THE INTERNATIONALP.E.N. CONGRESS AND THE LITERARYVOCATIONTODAY - SOCIETY AND THE WRITER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01315R000400200012-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 12, 2004
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: June 12, 1966
• Content Type: BOOK

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Approved'For RJiPT6W KY: CIA-RDP88-01315
JUNE 12, 1966
THE INTERNATIONAL P.E.N. CONGRESS AND THE LITERARY AVOCATION' TODAY
Society and
the writer
?--------------I3y Paul Goodman.
P.E.N. is concerned with the threat to literature'
by new technological and social conditions. Are
there essential changes in the function of writing, '
in the subjects written, in the audience and a
writer's relation to the audience?
Let me say right off that, as a writer, I have never
felt myself different from the worthies of the past 1
in Europe, Asia, or America. I think I know what ~,;
they were up to, and I have felt them to be my -I
present colleagues and confidants, though alas
mostly dead. Long ago Longinus advised us to
"write it for Homer, for Demosthenes," and, even
when I am writing a kind of journalism, I still write
it for Sophocles, Seami, Milton or Goethe, or Lao-tzo
and Kant. (They tend to say, "Not bad for a kid in
1 Is this perverse, gripped in the dead hand of a
'literary tradition? I have no doubt that such a
literary attitude developed in particular ancient his-
conditions; conditions; but I think that its persistence
and development indicate that it has been the
invention-and-discovery of something permanently
human, just as disinterested science, political free-
' dom, Hippocratic ethics, bearing witness, and ro-
mantic love have all arisen in particular historical
conditions but are now our human glory and
,burden.
Speaking-as infants pick it up and remarkably
intuit the syntax (we don't know how)-is a special
way of being in the world. It is certainly more than
an "instrument for communication and expression,"
as many contemporary, anthropologists and linguists
call it. As a structure of symbols, speech opens op-
tions and a field for reflection and play. It defines
and actualizes the self rather than merely expressing
it. It does not merely communicate but creates com-
munity, and acts in it by its very act.'Its vocabulary
and syntax constitute world-views. that prejudge
reality.
The process of making literature -magnifies and
consolidates speaking as a mode of existing. It has
tradition and draws on personal memory: it chan-
nels observation by continual formulation. It makes
a reconstructed world whose causes are autonomous
devices of metaphor, dramatic plot, chains of verbal
reasoning. It maintains itself consistently through
TN recent years the annual International
P.E.N. Congress has grown in interest and
significance as a forum for writers from all
parts of our rapidly contracting world. Because
the XXXIVth Congress, which begins today in
New York, promises to be particularly valuable,
Book Week has asked two prominent writers-
--one American, the other Irish-to -discuss the
major topics that will focus the general theme
of the congress: "The Writer as Independent
Spirit." Paul Goodman, one of our leading
social critics and an independent- humanist of
many fears' standing, addresses himself mainly
to the three topics that inquire into the impact
of the social sciences, the mass society, and
the "clecronic age," respectively, upon the.
images of man that literature ,has traditionally
expressed and upon the literary vocation itself.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was the United
Nations representative in Katanga and vice-
chancellor of the University of Ghana before
becoming professor of humanities at New York
University last year, was asked to write on
the fourth topic: "The Writer as Public Figure."
Noting the prevalence today among writers of
"public commitment ... both to simple humani-
tarianivn and to rigorous ideology," the framers
of the topic ask whether "the donning by the
writer of a public persona tempts him to live up
to that role in disregard of his true creative
impulse. A collateral question is: Do we read the,
classics because their authors took a stand in a
contemporary conflict, or rather because they
illuminated the spirit of man?" In expanded
form,- Air. O'Brien's essay was recently given
as the Homer Watt Lecture at N.Y.U.
CIA-RDP88-01:34d605TAROFF
long works by a literary beginning, middle, and
end. Yet this peculiar process has always been
thought to give a unique kind of evidence about
reality, and philosophers and historians quote the
sayings and stAppgrbvwideftNi ft'sts $bWmiVit'1
,authority to a mysterious Continued