Today Cereus Readers–a book club devoted to Eudora Welty & and the writers she loved–is discussing “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” (1963), “The Demonstrators,” (1968) and the essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (1965).
If you’re interested in joining Cereus Readers, send me an e-mail (lisa at lemuriabooks dot com) or stop by the store.
As I read “Must the Novelist Crusade?”, I realized that this essay has just as much truth for us today as it did when Miss Welty wrote it. If you have never read this essay before, it can be found in The Eye of the Story. I feel it is also one of those essay that beckons to be read more than once. The entire essay is a marvel, and I hate to chop it up, but I’d like to share some stand-out passages with you.
From “Must the Novelist Crusade?” by Eudora Welty
‘All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it? Sit down there with your mouth shut?’ asked a stranger over a long distance in one of the midnight calls that I suppose have waked most writers in the South from time to time. It is part of the same question: Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?
. . .
The ordinary novelist does not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. His persuasions are all toward allowing his reader to see and hear something for himself. He knows another bad thing about arguments: they carry the menace of neatness into fiction. Indeed, what we as a crusader-novelist are scared of most is confusion.
Great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion; it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove.
When a novelist writes of man’s experience, what else is he to draw on but life around him? And yet life around him, on the surface, can be used to show anything, as readers know. The novelist’s real task and real responsibility lies in the way he uses it.
. . .
We cannot in fiction set people to acting mechanically or carrying placards to make their sentiments plain. People are not Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Black and White personified; flesh and blood and the sense of comedy object. Fiction writers cannot be tempted to make the mistake of looking at people in the generality–that is to say, of seeing people as not at all like us. If human beings are to be comprehended as real, then they have to be treated as real, with minds, hearts, memories, habits, hopes, with passions and capacities like ours. This is why novelists begin the study of people from within.
. . .
What must the Southern writer of fiction do today? Shall he do anything different from what he has already done?
There have been giant events, some wrenchingly painful and humiliating. And now there is added the atmosphere of hate. We in the South are a hated people these days; we were hated at first for actual and particular reasons, and now we may be hated still more in some vast unparticularized way. I believe there must be such a things as sentimental hate. Our people hate back.
I think the worst of it is we are getting stuck in it. We are like trapped flies with our feet not in honey but in venom. It’s not love that is the gluey emotion; it’s hate. As far as writing goes, this is a devastating emotion. It could kill us. This hate seems part shame for self, in part self-justification, in part panic that life is really changing.
. . . Yet I would like to point something out: in the rest of the country people seem suddenly aware now of what Southern fiction writers have been writing in various ways for a great long time. We do not need reminding what our subject is. It is human kind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody.
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