberry Finn is the one book of Mark Twain's which as a whole has this unconsciousness."

F. R. Leavis states that Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Mark Twain's greatest work and is supremely the American classic and one of the great books of the world. Incidentally, those of you interested in the work of Mark Twain will find two excellent studies published recently: one, Justin Kaplan's biography of Mark Twain, called Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain; the other by my colleague in the Dartmouth English Department, James Cox, titled Mark Twain, The Fate of Humor.

Now, Twain's book, universally acknowledged as a classic and a peculiarly American classic, raises questions about what is so importantly American about it, apart from the obvious facts that it was written by an American, set in a region of America, told in the language of the southwest vernacular. Perhaps it presents a special American experience; perhaps it tells us what growing up and living in our country is like. Scott Fitzgerald says, "Huckleberry Finn was the first journey back, the first look back at the republic from the perspective of the west."

As for the point of view of this novel, Twain tells the whole tale through Huck's eyes, those of a fourteen-year-old boy who is an outsider in the world he finds himself in. He loves nature. He is sensitive, perceptive, and he is always trying to understand. Except for some minor boyish sins or crimes he is innocent. He steals, to be sure, but we know that he calls it borrowing. When he and Jim face the fact that stealing isn't exactly borrowing, they make a list of things they are going to borrow, and they make themselves feel better by striking several items off of the list, crabapples and persimmons, for example. Huck's grammar is bad. He likes his freedom. He is not shackled by tradition. His knowledge of history leaves a great deal to be desired. Henry the Eighth, you will remember, had the Duke of Wellington for his father, and Henry threw that tea into Boston Harbor just to see what he could do to us. Huck has none of the defensive materials that we adults have in our lives; he has no power and no money. But he does have his wit, as his main resource, and in addition, he is concerned with the truth. We immediately forgive him his grammar because we like him, even though we know the place of good grammar in the adult world. (You certainly would not hire this young man as a salesman, would you?) We like his vitality and his love of life, and to this liking we bring sentimental memories of our own childhood, I suppose. We sympathize with him against Miss Watson: "Don't skrunch up like that!" she says. "Set up straight. Don't gape and stretch like that." We also sympathize with his questioning the dogmas of the adult world, dogmas about the bad place, about the good place, about praying and providence. His questions are those of the child, which we have come to realize are awkward questions, embarrassing ones that we have long since taught ourselves not to ask. Further, we see very soon the threat of his father, and we are all the more sympathetic with the boy. So at once, may I suggest, we find ourselves as readers on the wrong side of things and rather enjoying being there. If Huck were our child he would be learning manners, reading, writing, history, and above all preparing to make something of himself. And wouldn't we be right? How else will he get ahead in the world? But Huck is a young rebel, a person who resists what all of us know is good and proper for his education and development, and don't we know what is good and proper for the Hucks of this world? You bet we do! Wash! Shave! What do you have those beads around your neck for? Why don't you get a haircut? Keep America beautiful!

In the first section of the book, Chapters 1-3 and 4-7, we see Huck caught between two adult worlds. One is the world of the village, the Widow Douglas, Miss Watson, and Tom Sawyer's world of make-believe. The other adult world is the world of his father. The illusions of the village and those of Tom Sawyer are seen as just about equal in Huck's eyes, with the Sunday school partaking of just a little more reality than Tom's world of Arabs and elephants: "I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday school." The other adult world with which Huck has to contend is the world of utter human degradation where man is seen as perhaps worse than the hogs his drunken father lies with. Both worlds have things in common: A-rabs and elephants and, if you will, the good place and the bad place on the one hand, and Pap's world of the DTs, snakes, angels of death on the other. There is too much civilization on one side and not enough or none on the other. Huck is pulled through both worlds and even makes a temporary adjustment to each. About the village he says, "At first I hated school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got the next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be." We can place beside this passage an almost exact parallel, his comments on living with Pap. Except for the cowhide part "it was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's where you had to wash, and comb up and go to bed and get up regular. ... I didn't want to go back no more.... It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around."

The two adult worlds are rejected by Huck when he is regarded as "the angel of death" by his father, and he knows that he has to get out. The way he gets out is by his wits, just as he slid out of his jacket, quick as lightning, you remember, when his drunken father caught him and was about to stab him. He plans his own murder so everyone will think he has been murdered, and he lights out for Jackson's Island. The old Huck that everyone had been beating on now is dead, and a new Huck is born and seeking. Seeking what? Did he know? We are not sure, but we know that there seems to be a renewal, a rebirth, a chance for a fresh start when Huck moves to Jackson's Island.

One other figure is important in these two worlds which Huck leaves; that is Nigger Jim. Huck and Tom had played tricks on him. Huck's father rages against Negroes in general. Miss Watson is going to sell him. Jim, too, has to leave for Jackson's Island. Neither Huck nor Jim could stay in those two worlds because both were enslaved by them, and when they meet on the island Jim says, "I'se powerful sorry you'se killed, Huck, but I ain't no more now." Both are seeking freedom. Earlier, when Huck had discovered "Moses and the Bulrushers" through the tutelage of the Widow, he said, "I didn't care no more about him because I don't take no stock in dead people." But now Huck finds that he is leading Jim and himself to freedom.

One of the first things that happens after they get to the island is that the house floats by with Hnck's dead father in it. That side of Huck's past is finished, and Jim, in protecting Huck from the knowledge that the dead man is his father, begins to take on some of the role of a true father. He builds the wigwam and fixes up the raft. He advises on the coming storm, and they go up to the cave. His reading of signs now, unlike the reading of the hair-ball with the counterfeit coin, is beginning to be true.

Jackson's Island is really a kind of Eden: "On every broken-down tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things; and when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on. account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand on them if you wanted to; but not the snakes...." The snakes in this Eden are very real, as we shall see.

This island suggests an idea that has helped make America, and this is the illusion of the fresh start. We come from the old country for a fresh start in the new land. We go west for a new beginning. We hope that with a new job we can make a fresh start. But I say the illusion of a fresh start because we can never have a completely new beginning. We always have to bring ourselves, our old selves with us into any creative enterprise. Huck's murder of himself was, after all, only symbolic, however important it may be, and some of his old self is there with him on Jackson's Island.

The island brings forth another situation of major importance in our history, and that is the teaming up of the white youth and the black man to help each other and make do together. You may recall that the son of the industrialist in Invisible Man wishes, sentimentally, that he and Invisible Man could be like Huck and Jim; and whites and blacks, at Dartmouth and in the United States, have got to make do, somehow, together.

The idea of a fresh start and the need for cooperation between black and white come together very sharply in the brief episode of Huck's killing the rattlesnake in the cave. He puts the dead snake on Jim's blanket, carrying over from his old self the sense of white superiority and expecting fun from Jim's antics when he discovers the rattler. But Huck forgets that the snake's mate will come, and Jim gets bitten by the rattlesnake. Huck is thoroughly ashamed, and takes those two snakes and throws them into the bushes so Jim will not find out that he is guilty. In fact his voice becomes a little loud as he covers his guilt with a joke: "I'd druther been bit by a snake than Pap's whiskey"; and we learn that Jackson's Island does not afford a completely fresh start, but rather a new problem: how can a white boy and a black man get on together?

Perhaps this is the time to introduce the fact that in 1957, at the urgent insisting of the N.A.A.C.P., Huckleberry Finn was withdrawn as required reading in the New York City schools. Ralph Ellison has stated the objections of Negro readers to Twain's characterization of Jim:

Writing at a time when the blackfaced minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim's dignity and human capacity - and Twain's complexity - emerge. Yet it is his source in this same tradition which creates that ambivalence between his identification as an adult and parent and his 'boyish' naivete, and which by contrast makes Huck, with his street-sparrow sophistication, seem more adult.... Jim's friendship for Huck comes across as that of a boy for another boy rather than as the friendship of an adult for a junior; thus there is implicit in it not only a violation of the manners sanctioned by society for relations between Negroes and whites, there is a violation of our conception of adult maleness. (pp. 106-7)

Now, you should test this criticism, but Jim does, I think, start out as the typical Negro of the American minstrel show; and it is interesting how Americans have been able to keep the Negro subjected by just such stereotypes: Mr. Bones, Amos 'n Andy, Step-and-Fetch-It. Jim gets "busted out" speculating in stock. What kind of stock, Mr. Bones? Why livestock - cattle, you know. There is the "Balum's Ass" story and the debate over "Sollermun's" wisdom, but Jim gains a little bit in the wonderful passage on language, when Huck asks Jim what he would think if a man came to him and said "Polly-voo-franzy"? Jim replies,

"I wouldn't think nuffin; I'd take en bust him over de head - dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan't want to hear no mo' about it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow like a cat?"

"No, day don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man? - er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one or the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man?

You answer me dat!"

Huck's only response is, "I see it warn't no use wasting words - you can't learn a nigger to argue. So I quit." Who wins?

Jim develops his intrinsic dignity on the raft with Huck, and this represents, incidentally, a growth on the part of Twain. "In my school days I had no aversion to slavery," he wrote in his autobiography. "I was not aware that there was anything wrong with it. No one arraigned it in my hearing . . . the local pulpit taught us that Gòd approved it, that it was a holy thing." Twain may begin with a stereo- type in characterizing Jim, but his character and he emerge from this and Jim becomes as much a man as Twain can make him. Perhaps Twain's and Huck's most poignant growing experience comes in the famous section when Huck tries to make Jim believe that the fog and their separation from each other had been really a dream. In "Fooling Poor Old Jim" we still have the old Huck from the village and the shore. After he has Jim convinced that he dreamt the whole affair, Huck points to the branches and rubble that had collected on the raft. When Jim sees that he has been fooled, and he draws himself up with dignity and says, "Dat truck dah is trash; and trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." Both Mark Twain and the reader are, I think, deeply grateful to Huck who reports, "It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterward, neither." Perhaps Twain had to write this episode before he could allow Huck a real test of his conscience on the slavery issue.

This test comes when they encounter the two men hunting runaway slaves, and they call out to Huck, "Is your man white or black?" Huck hesitates, and then comes out with a lie, which he quickly follows with another lie about smallpox. The first lie is beautiful because Huck's native moral sense is better than that of his society. The second is clever, and Twain contrasts Huck's emerging moral code with that of the white men hunting runaway "niggers." They say, "You can make some money by it." But they are having trouble with their consciences, too. They won't run the risk of getting smallpox to help this family in distress, so they buy their way out of their human obligations by putting a $20.00 gold piece on a board and floating it down to Huck.

At this point in his moral growth Huck is feeling that whatever he did would have been wrong. If he had turned Jim over to the men, he would have felt badly; not turning him over he did feel badly. The wages were just the same? Why then be good? Huck is stuck on this one. What we see is the emergence of natural morality, natural goodness; and I think that one of the reasons Mark Twain ended his life so bitterly is because early in his career he must have had so much idealism and an implicit, if not explicitly stated faith in natural goodness. Only a man with faith in such an ideal could see so sharply and clearly the many aberrations from it. As we get into the next section of the novel we see some of the depths of human corruption, a further stage of Twain's vision, but here Huck has learned that friendship is more important than color, and Twain breaks off his story, interestingly enough with reference to one of Jim's signs: "The Rattleskin does its work." Huck doesn't think of this as "nigger superstition" and uses the rattlesnake sign of Jim's world to explain why they are suddenly overwhelmed by calamities. In two short pages they learn that they have missed Cairo, that the canoe, which had been their next hope to go back up the Ohio, is gone; and then their raft is destroyed by the steamboat. Twain's description of the steamboat might be almost a symbol of the mechanization and industrialism which he saw coming to destroy America, just as it destroys the raft:

She was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us. There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a pow-wow of cussing, and whistling of steam - and as Jim went overboard on one side an I on the other, she come smashing straight through the raft.

The story breaks off here at the end of sixteen chapters, and Mark Twain presumably left it alone for three years. When he came back to the tale he began to give it a different direction. The first thing he writes is the Grangerford Feud. Here we notice that Jim and Huck are separated. Huck has become a passive observer of the idiocy of the human race. The feud is treated with sharp and bitter satire, and when Huck and Jim return to the river, the satire is continued through the arrival aboard the raft of the Duke and the Dauphin. Like the rogues in Chaucer the skill of these scoundrels can be admired, even though their characters can not, and those who are duped by them would seem to deserve the cheating. But there is another element introduced in this section of the novel: all the time they are floating deeper and deeper into the slave-holding South. Huck explains to the Duke that Jim isn't a runaway nigger because a runaway nigger wouldn't run south. This gets him by with the Duke, but the explanation sits uneasily with the reader. What is going to happen to Jim? Our uneasiness is not relieved very much by the fact that the deeper they get into the South the more outrageous become the devices to hide Jim. First, it is just a question of tying him up, but then they dress him in the King Lear costume. This seems funny until we recall that no one in the world ever suffered more than Lear. Then they paint Jim blue and put up a sign, "Sick Arab," a device which does not even allow Jim his blackness. He may be "harmless when not out of his head," as the sign says, but what is to keep him from going out of his head? As Jim's plight becomes increasingly hopeless we are reminded that Huck had entered on these adventures having discovered one positive value, that of friendship. This is something he can believe in and is a tie to sanity for both himself and Jim.

Ernest Hemingway, in The Green Hills of Africa, has a fascinating statement which is relevant here. He writes, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." If one thinks of The Scarlet Letter, Leaves ofGrass, Moby Dick, Emerson's Essays, Walden, all written before Twain's book, this is an overstatement; but I think that we can see what Hemingway means. He's concerned with style, of course, but also with substance: the education of the now-equipped hero in the ways of the world. The first sixteen chapters have given Huck his moral equipment to meet the chaos and depravity of the adult world. Friendship, and its attendant loyalty and trust - one can even go so far as to say love - give meaning to his life, a meaning which is immediately tested by the Grangerford Feud and later by the antics of the Duke and the Dauphin.

The Grangerford Feud, with its conflicting definitions of honor, with its utterly senseless killing and its empty pride is the first encounter of the newly equipped Huck with adult madness. He even gets drawn into it, carrying a message in the Bible, befriending young Buck. But he is up in a tree watching when the Shepherdsons run along the bank of the river shooting at Buck and his cousin, crying "Kill them! Kill them!" as they struggle in the water. Huck says, "It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain't a-going to tell all that happened - it would make me sick if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't come ever ashore that night to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of them - lots of times I dream about them." Here is his exposure to corrosive, destructive evil and adult madness, all in the name of honor; and he and Jim, now together again, return to the raft, their friendship, and their sanity.

With their return to the river Twain reaches the lyrical height of the book. We have Huck's beautiful description of the sunrise as it "softens up" the river and brings light to the trees on the far shore, and his musing during the evening:

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could 'a' laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I din't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allow'd they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

For Huck and Jim here is peace and freedom, but can they exist only in this kind of a situation? And are they only momentary in our American lives?

In Huckleberry Finn the Duke and Dauphin come aboard to shatter the peace, and in what follows Huck and Jim become observers of American life. In Twain's satire it is the life of the cannibal, a dog-eat-dog life, where the strong or the clever prey on the weak and the gullible. We have some admiration for the skill with which the King and the Duke milk the people. The Duke is superb as the reformed pirate at the camp meeting, planning to go back to the Indian Ocean and convert pirates; and the pair's understanding of human nature with their sign for the Royal Nonesuch - Ladies and Children Not Admitted - makes a telling point with the reader as well as filling their own pockets. We even detect the indignation of Twain himself at human folly in the awful speech by Colonel Sherburn from the roof of his house with a shot-gun in which he accuses them all of being cowards. Even when the rogues overreach themselves, they are clever to the point of extracting some admiration from us, although I do not think that we can be as sorry as Huck is when he sees them finally tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. The whole middle section, before Tom Sawyer appears, is Twain's picture —if I can take one of his phrases out of context — of the "E Pluribus Unum mumps," the comedy and sickness of American social life.

The details of this section, and the particular objects of Twain's satire we can discuss later, in our small group meetings, but now I want to turn to the ending. For me, and I know that many will disagree with my interpretation, we leave Huck crying, really, over the unspeakable betrayal when the King sells Jim as a runaway slave. Huck says, "Then I set down and cried; I couldn't help it. But I couldn't set still long. Pretty soon I was out on the road trying to think what I better do. ..." There follows, you remember, the major moral crisis of Huck's life. He thinks of writing to Miss Watson telling her where Jim is, but this means returning* Jim to slavery. "It was a tight spot," he reports, but he tears up the letter he had actually gone so far as to write, and concludes, "All right, then, I'll go to hell!" Huck here commits himself to his friendship for Jim as the only real value he has; and he realizes that this commitment means a fight against the society he finds himself in. His plight is certainly a modern one. Twain ends the story by bringing in Tom Sawyer and the romantic world of daring escapes. American history ended Huck's story with our terrible Civil War. The comic vision of great fiction ends on the verge of what Twain knew and we know was tragedy.

III

LAST time, in talking about Huckleberry Finn I tried to suggest that Huck, in running away to Jackson Island, was trying to create himself, to bring himself into birth. He succeeded in entering the adult world with something to believe in, a value which he cherished and for which he was willing to fight: his friendship with Jim. But the society he found himself in considered this value immoral and unjust, and we left him deciding ironically that he'd go to hell. And Twain leaves him there, too, turning away to the play of Tom Sawyer and his elaborate plans for the freeing of Jim. Hemingway, in that passage where he speaks of all American literature coming from Huckleberry Finn says, "But you've got to stop when you come to the Tom Sawyer part; the rest is cheating."

Passing into the Twentieth Century, we come down to 1932 to the post-Civil War South, and instead of a 14-year-old boy creating himself and expressing a kind of natural goodness and humanity, we have a man who for 33 years has tried to become a human being and has been prevented. His name is Joe Christmas because he arrived at the orphanage on Christmas Day. Like Christ he is 33 when he is crucified: the shots go through his body like nails being pounded through flesh into wood. All his life he had tried to be born, but no one would allow him this luxury. In Light in August Faulkner gives us what can be called a "comprehensive meditation" on human life and destiny. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Faulkner is one of America's greatest writers. He is the author of a long and varied saga of life in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, with the town of Jefferson at the center, an area of 2400 square miles, and a population of 6,298 whites and 9,313 Negroes. The maps say, "William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor." This saga deals with the decadence of the Compson and Sartoris families, representatives of the old South, and it deals with the rise of the Snopes family, those unscrupulous newcomers who displace the older generation. The degeneration of the old families is traced from feudal illusions of the Civil War to the disillusionment of the modern day. In this saga Light in August does not occupy a central part as do such books as Sartoris, TheSound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom! But Lightin August does have much in common with the others, while being more self-contained and less dependent on interconnections and references.

Light in August opens in a most memorable way, a beautiful description of the countryside in August, with a pregnant woman, carrying her shoes in a bundle. She is picked up by a wagon and taken toward Jefferson, where she believes that she will find the father of her coming child and that he will marry her. There is the countryside, the heat, the dust; there is the stillness and the peace. This is a pic- ture of something timeless, slow as the wagon, a pastoral scene in the rural and agrarian South. The closeness to the land and the pregnant woman suggest that we have a representation here of a kind of earth mother. Her very name, Lena Grove, suggests the sacred grove of earth worship. The novel begins and ends with her. First she is seen riding in a wagon and at the end in a truck: "My, my. A body does get around. Here we ain't been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee." She travels trusting in natural humanity; instinctively she knows that people will help her, and they do. She is representative I think of the natural female, bearing the life force, attended by the common man. And Byron Bunch, who wins her in the end, is certainly a common man. Little in his size and little in his aspirations and dreams, he is willing to be father to the child of another man. At the end, we see Lena and Byron coming together through the eyes of a young furniture dealer in a somewhat ribald situation. He is back from a trip, and he is lying in bed with his wife. He is happily married and they joke together as a married couple, laughing over Lena and Byron. This is the frame that Faulkner has given his story, suggesting life going on and on.

The point of view from which this story is told is interesting. We find that Faulkner is the omniscient author, to be sure, but except for the eternal presence of Lena Grove before and after the birth of her child, the novel is really a series of memories and a series of contemplations. Even though there are many moments of rapid, violent action, we sense that Faulkner holds each action up for contemplation and analysis, seeking to draw from it as much meaning and understanding as possible. The memories begin with Byron Bunch who introduces the second chapter: "Byron Bunch knows this: It was one Friday morning three years ago..." and we pass to Hightower's memories, and then to those of Joe Christmas: "Memory believes before knowing remembers." Other people tell things as they remember them. We do not see the action first-hand; again and again it is presented to us through the filter of someone's mind. Memory, meditation, distance are there, and over them all is the brooding stillness, the silence of an August evening, with voices rising up every now and then and falling back again.

Regarding the title, Light in August, Faulkner said that all he meant by it was the quality of light in August, the way things look in that month. The Mississippi countrymen have a saying that the cow is light in August, it has given birth to its calf. Perhaps there is some connection here with Lena. But I think we should note that the characters in this novel are in the August of their lives. Faulkner has Joanna Burden reflect that time was short, that autumn was almost upon her, "something threatful, dreadful, something out of the darkness, the earth, the dying summer itself." Hightower's passages of marvelous reflection in the 20th chapter are held in "the lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come." Also there is reference in Joe Christmas' contemplations to August, containing the unbelievable hint of winter. In August we find the fruition of crops from seeds that had been planted before. There is a sense in this novel that there is no future except for the eternal earth mother. There is the past and there is the present, but for this novel I think Edgar's great line in King Lear is appropriate:

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.

We have the ripeness of all of these lives, what they have become, and we are to see them at the moment of their harvest. There is no future for Joe Christmas. There is none for Joanna Burden. There can be no future for Hightower, even though he is temporarily touched into life again when he delivers Lena's baby. In his last meditation he thinks that he is going to die soon. We know that Brown, the father of Lena's child, will go on running away forever. There is no other future for him. Even Percy Grimm realizes his true and full self and his completion as a man when he makes that hideous attack on Christmas, castrating him and crying out, "Now, you'll let white women alone even in hell." This is his ripeness, or fruition!

And so the novel shows no future except the continuing of the Lenas in this world. Faulkner does not even let Byron be much of a man. The furniture dealer says to his wife, "I just couldn't imagine anybody, any woman, knowing that they had ever slept with him, let alone having anything to show folks to prove it." "Ain't you shamed," his wife says, "talking that way before a lady." But there is the past and there is the present, both of which we contemplate. Hightower is trapped by the past, by the memory of what his family has been, by the tales of his grandfather about that Confederate cavalry raid. The past has given the only meaning in his life. One could say that here Faulkner is ridiculing the Southerners' obsession with their past history; but Hightower differs little in essentials from his counterparts in the North. Through dreams of past glory he denies life, he denies his wife, he denies his church. He says, "Is it any wonder that this world is peopled principally by the dead? Surely, when God looks about at their successors, He cannot be loath to share His own with us." Likewise Joanna Burden is trapped by the past, by her New England background, by her murdered grandfather and brother, by their graves, by the struggle of her family in the South. She goes on doing the work that her grandfather and her brother wanted to do, held fast by her puritanical and abolitionist background, refusing to leave her decaying plantation. Percy Grimm is a victim of the past, victimized because he was born too late to have been a hero in the First World War. Now he acts out his heroism in a little town that doesn't want it or need it or ask for it, but gets it. Faulkner said that without ever having read about the Nazis in the newspapers he drew the first portrait of one of them in Percy Grimm.

Joe Christmas' past begins with that episode of eating toothpaste in the young dietitian's bedroom, hiding behind the curtain while the dietitian makes love to an intern. Behind that there is no past for Joe Christmas. He is the opposite of the others. He is cut off and utterly lost. He tries to find out who he is, but he can never know.

One should observe also that in the vision of this novel there is no forgiving God. There is no salvation, no vision of the changing of things. Characters come up to the present, act their brief and sometimes'violent scene, and that is the end. None of them knows how to want to change. In this world there is no divine promise, no hope. We have only the distorted God in the mad understandings of Old Doc Hines and McEachern, McEachern who prays to God that He will be as charitable as McEachern is in forgiving Joe Christmas his sins; and Doc Hines who murders the lover of his daughter, causes his daughter to die in childbirth, and takes Joe off to an orphanage, God telling him all the time what he is to do. Theirs is a frenzied, insane concept of God.

But there is a powerful controlling force in the novel. Sometimes it is called the Opponent, as when Brown, still running away from Lena sends the boy back to get the reward money. Faulkner says, "It seemed to him now that they were all just shapes like chessmen - the negro, the sheriff, the money, all unpredictable and without reason moved here and there by an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules which he and not the Opponent must follow." When Percy Grimm is chasing Christmas, Faulkner writes, "Above the blunt, cold rake of the automatic his face had that serene, unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows. He was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the board." Shortly thereafter Grimm finds the car "just where the Player had desired it to be," and after he had entered Hightower's house the Player moves him again "because with unfailing certitude he ran straight into the kitchen." The Opponent or Player moves the characters around and maliciously changes the rules. Sometimes Faulkner's characters think of him in other terms. Old McEachern rides out after Joe Christmas and finds him as if he had been guided by "the militant angel Michael himself." In another episode, just before Joe murders Joanna Burden, he lies listening to the clock strike ten, then eleven, and Faulkner says that "he believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe." And he was saying to himself, "I had to do it," already before having committed the murder, using the past tense, knowing that it would be done. There is, in short, a sense of a malicious fatality hanging over all of the action.

Fate, in Light in August, is connected with the idea of a curse on the people. Joanna Burden's father speaks of this curse, and it is an idea that is certainly accepted by other characters and to some extent, anyway, by Faulkner: "Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you was ever thought of. A race doomed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins." And then Joanna says,

I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever into the world, white, with the black already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross.

This is the curse first of the black man and secondly the curse of the white man because of the black man. The novel seems to offer no escape from the curse, no salvation or redemption, no hope for future forgiveness; and the mainspring of action is a guilt central in the world in which the action takes place.

In a very fine essay by Alfred Kazin, to which I am much indebted, called "The Stillness in Light in August," we find this valuable summary:

Light in August is one of the sharpest criticisms of Calvinism ever written, but unlike so many Southern writers on Puritanism, Faulkner knows that the same religion is found in Doc Hines and Joanna Burden. The guilt that is the mainstay of their faith is embodied in the assumption of excessive authority by fathers, lawyers, teachers, ministers. Everyone wants to play God to the Orphan Joe Christmas. In Faulkner's eyes, life is an ironic and tragic affair that is beyond human rule and misrule, but Calvinists like Doc Hines and Calvin McEachern, the children of Calvinists like Joanna Burden, even murdering, simon-pure patriots like Percy Grimm, take life in their hands. They dominate, they murder. Joe Christmas is their favorite pupil. He is the man "things are done to."

Joe Christmas is, to borrow Locke's phrase, a tabularasa, a sheet of paper with nothing on it at birth. He is to become a symbol of the American wanderer. He is a stranger to everyone and most of all to himself. He tries to become someone, a human being. He tries to find integrity, that which is so rightfully present in Lena Grove, who is the opposite pole of the book. Even his name Christmas is not a name, but a parody of a name. Huck Finn, we recall, tried to become someone instinctively and was able to do so through friendship and sacrifice for Jim. Joe Christmas tries to become someone, but what he thinks is the mixture of black and white in his blood prevents him from becoming anything. We have had the friendship of Huck and Jim on the raft, and now we have the question of conflict between black and white in the character of Joe. Throughout Light in August we have the presupposition on the part of everyone that there is a difference between black blood and white blood. People see Joe as they want to see him. Let us remind ourselves that the Negro, the nigger, the black man, is a creation of society and has nothing to do with biology (and I have this on the authority of Professor Ballard). Christmas to us is the source of wonder, of horror, and yet above all of pity. He finds a most terrible truth, that he can never be anything more than a thought in other people's minds. They see him as they want to see him. He is never allowed to see himself. On the night before the murder, thinking of Joanna Burden and her plans for him to become a Negro lawyer to help his people, he says, "She shouldn't have prayed for me." The dietitian thinks that the five- year-old boy has understood what was going on in her bedroom. Old Doc Hines thinks of Christmas as "the Devil's spawn." In growing up, this poor, sensitive boy can have his first love affair only with a whore, Bobby; and after he has beaten McEachern, stolen Mrs. McEachern's pitiful horde of egg money and brought it to Bobby so that he can marry her, all she can do is to beat him, aided by the pimp and the matron. He finds himself turned out on the road, and he runs, half looking back all the time at his guilt, wondering, trying to find something, unable to enter the future, unable to know himself.

Then we find him after the murder running for seven days. He has even put on black shoes, Negro shoes; but he discovers that in his association with nature during those seven days, in surviving in forest and field by himself, he has traveled further than he had in the past many years. He comes to know something of himself, but he still has been unable to develop a vision, he still can not break out of the circle of the meaninglessness of his life. He concludes that there is only one thing left to do: give himself up, walk a straight and direct line towards the center of the circle. It is not worth running any more. His one freedom is a giving up of himself, and he chooses to exercise it, knowing that doing so will lead to certain death. Faulkner has one of his characters speculate on Christmas' actions in terms of the influence of black blood and white blood, as if they were different, as if Christmas had black blood in him. (No one knows for certain whether or not he does.) And this speculation leads directly into the terrible crucifixion and castration of Joe Christmas by Percy Grimm. The horrible work is done, and Faulkner writes,

But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like a rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.

We realize now that the central fact about Joe Christmas is not his blackness or his whiteness. It is his humanity. No one had allowed him to be human, to have a reality and identity outside of their own minds; but in the moment of his death, in the final look which he gives them his humanity is there. The look is not particularly threatful, says Faulkner, but the humanity of Christmas is "of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant."

IV

As we enter the second week of Alumni College some of us are finding that these pictures of man in "the cancerous age," which the four lecturers are presenting, are disturbing. Professor Ballard shows us that the human race is destroying its environment and itself, and no one seems able to stop the process. Professor Lyons reports that statesmen are still looking at international affairs in the same old ways - power politics with arsenals, superweapons, and military forces - as if the prospect of blowing ourselves off the earth does not mean much. Our naval officers are now asking for more submarines because Russia has a deep water navy and bigger weapons. Professor Fernandez shows that we can study what man has been in different cultures and possibly come to a better understanding of ourselves, but such a study is still earth-bound, limited, and relative. And I have suggested that the farthest reach of human experience is tragedy and the inevitability of human suffering, with our only weapon laughter as a means of coming to terms with life. Even laughter fails before the reality of war.

What is the matter with us? Can't we get out of this circle? Joe Christmas, you remember, found his life was a circle, and he was glad to give it up, finally. Is there for us no light in August? Life in the solar system, we are told, exists only here on earth. Doesn't this fact have some meaning for us? Are we not to reverence something? It is interesting to note that none of the lecturers and almost no one in the discussion groups I have been in has considered transcendent values. Statesmen in international politics are pragmatic. Professors Ballard and Fernandez are giving us scientific analyses, and the novels I have selected do not really admit to man's relation to that which transcends the terrestrial, or if they do, they see it as malicious. But how do we account for the beauty, the wonder, the mystery of human life? How do we explain the uniqueness, as I understand it, of the biological experiment, man?

We can describe our evolution, we can describe our follies and failures. We can list the alternatives in the Cuban missile crisis. But can we understand the wonder of Huck Finn at the coming of the dawn, with the smells of the winds, the delicate air, the wild flowers, and the song birds, as Huck says, "just going it"? I am sure that this can be measured and explained in terms of chemistry, sensory apparatus, and good digestion, but I want to believe in the primacy of Thurber's idea of one man, one woman, and a flower. There, he says in his fable, is where we started; and even though we go through history and destroy everything, there will be left, perhaps, one man, one woman, and one flower. Possibly they will want to begin again. All of us know that plagues will come again, and we know that there will be more wars. We know that children will starve, and we know that blacks and whites will go on fighting each other. We shall certainly go through periods when our industrial-mechanical activities will seem like suicide, and many of us will die in the wars, plagues, famines to come. But perhaps there is some value for us in James Baldwin's perceptive remark, in his Notes of a Native Son:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.

Perhaps these reflections may be of use to us in our discussion groups; possibly my fellow lecturers may want to address themselves to them. At any rate, they are prompted by the question in the minds of many here: if our age is indeed cancerous, what shall we do? We ought to be able to come up with a better answer than simple hedonism. Possibly we can surpass Voltaire, whose best advice in answer to that question in his age was, Cultivate your gardens!

In my last lecture I talked in a general way about major elements in Light in August, and this morning I want to get more detailed and specific; because I have found, and perhaps you have too, that this is a difficult novel. The action fascinates us and keeps our attention; but Faulkner presents it as symbolic action, not allegory; rather the struggle of the modern individual to find his meaning The novel is a prolonged contemplation of this struggle. The style is interesting. We find Faulkner writing with some uncertainty about what his characters are doing or thinking. When Joe is climbing in the window to Joanna Burden's house, Faulkner says, "Perhaps he thought of that other window which he had used to use and of the rope upon which he had had to rely; perhaps not. Very likely not, no more than a cat would recall another window. ..." One is tempted to say, "Come, Mr. Faulkner. This is your story. Don't you know what your characters are thinking?" But this is contemplation, standing back a little from the action and speculating about it.

Secondly, I mentioned in my last talk that August is a time when seeds planted in the spring ripen into fruition. Autumn casts its shadow forward into August, also; but in August we reap the harvest of what has been planted in the past. Hence, there is a certain inevitability in this book. Those of us who are in the August of our lives know that things have come so far; we have developed into what we are; we can't go back to the spring and replant. This idea is enriched by the imagery of the season in the novel and also by the analogy of the day, the day as it is drawing to a close, the moment of balance between late afternoon and early evening. It is at just such a time that we find Hightower sitting in his window, waiting, waiting for night to come, because when night comes then those voices, those galloping hooves, those actions of the glorious past come alive to him again, and he can live in the world of the dead. We noted, too, a sense of fate connected with a curse on the people, working its way out in violence and conflict in the here and now. The violence is illustrative of the barely leashed violence which is so important a part of America. Whether or not one believes in original sin (and I think I could make a strong case for it - Saint Augustine says that the only reason the baby is not a murderer is that he is too weak!) one gets the picture in this book of some characters struggling to free themselves from the sin of a world that offers no escape. Other characters, the self-appointed elect, struggle with the sins of other people. Even the madness of old Doc Hines, who says that God has told him to watch Him work out His will with the people to bring about His ends, is prgsented with some sympathy by Faulkner, who seems to see a Supernatural Will at work in the development of the lives of these people. The curse is seen affecting the lives of the Hightower family, the Hines family, the Burden family, and, in its special way, the life of Lena Grove. We have here, then, most of the ingredients of a Greek tragedy: sin that has to work its way out through suffering and bloodshed and does so with a terrible inevitability.

"Tragedy results," says Arthur Miller, "when man is compelled to be totally honest with himself." This is the kind of honesty we can get only through compulsion, all of us. We have too many protective devices which keep us from looking and asking. But when we are compelled, we find ourselves confronted with the existential questions: Who am I? Why am I? These are the central questions for Joe Christmas. They were central for Oedipus, too, although he arrived at them through different channels. The central drama of Light in August is the suffering of Joe Christmas, whom I should like to call, despite resistance, a hero. The drama ends with his sacrifice and transcendent death.

If we are going to have a Greek tragedy, we ought to have a Greek chorus, too. Perhaps you will accept the idea that the chorus of this piece is made up of the townspeople of Jefferson, who constantly comment on the action. Their comments are ironic, because they do not fully understand what is happening. In their reactions, they reveal their own human limitations. The leader of the chorus could be the sheriff, with his shrewd and generally sane observations. One of his deputies says, "If Brown don't get that reward, I reckon he'll just die." The sheriff, with sad knowledge that for the Browns of this world the only law is that of self-preservation, says drily, "I reckon he won't." The townspeople have little understanding; they are quick to threaten lynching. They rush out to the fire, and Faulkner observes, "It was an emotional barbecue for them." When they come, some of them with pistols already in their pockets, they begin to canvass about for someone to crucify, asking, "Who did it? Who did it? Is he still free? "

At the root of the drama is racial conflict, a primary matter for the South and for America. We have noted that the novel is regional, taking its origins in the deep South, but the struggle is that of the United States, just as our Civil War involved the whole country and was, as Frost said, one of our many deeds of gift to our land. The North - New Hampshire, specifically - is brought into this novel through Joanna Burden and her family; and we begin to see that Light in August is a story of epic proportions, told with high seriousness, and having as its major theme the working out of the destiny of man in a racially divided United States. When Christmas is dead and Percy Grimm has become what he always was in potential, through his unashamed, naked savagery, we have Hightower's meditation in which he sees the face of Christmas. This meditation gives us, I think, the vision that Faulkner wants us to see. The face of Christmas is not clear. It is confused more than any other face he sees in his semi-dream. "Then he can see that it is two faces which seem to strive... in turn to free themselves one from the other, then fade and blend again. But he has seen now the other face, the one that is not Christmas." He is startled to realize that the other face is that of that boy, Percy Grimm. He has seen the face of one man who had been made into a nigger and of another who had to destroy him, locked together in a single vision. We wonder whether there can be any possible resolution of this conflict. Hightower realizes, now, that he is dying. He has passed the August of his life. His vision has been able to come this far and no farther. He is content to pass on to the world of the dead where he can live with his grandfather and those cavalry raids.

The novel ends with what has been called Faulkner's picture of the holy family. There are Lena, her child, called Joey by Mrs. Hines, and Byron Bunch. They are traveling to an unknown destination, finding shelter in the back of a truck, for an inn would be too expensive. Is the fate of this new child going to be any different from that of Joe Christmas? Are Percy Grimm and Christmas to be locked forever struggling with each other? Faulkner turns away from Hightower's vision to this family. It represents only a small note of hope.

The theme of racial straggle can be understood more clearly, I think, if we look at major families whose histories are fed into the story. First there is Eupheus Hines, a small man who does a lot of fighting. His wife says it is the devil in him. The night his daughter Millie is born he is in jail

for fighting. Then there is the episode of Millie running off with the circus man who is called a Mexican. Guided by God, Eupheus runs and finds his daughter, kills the man she's running off with, and says, "God showed me the right road and he held the pistol steady." Because his daughter is a "whore," he prevents the doctor from coming to her in childbirth. She dies, and Hines steals the child and puts him in an orphanage. He is delighted to hear the other children call this boy "nigger"; but in a parody of parental care he steals the boy again when he suspects that he will be sent to a Negro orphanage. Later when he learns of what has happened to Christmas he refers to his grandson as "that bastard!" God speaks to him about the boy: " 'He is still walking My earth,' and old Doc Hines kept in touch with God and one night he wrestled and he strove and he cried aloud, 'That bastard, Lord! I feel! I feel the teeth and the fangs of evil! and God said, 'It's that bastard. Your work is not done yet. He's a pollution and a abomination on My earth.' " And so Doc Hines wants to lynch him, his own grandson. But let us ask here, is Christmas a pollution and an abomination on our earth? In short are we going to agree with Doc Hines?

Turning to the Hightower family, we are told that his grandfather had two slaves on the day of his son's wedding. He presents his son with the keys to his house and goes off with the slaves. He says, with admirable frankness, "You'd find me dull, and I'd find you dull." Even though the grandfather is an Episcopalian, his son, Hightower's father, becomes a Presbyterian preacher. He will not eat food prepared by slaves. He is an abolitionist before that word had been invented. There is a kind of schizophrenia here. Hightower's father, austere and of pioneering stock, takes part in a war on the side which opposed his own principles; and his son grows up with three phantoms and a ghost. The ghost was his grandfather, who made that cavalry raid and shot hundreds of Yankees. These actions never seemed horrible to the boy because, ironically, he got the stories of his grandfather through the words and imagination of a Negress. She was the one who told him what his grandfather had done. Hightower realized that maybe these tales were not true, but that did not matter. They gave him the dream of a glorious past which gave meaning and direction to his life. In the past there had been heroes, but in his present life he finds one disillusionment after another. At Seminary he becomes disillusioned with the church, because of the "professionals" who have taken away the church bells. He then has a love experience, but he discovers that the girl really wants to use him to get away from her own life and that there is no love there. "No wonder," he says, "that they put the word love in books, because it doesn't seem to have much existence in life." He keeps nourishing his mind on the past of the South and the land, just as you and I are not indifferent to where we came from, our family backgrounds. For him increasingly his history becomes the most meaningful thing. Even the Bible causes disillusion, and he notes "how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life." There follows the loss of his church, the beating by the townsfolk - the Ku Klux Klan beat him senseless. He still stays in Jefferson, however, and he says, "I have paid them and all I want is peace and quiet." This is why he so resists Byron Bunch who comes to him twice to try to draw him into life, first to assist at the birth of Lena's baby and secondly to lie about Joe Christmas. It is a peculiar kind of nasty, unpleasant lie, too. He is asked to say that Joe Christmas was with him the night of the murder. It is nasty because in the eyes of the townspeople this would be an admission of a homosexual relationship between himself and Joe. High tower is willing to put up with this kind of accusation.

As for the Burden family, we have Calvinism in another form. Their story is familiar. Her father and grandfather after the Civil War go to Washington and get a commission to come back to help Negroes in the South. Colonel Sartoris kills both her grandfather and her brother in one day, with one pistol, two shots, right in the midst of town. Sartoris was, Joanna said, "probably thought a hero because he did that to the people who came into their land and tried to change it." Joanna thinks that she is forced to carry on the work, to do what her grandfather and her brother had been unable to finish, and to protect their graves. Christmas is the one who says, "How long will it be before people of different races stop hating each other so much that they would even be willing to dig up the graves of the dead?" Joanna tries to keep serving "God's cause," is hated by everyone in Jefferson, and finally is left all alone, dubbed by the townspeople a "nigger lover."

And then there is McEachern. He is not a bad man or a good man. He is simply inhuman in the way that religious fanatics are always inhuman. Their truth has little to do with pity, compassion, forgiveness, peace and happiness, but rather with calmly damning, in the name of God, most of the human race. He has the Calvinistic virtues of work, thrift, self-discipline, austerity in the service of a code of conduct that is absolute. It has little to do with the pressures and sufferings of the human heart, let alone the needs of a growing boy five years old. To him the boy is an example of human depravity, and he is determined to beat the sin out of him.

Joe Christmas is an odd sort of hero. First of all there is the mystery of his birth. We do not know, nor does he, where he comes from. In a way, generalized, this is one aspect of every man. Secondly, he does not control his world or function for some divinity in the world as heroes of the past have done - Odysseus, Achilles, Aeneas, the Red Cross Knight of Spenser, or Jesus, functioning for God. He is another kind of hero who, through his suffering, illustrates the truth of his world. In the past we look at the suffering of great figures - Oedipus, Antigone, Macbeth, Lear - who show us the potential of the species. Joe Christmas is a little man. He is a helpless boy, at first. He is very ordinary and is acted upon by ordinary forces. But one is reminded of old Father Zossima in TheBrothers Karazamov kneeling before Dmitri and praying for one who was to suffer so much. Joe is made to suffer. Other people take out their guilt on him; the dietitian the guilt of her adultery, old Doc Hines the guilt of his daughter, McEachern the universal guilt of humanity.

Christmas becomes a man when he is eight years old. It is when McEachern beats him all day, every hour on the hour, because he refuses to learn his catechism. Joe decides that he is not going to learn it; instead he tries to find some personal integrity. He sticks to his resolution until he falls senseless from the beatings and from hunger. After he is taken to his room Mrs. McEachern brings him some supper on a tray. He takes it to a corner and calmly throws it onto the floor. The minute she leaves, however, he goes over on his hands and knees and eats it like a dog. He says, "They're trying to make me cry, and if they had done that, then they would have had me." Joe is trying to become a human being, and he begins to be a man that very day.

In his love affair with the whore, Bobbie, there is the desperate reaching out of the young boy for love and tenderness and personal fulfillment. McEachern storms into this and tries to smash the whole thing. Little wonder that Joe takes the chair and brains the old man; and even when Bobbie is beating him in the face and hurling obscenities at him he says, "I'll run back and get the money so we can get married." As he rides back, he is compared by Faulkner to Faustus when he had finally made his pact with the devil, "exulting perhaps at that moment as Faustus had, of haying put behind now at once and for all the Shalt Not, of being free at last of honor and law." Honor and law had been forcing him to be something different from what he thought he was. He rushes to the house where Bobbie, Max the pimp, and Mame are, and it is pitiful when he empties all those nickels and dimes and quarters into Bobbie's lap, saying that now we can get married. All she can do is get up, scatter them on the floor and beat him again, screaming at him, "We had a good thing down here, and now you've wrecked it all." So they end up simply by beating him: "We'll find out. We'll see if his blood is black. ... We'll need a little more blood to tell for sure." Bobbie says, "I did it with him free, a nigger, and now look how he treats me." The love he offers her is looked upon as the evil of the "nigger." The torture of Joe Christmas is the torture of the struggle between Negro and white.

Joe himself tries to find out whether or not he is a Negro. When he lies with white women he deliberately says that he is a Negro, trying to shock them. But when he runs up again a whore who is not shocked and says. "You should have seen the shine I just turned out of here before you came in," he goes mad and tries to kill her and is put in jail. Joe's life is the dramatization of Joanna Burden's vision: "the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow." Joe tries to escape the shadow, but he can not. This is the problem of the South but it is also the problem of the North; there is no escaping racial conflict in America.

There is also Joe's relation with Joanna Burden to be considered. Not only is he tortured on the rack of the black-white conflict. He is also tortured by the male-female struggle. He keeps finding women who want to mother him and destroy him. He can take the stiff, stern McEacherns because the struggle is manly, but the conflict with Mrs. McEachern and Joanna is different. Joanna is in the August of her life, a spinster, attempting in her love- making with Joe to compensate for all the years of frustration in her past. Another side of her insists on his being a Negro, calling him "nigger, nigger" as she makes love to him, and wanting him to go to a Negro school. She wants him to take over her affairs; she prays for him; she tries to destroy his integrity and make him into the being she thinks he ought to be. But this is to destroy the one thing Joe is trying to achieve. Consequently, he says, and she says also, there is only one thing left to be done: they both have to kill each other. We get that scene in the bedroom, Joanna with the pistol, with two shots, one for him and one for her. The pistol doesn't go off, so Joe ends their affair by murdering her. When he runs from the murder he is still fighting a racial battle. He goes to that Negro church, you remember, and he gets into the pulpit; there he curses God and Negroes too. He fights black and white, and now he fights life itself. Then he runs some more. He puts on black shoes, and they help him escape, but the black creeps up and up his body. Then, one day, he wakes and discovers that he does not have to eat anymore. He also smells the lovely air of the cool dawn. It comes into his lungs, refreshing, beautiful, and there is a moment of peace. He says, "This is all I wanted. This is what I wanted." After that he doesn't care, because he has been in a circle, and nobody had let him get out of it. Now it is time to quit. It is time to give up. It has been enough. He walks back to town and he is taken on Main Street. The chorus - the townspeople - blame him even then for not behaving as a murderer ought to behave. Instead of fleeing he walks right through the middle of town. Then there is his struggle to escape and Hightower's willingness to enter life again with a lie. But Joe is crucified, and Grimm and Christmas are finally seen in that last scene locked in struggle, looking at each other. American history has produced this. The struggle will go on between the whites and the blacks; yet life will continue, too; and Faulkner seems to conclude that Man will endure. But what does Joe Christmas' death mean? I think that he is a martyr in this black-white struggle, and a martyr has to have a cause. The cause of Joe Christmas is his own humanity.

We II come to another stage of this struggle Wednesday, when we consider Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

V

THIS morning I want to begin with some remarks about black writing, or better, writing by individuals who happen to be black. One of the surprising facts, until you reflect on it, is that there has been hardly any until recently. Robert Bone, who has made a careful study, TheNegro Novel in America, can list only three major novels: Jean Toomer's Cane, Richard Wright's Native Son, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Bone's study was published in 1958, and his survey was carried down to 1952, so he does not include James Baldwin. But the number of books by black writers in America is growing rapidly now, and if one looks at several of them he can find an interesting development.

They start with a hopeless, despairing representation of the Negro in America - I'm thinking particularly of Wright's Native Son - and come right down to Eldredge Cleaver, who is now writing revolutionary tracts. (Cleaver's Soul on Ice has just been banned from the required reading list of the school system in San Francisco, of all places, on the grounds of obscenity.) Wright's Native Son (1940) opens with a scene in which Bigger Thomas, a black boy in his middle 'teens, is shattered into consciousness by the alarm clock in his tenement in Chicago. He sees a rat in the room, and he runs around frantically chasing it, trying to kill it. The scene, metaphorically, is just the reverse of what happens to Bigger in the novel. He is the rat chased and killed by society. A blind society makes him what he is and destroys him.

Wright said, "In Native Son I tried to show that a man, bereft of a culture and unanchored by property, can travel but one path if he reacts positively but unthinkingly to the prizes and goals of civilization; and that path is emotionally blind rebellion." Bigger ends up being electrocuted for murder. The lawyer, in his defense, says, "This Negro boy's entire attitude toward life is a crime! The hate and fear which we have inspired in him, woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence." His attitude toward life is a crime, and the crime is ours.

A second story which might be mentioned here - it is really an autobiography — is Claude Brown's Manchildin the Promised Land, an account of what it was like to grow up in Harlem. This is a painful book, containing along with the expected sufferings of poverty and deprivation a terrible picture of what happened in the late '40s and early 'sos when dope came in quantities to Harlem and swept the whole community like a plague. Beside Brown's book we might put James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, his fictionalized account of youth in Harlem, and his later novel, In Another Country, which is again a suicidal representation of the Negro's position in America. Baldwin has also published a collection of essays which I recommend very highly, Notes of aNative Son. It is brilliantly written, and its content is important. There is, for example, this conclusion to one of the essays, "Stranger in the Village":

One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetmet. ually It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face This. world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Another book which should be mentioned here is TheAutobiography of Malcolm X. This is a tale of Malcolm s youth, his growing up, his suffering through all kinds of degradation, and his finding a kind of salvation. The book is widely read by our students today, who see in it a chance for the black people of our country and the world to establish a meaningful civilization in the future. Lastly, I want to mention Cleaver's Soul on Ice, which is militant and revolutionary. I do not think that it is obscene. Cleaver uses the metaphor of the black Trojan horse to describe the situation of black people in our country. We brought them in as slaves for our benefit; but now they are here. The horse is opening and armed men are coming out. Cleaver asserts that "The black man in America has already come to the realization that to be free he must now throw his life - everything — on the line, because his oppressors refuse to understand that they can no longer come up with another trick to squelch the black revolution. The black man can't afford to take a chance. He can't afford to put things off. He must stop the whole show NOW and get his business straight, because if he does not do it now, if he fails to grasp securely the reins of this his- toric opportunity, there may be no tomorrow for him." You can see what I mean about the change in tone that has occurred in black writing.

James Baldwin has identified some of the problems that he, as a black man, has faced in trying to be a writer. To him, a writer is a person who gets beneath the surface of things; he is a man who attempts to communicate his vision of reality, and for Baldwin one of the first difficulties was to get over seeing the Negro as a problem. So much has been written about the problem instead of human beings, about some sociological entity, something altogether inhuman! Secondly, he found himself like Caliban on Prospero's wonderful island in The Tempest, saying, "You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse." As Negroes become more articulate and seek to express their experience in life, what else is there for many of them to say but to curse? Even some white writers in our time are unable to say much more than "Howl!" There is, also, the question of cultural heritage. For the black man, history began with the slave block. Families and tribes were separated with the bill of sale. Baldwin says, "I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude." They were not his, as you and I can say that they are ours. We cherish them, for they give a lot of meaning to us.

Finally, and perhaps most important, is the question of hatred and fear: hatred and fear of white people, first; but hatred of the blacks secondly because they had not produced a Rembrandt. Baldwin hated and feared the world and in doing so, he discovered that he gave the world tremendous power over him. He was prohibited from examining his own experiences too closely by the tremendous demands and very real dangers of his own social situation. The chief thing he had to do, he realized, was to conquer his hatred and fear of the world. He tells a marvelous story about this in connection with the death of his father. He hated his father, a minister whose favorite text was taken from the most bitter of all the Psalms (137), "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Baldwin did not want to go to his father's funeral; he wanted to hold on to his hatred because there was some comfort in the hate and because he realized also that after the hate goes the pain comes. At that point he made a discovery; hatred, he came to understand, always destroys the hater. He saw this as an immutable law of life. When he had come this far he began to get over his hatred, and he says that he has now come to love America. He had to stop hating before he could begin to write.

in Ralph Ellison we have a major American novelist who is black. His Invisible Man is the finest imaginative representation of what it means to grow up in modern America that I have encountered, not just a black man growing up but a man. Some critics have called this the best novel since World War II. The last sentence of the novel, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" suggests that he has had more in mind than what is crudely called the black problem. Moreover, it is a novel by a Negro which brings together important elements of the Western tradition, especially Dostoevsky, James Joyce, and in our own country, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot. Invisible Man is a fresh and vital statement about our modern world, and it is intensely human and individual.

Ellison says that his book is not autobiography, but in the main outlines the novel follows his own personal experience, shaped, of course, to the demands of his vision. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1914 and educated in its public schools. With the help of a scholarship from the State of Oklahoma he attended Tuskegee Institute as a music major from 1933 to 1936. Leaving for New York with the aim of becoming a composer, he struck up friendship with Richard Wright, whose novel, Native Son, I have just referred to. Ellison joined the Federal Writers Project and also became a member of the Communist Party. He worked with Wright on various publications, doing articles and reviews. Some of his short stories and articles appeared in Horizon, The Reporter, and The Saturday Review. Invisible Man was published in 1952 and received the National Book Award in 1953.

Robert Bone, whose excellent study of The NegroNovel in America I mentioned earlier, has described Ellison's break with the Wright school and the naturalistic novel and also with the hard-boiled Hemingway idiom:

In accepting the National Book Award, Ellison states his reasons. ... There is first the problem of understatement, which 'depends, after all, upon commonly held assumptions, and my minority status rendered all such assumptions questionable.' Then there is the problem of the clipped, monosyllabic prose: 'I found that, when compared to the rich babble of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness, it was embarrassingly austere.' Finally, he feels compelled to reject 'the rather rigid concepts of reality' which inform these works in favor of a more fluid, more mysterious, more uncertain conception: 'Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction.'

The style of this novel, which is certainly one of its great virtues, reflects £ different view of reality from that found in Hemingway and in the naturalistic novel. It is a view which derives from Ellison's experiences as a Negro and from his experiences as a literate, educated man in the Western tradition, as well. As Bone has pointed out, and the examples are his, there is in Ellison's use of words and all through the novel a love of sounds and a love of music: "My name is Peter Wheatstraw, I'm the Devil's only son- in-law, so roll 'em!" and "I'll verse you but I won't curse you," the kind of delight in language which we find back in Elizabethan times when English was still fluid and new. Another example: "Then came the squad of drum majorettes ... who pranced and twirled and just plain girled in the enthusiastic interest of Brotherhood." There is also, we notice, some in-group humor. An angry black bartender "sliced the white heads off a couple of beers with an ivory paddle." Bone has also shown very well the importance of music in this book. There is a jazz theme that runs through it:

What did I do To be so black And blue?

—a question which Louis Armstrong, not very innocently, asks. Frequently in this novel, we find the melody, which is Ellison's narrative, in the foreground but become aware of important orchestration in the background. The themeline might be Tod Clifton being shot by the policeman, but the orchestration of the background gives us pigeons wheeling in the air while the shooting is going on.

Ellison, as Robert Bone points out, turned to the classical American novelists of the 19th century, Melville and Twain, because "he found a greater sense of responsibility for the future of democracy than among his own contemporaries," and we should keep this concern with the future of democracy in mind as we consider Invisible Man. Other writers, T. S. Eliot, with his concern for the past, and especially Dostoevsky and his Notes from Underground have been important in the development of Ellison and this book. James Baldwin lamented that the Negro had no past behind the slave block; but Ellison is willing courageously to face the past that the Negro has had since the block, a fact which explains in part his inclusion of the Trueblood, incestuous episode in Invisible Man. Doestoevsky's Notes from Underground explored the lower depths of human personality as well as such questions as the nature of reality, the meaning of the individual, and social responsibility. Doestoevsky, writing in the late 19th century, in a white, Russian society, has anticipated the need and has helped a 20th-century black writer to come to terms with the central problems of our age.

The opening of Invisible Man is symbolic. The hero, or non-hero perhaps he should be called, is seen inhabiting his underground den. It is illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs, the current for which comes, without their knowledge, from the Monopolated Light and Power Company. He needs the light so he can give form to his invisibility. His fellow humans have refused to see him as a human being, and his temporary revenge is in tapping the nonhuman power company for light so that he can see his humanity. He is underground in contemplative hibernation, trying to understand how and why he is invisible. The novel moves back to the time of his youth and graduation from high school, to the scene of the men's smoker. This is an obscene situation with three episodes. There is first the white girl who dances naked in front of the white men and the black boys. The boys are embarrassed because they want to look at her and know that they should not because she is white and sexually "off limits" to them. They are then blindfolded and have to fight each other in a battle royal for the entertainment of the now quite drunk white men. They smash each other instead of their real enemy, the white men who force them to do this. Thirdly, when they go to get their prize money it is thrown down on a rug which they discover is electrified. Moreover, the prize money is counterfeit.

Ellison has presented in these three episodes his view of the actual social situation of the black man in American society. We have the black man's ambiguous relation to white women (and I think that we all realize that racial conflict has strong roots in sexual attitudes and drives). The battle royal keeps blacks fighting blacks and hurting each other. The prize money for the black man in America is just such a painful joke. The prizes in America are held up before our people day after day on television - swimming pools, for example, shown to the Negroes in Watts, California. The prizes include a good home, pleasant grounds, good schools, material comforts, cars and hi-fi sets; and when the black man reaches out for them he gets a shock. If he should succeed in grabbing hold of one of them it turns out to be counterfeit.

Ellison does not stop here. The men are so drunk by now that they almost forget that the young narrator is supposed to give a speech. With some difficulty they are quieted to listen to what they expect to hear from this black boy who has done so well in school: a reaffirmation of the old Horatio Alger myth. In spite of his having been shamed and degraded, in spite of his having to swallow his blood from a cut in his mouth, he gives his prepared address. It is a Booker T. Washington speech, Washington the man who had been a slave, who came up from nothing, educated himself, and set up Tuskegee Institute to help his people. Like Washington this boy would help advance his race, but in the view of the white men he was not to go too far. (Washington, you remember, tried especially to train his people for industrial jobs.) Once, the young boy slips and mentions the word "equality." They loudly interrupt him, "What was that, boy?" He changes the word; one has to know his place at all times.

The chapter on the Negro college opens with Invisible Man looking at the statue of the Founder shown with "his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave"; but the narrator cannot decide whether the veil is really being lifted or lowered more firmly in place. He is in his junior year and has been selected to be chauffeur to one of the trustees who is visiting the institution. Mr. Norton (shorthand for Northern, if you will) is a Bostonian, a banker, a philanthropist, and a bearer of the white man's burden. "Through you and your fellow students I become, let us say, three hundred teachers, seven hundred trained mechanics, eight hundred skilled farmers, and so on. That way I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested." Mr. Norton is anticipating the industrialization of the South and wants trained workers. Ellison slyly hints at his Oedipal connection with his daughter whom he loved and who died in Italy. His work is to be a memorial to her. This comes just before Norton's accidental visit to the cabin of Jim Trueblood (a true, down-in-the-earth nigger) who has had an incestuous relationship with his daughter. The whites had never rewarded Trueblood's industry, but as soon as they learn of his incest, they reward his degeneracy. Even Mr. Norton, without quite knowing why, gives him a one hundred dollar bill. Through such rewards the whites confirm their deeply rooted prejudices; they are grateful to the Truebloods for proving them right.

From Trueblood's cabin we pass to the hilarious scene at the "Golden Day," a whorehouse where colored inmates from a nearby veterans' hospital for the insane make their weekly visit to the prostitutes. They are accompanied by a huge black man called Supercargo - their super-ego, if you will - who tries to keep order. Here, doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil service workers, Phi Beta Kappas, more than one of them beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan, men who have achieved something in life but are presently inmates of an insane asylum, are seen in their present madness. There is method in their madness, however. One of them says, as Mr. Norton is brought in, "I should know my own grandfather! He's Thomas Jefferson and I'm his grandson - on the 'field-nigger' side." Another says, and we remember Norton's speech about his great role, "Bring a chair for the Messiah!" Supercargo is badly beaten by the veterans because he is a white man's nigger. Mr. Norton and a "mad" doctor have an argument. The doctor says, referring to Invisible Man, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life.... He registers with his senses but short circuits his brain.... Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!" Norton is indignant, but the "mad" doctor continues: "And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you, he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man: a child, or even less - a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force."

Having shown us the reward for infamy in the black community of the South and the rewards for achievement, Ellison turns next to the Negro college. Its function is not to educate, but to indoctrinate with the myth of Horatio Alger. "We are a humble but a fast rising people," intones the Reverend Barbee, who, we discover later, is blind. Bledsoe, the director of the college, is a hard, ruthless pragmatist who can hold his own in the pitiless power struggle between blacks and whites. He follows the bitter advice of Invisible Man's grandfather: He "Yeses 'em to death." His philosophy is candidly expressed, as he expels Invisible Man from the school: "You let the white folks worry about pride and dignity - you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people - then stay in the dark and use it!"

Invisible Man, however, will not capitulate to this cynical and despairing philosophy. Throughout the many adventures of the book he is tricked and cheated and rebuffed and exploited. Whether it be by the Liberty Paint - Company "Keep America Pure with Liberty Paint" or by the Communist Party, called the "Brotherhood" in this book, Invisible Man is used by all he meets for their own ends. He struggles to preserve his human dignity and his individuality; these constitute his real visibility. But no one will allow him to be an individual or to be human; and finally, in running from a gang of, whites who are chasing him with clubs in their hands, he falls - or jumps - into a coal cellar, which is the only place in which he can be an individual. In the darkness, and before he has plugged in the 1,369 light bulbs, he reflects. The passage conveys not only the meaning of Invisible Man, but also the major idea I hope you will take away from my part of Alumni College 1969.

Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? - diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing toplay in the face of certain defeat. (Italics mine.)

This much, I think, we have been taught by the lives of Huck Finn, Joe Christmas, and Invisible Man.

Professor Bond lecturing in 105 Dartmouth Hall.

One of the group discussions after the morning lectures.