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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

EVANSTON. ILLINOIS

EDITOR ..•....••........

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

BUSINESS MANAGER

Charles Newman

Elliott Anderson

Theresa Maylone

ART DIRECTOR. Lawrence Levy

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

ASSISTANT EDITORS

ADVISORY EDITORS

PRODUCTION

FULFILLMENT

M. D. McDonnell

Dave Sedgewick

Debby Silverman

Mary Elinore Smith

Gerald Graff

Suzanne Kurman

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Kathy Jordan

TriQuarterly is an international journal of arts, letters, and opinion published in the fall, winter, and spring at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Subscription rates: One year $7.00; two years $12.00; three years $17.00. Foreign subscriptions $.75 per year additional. Single copies usually $2.95. Back issue prices on request. Contributions, correspondence, and subscriptions should be addressed to TrlQuarterly, University Hall 101, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. The editors invite submissions, but queries are strongly suggested. No manuscript will be. returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. All manuscripts accepted for publication become the property of TriQuarterly, unless otherwise indicated. Copyright © 1974 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. The views expressed in this magazine are to be attributed to the writers, not the editors or sponsors. Printed in the United States of America. Claims for missing numbers will be honored only within the four-month period after month ofissue.

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Contents

ALBERT J. GUERARD. Notes on the rhetoric of anti-realist fiction 3

DAVID CAUTE. Commitment without empathy: a writer's notes on politics, theatre and the novel 51

RICHARD PEARCE. Enter the frame 71

TONY TANNER. My life in American literature 83

JOHN HAWKES. Notes on writing a novel 109

PHILIP STEVICK. Metaphors for the novel 127

Creature on cover by Elwood H. Smith

Lithograph on pages /6-17 entitled "Oregon" is by Larry Stark

Notes on the rhetoric of anti-realist fiction

ALBERT 1. GUERARD

One approaches this enterprise with sinking heart, if only because the term anti-realist seems to offend many, perhaps because it seems to call into question both the novels one was brought up to like and the solid ground underfoot. Moreover any article of some length, proposing categories and making quasi-historical statements, is bound to enrage by its omissions. Where is Warren Fine? Why no more on Vonnegut? Only a sentence for Ishmael Reed! Delinquency, delinquency. So I insist from the start these are but notes on a few problems and tendencies, on a "situation", and on a very few writers, with only a partial view of these few. With Hawkes and Kosinski for instance, only one emphasis: how "psychology" functions as anti-realistic rhetoric. A very important mode is all but omitted, a sub-genre so to speak: the intellectual extravaganza, wildly entertaining though often academically parodic: Giles Goat-boy, or Alan Friedman's Hermaphrodeity or Charles Newman's The Promise-Keeper, this last "A Tephra-

TriQuarterly 3

mancy (Divination by means of ashes) with Certain Profane Stoical Paradoxes Explained/Literary Amusements Liberally Interspersed/Partitioned with Documents & Conditioned by Imagoes/Hearty Family-Type Fare, Modern Decor, Free Parking." Here, as in the title pages of Barth, is a nostalgia for eighteenth century energies and freedoms. Much good recent fiction is entertainment for loose-jointed intellectuals, with lists and catalogues (and giants) to rival those of Rabelais.

So an element offun I often ferocious, is an ancient attribute of fiction that somehow survived the 1850-1950 longeurs of social realism. An essential question: can (even should) other old values survive in an anti-realist art: the novelist's caring about his personages, for instance, as Nabokov cares about Ada? The particular "situation" that interests me is that of the novelist who cannot put himself through the realist paces, who may even find them deeply repulsive, yet who wants to preserve some of those old pleasures, even a primitive pleasure in narrative? What ofthe novelist who would still like to exert a Conradian control over the reader's sympathies and judgments, or who would take a Gidian delight in disturbing the reader's moral system and in corrupting him without his realizing it? These are Gods I refuse to burn. But which way should a younger writer nourished on Flaubert and James' (but also on Burroughs and Barth) turn? There are a few radically original writers, most notably John Hawkes, who were able to write several novels in total disregard of the current literary scene. But such are very rare. This essay will conclude with the fairly extended example of one young writer, Jerome Charyn, who appears to be unusually aware of the contemporary situation in the novel. Given a fine and somewhat traditional (better: Dickensian) talent, Charyn has tried from book to book to "make it new", in rhetoric as well as in invention, without wholly sacrificing the old.

The word rhetoric, even in the wide acceptation given it by Wayne Booth, also irritates many, and long irritated me, ifonly for its Freshman English overtones, and the crimes committed

there in its name. But it does suggest a concern with form and language and what they can do, with novel-writing and novelreading as felt experience. The common practice is to insist rather on subject, theme, character, and on the "real realities" of psychological and social insight. Hence the paradox that so few of the innumerable studies of Faulkner have much to say about what is really new in his work: language, love of incongruity, perverse humor, disruptions of reader expectation, etc. The case is put clearly by Richard Gilman (The Confusion of Realms) in writing about William H. Gass. Confronted with novelty, the critical tendency is to subvert its impact by seizing on what is familiar in it-its "theme" or "characters" -celebrating that and then assigning to what is new and unprecedented a role as augmenter, regenerator, reinterpreter of the known We are so accustomed to seeing, or imagining that we see, or complaining that we do not see, the novel advancing thematically-the sensibility being extended to cover previously unreported areas of public or private behavior, wit deployed against hitherto sacrosanct targets, language in the service of ever deeper or more complex moral investigations-that we have effectively made fiction into an adjunct of all our other disciplines. 1

The statement is entirely admirable, though we must add that Gilman himself, complaining of certain concessions in Gass to character and plot, threatens to make fiction an adjunct of French phenomenology: "fiction has no reason for being other than to test and exemplify new forms of consciousness "

The discrepancy is more than usually shocking, between adventurous novelistic practice of the 1960's and early 1970's and even the best theoretical and descriptive criticism. Robert Scholes (The Fabulators) did recognize a renewed delight in extravagance and design and Anais Nin (The Novel of the Future) insisted on the primacy of language and dream. Philip Stevick, in his introduction to the anthology Anti-Story, saw his experimental writers in terms of their repudiations, and properly so: Against Mimesis, Against "Reality", Against Event, Against Subject, Against the Middle Range of Experience, Against Analysis, Against Meaning, Against Scale. But even he has little to say about the effect of these repudiations on the uncommon reader these writers seek. Rhetoric-the

novelist's struggle and the reader's-plays a disappointingly small part in two ambitious studies of contemporary experimental fiction: Raymond M. Olderman's Beyond the Waste Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties and Tony Tanner's otherwise excellent City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970. Both Olderman and Tanner are finally concerned with refractions ofreality, with themes, with writers as representative of their time.

And these matters are (pace Gilman, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes) important, though I will not dwell on them. Olderman is useful on thematic changes from the 1950's to the 1960's (fewer journeys now, less search for identity, less existential confrontation, more two-dimensional characters). He records the explosion of the ordinary by the fabulous and the growing sense of the mystery of fact, with fact and fiction more than ever blurred. There is a loss of confidence in our power to control events, a paranoid sense of a They with an irrational hold on things. The glaring weakness of Olderman' s book is its entrapment by its title. Contemporary America as a waste land, yes. But why, with a deadly literalness, such insistence on the Fisher King? Tony Tanner's City of Words is all in all the best introduction I know to the serious, non-commercial fiction of our time. Tanner underlines the prevailing vision of entropy; the intensifying fear of conspiracy, conditioning, control; the increasing awareness of failure of communication; the twin deaths of inertia and role-playing; and (a link with the American past) the ancient longing to go beyond structurings of reality into some zone of freedom where, without entirely losing individuality, one may "go with the flow". Tanner's title and introduction point to "lexical foregrounding"-language that draws attention to itself. Moreover, Tanner is often brilliantly persuasive whenever he discusses the thematic burden of imagery and reflexive reference. The effect of this insistence, however, is to make certain writers seem more somber, more philosophically impelled, than they are. The comic rarely gets its due in descriptions of these visions of

disaster. What is finally lacking-but this is absolutely central to the best contemporary novelists-is some sense of the fun writers take in the games they play. Affective technique, affective stylistics: these pedantic words refer, after all, to real pleasures for writer and reader: the delight in fantastic invention and the liberated underground life, black humor, extravagance. Hawkes, Pynchon Burroughs, Kosinski, Heller, Mailer: of course their visions are dark if not apocalyptic. But the writers experienced, in expressing these visions, novelistic delight.

This is very nearly all I will have to say about theme, subject, vision. The comprehensiveness of Tanner's book frees one to talk about other things.

Realist and anti-realist

Why anti-realist? Chiefly because alternative terms have deceptive connotations or exclude major talents:fabulist (with its overtone of ethical norms) or Scholes'sfabulator; anti-novelist or new novelist (here a specifically French aura, and the French yearning for a truer truth to life); experimental novelist; Barth's "post anti-novel-novel"; surrealist; new American Gothicist; baroque; grotesque; poetic; absurd; post-modern, etc. To revive the old distinction between novel and romance, and to further cloud matters with Frye's categories of Menippean satire and "Sacred Book", create dubious links with the distant past. I suspect fable is no more helpful, or helpful only for Vonnegut and a very few others.

The essential distinction is between the anti-realist and the novelist who purports to imitate life as ordinary common sense perceives it and who also tends to use the novel form inherited from the nineteenth century and from the 1930's. The antirealist, in conscious opposition, is determined to re-imagine the world or create a new one. He no longer finds the inherited form congenial or even tolerable. What nearly all critics, even Tanner, underestimate is the nausea felt by many recent writers for various worn methods and "tricks" to induce

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reader-identification: the in medias res opening followed by expository flashback of a character's consciousness; the impersonal "post of narration" and pretended effacement of the author; life-like banal dialogue and the trin-trin quotidien; the lighting of cigarettes and slamming of doors; the maneuverings to justify a narrator's knowledge of events, etc. etc. By contrast the anti-realist may seek the "purity" long ago preached by Gide and before him by Flaubert: "What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible."? More succinctly John Hawkes referred to the four enemies that confronted him at the start of his career: plot, theme, character, structure.

The modernist work, says Stanley Cavell, "is trying to find the limits or essence of its own procedures" "seems to be, even forced to be, drawing itself to its limits, purging itself of elements which can be forgone and which therefore seem arbitrary or extraneous "3 Narrative, for Gilman, is extraneous: "narrative, which Bernard Shaw long ago called 'the curse of all serious literature' and which every major novelist since Flaubert has either abandoned or used ironically, is precisely that element of fiction which coerces it and degrades it into being, a mere alternative to life, like life, only better of course, a dream (or a serviceable nightmare), a way out, a recompense, a blueprint, a lesson."4 Too strong a statement, one on which the anti-realists themselves will divide? No doubt. Yet there is a close affinity in some younger writers to what Ihab Hassan calls the arts of silence: "random music, concrete verse, electronic dance, guerrilla theatre, deliquescent sculpture, autodestructive media, packaged nature, psychedelic spectacles, blank canvases, and plain happenings."5 All of these, Hassan remarks, quite incorrectly I think, show greater exuberance than what he calls recent

American "absurdist" fiction. It is important to note how many people who will accept all or at least several of these forms of anti-art or pop art balk at the term anti-realist novel; and, more significantly, balk at reading the novels themselves. Only the novel, they insist, but the novel always, must render and represent. The generation gap is enormous, since many young people actively enjoy anti-realist fiction, while the reader in his fifties and sixties, with reading habits implanted in childhood and theories of fiction a little later, is likely to be disgusted or bored. (To anticipate accusations of special pleading I will note that my own six novels are on the whole distinctly more "realist" than not. This essay is essentially descriptive.)

But here without further ado is an illustrative lineup, in lieu of definition-the realist column to include such an impressionist as Styron, such an occasionally "magic" writer as Malamud, even such an unreliable reporter as Miller:

Realist

Saul Bellow

Henry Miller

early Mailer

Nelson Algren

Bernard Malamud

Truman Capote

Herbert Gold

John Updike

Wright Morris

Philip Roth

William Styron

James Baldwin

early Joyce Carol Oates

Anti-Realist

Nathanael West

Djuna Barnes

Anais Nin

John Hawkes

William Burroughs

Vladimir Nabokov

James Purdy

later John Barth

Jerzy Kosinski

Richard Brautigan

Thomas Pynchon

Ishmael Reed

Ron Sukenick

Both lists are very incomplete, and good writers move around. A number of writers showed a distinct shift, in the 1960's, toward anti-realism. And there remain a number difficult to place, or who shift positions within a single book: Ralph 9

Ellison, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, J. P. Donleavy, many more.

Repression and revolt within the realist fold

Serious writers, realist and anti-realist, faced some of the same problems in the 1960' s, not least the dwindling of a public for all but meretricious or momentarily newsworthy fiction. As the size of type face and binding suddenly increased in the 1960' s for serious" commercial fiction, so too various novelistic devices for reviving flagged attention. More deeply: how was one to respond to the complacencies and conformities of the recent Eisenhower years, to pervasive boredom and fear of entrapment beneath which lay repressed dread, repressed horror? Norman Mailer's classic statement in "The White Negro" dates from 1957: "Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in those years. "6 The writer's task was to shock the reader into awareness of the dullness of his life, awareness too that death and violence are realities, not items in a newspaper or pictures on a screen. How escape what Bellow called the "soul's soft sleep"? One could drop out, as beatnik or even hipster, or migrate again to Paris, Mexico, Nepal. Or one could, as a writer, preach a psychic vitalism-the imperatives of "coming alive" and "letting go". In subcultures beneath the mainstream of American life one found at least the illusion of new energies, fresh language: Herbert Gold's The Man Who Was Not with It, Nelson Algrens A Walk on the Wild Side, Kerouac's On the Road, etc. Differentiated behavior, passionate feeling and speech: these were to be found in the Bronx too, and on the Lower East Side.

Later, violence and absurdity reached the surface. As early as 1953, in "The Ivory Tower and the Dust Bowl"," I asked how (except through symbolic exaggeration or foreshortening) the serious novelist could compete with reality, the newspaper,

the newscast. I found myself defending"Kafkaesque" fictions (The Cannibal, 1984, The Plague, Flaiano's The Short Cut, Buzzatti's Across the Tartar Steppes, my own Night Journey) as well as elaboration of language. How tame were the riots imagined by West and Ellison, as we came to 1968 or 1970! Even the traditional realist might be driven to extreme solutions (say Henderson's journey to Africa or Augie March's to Mexico); or driven, in time, to the "new journalism", nonfictional reporting with fictional enrichments, fictional rhetoric.

For all but the most mediocre talents, or nearly all, mere ordinary surface Middle America had ceased to be viable material.

But there were also liberations from which both realist and anti-realist profited. As the sexual liberation, when at last it came, was more violent than anything Europe could have dreamed, so too the breakthrough in language. It is hard to establish precedence where in any long view the liberations were nearly concurrent:

The personal revolts against banality of language and academic polish-notably exemplified in Mailer's revisions of The Deer Park and discussed by him in Advertisements for Myself, and in the deliberately looser language of The Adventures ofAugie March. The difficult objective (for Bellow, for Algren, for Herbert Gold, for many others) was to combine tough earthy colloquialism and poetic richness, street-corner slang and metaphysical wit. 8 One solution was to use eccentric narrators, itinerant preachers or doctors, speakers for whom such a blend was natural.

The personal revolt against the controlled shapely art novel with its psychological nuances, its imperceptible transitions and modulations, its understatement: Saul Bellow's break, again, from short muted fictions to the freer narrative of Adventures ofAugie March. In form as in language, Bellow was widely imitated; there were writers who went still further toward the picaresque. 11

The influence, through the universities and the writers teaching there, of two richly liberated, risk-taking writers: Joyce and Faulkner.

The sexual revolution and the lifting of censorship (both inner and outer): fortuitously preceded by the astounding Kinsey revelations and by the D.H. Lawrence decision. Was one aware of the moment as historic, hearingfuck for the first time in a classroom, a student reading his story aloud with red face and strangled voice? All along there had been, though difficult to measure, the underground influence of Henry Miller and other writers for the Olympia Press, as the Marquis de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos had been underground influences in nineteenth century France. James E. Miller (Quests Surd and Absurd) speaks of Miller's "mute presence in many dark corners of contemporary fiction". Another milestone: the Partisan Review publication of "Whacking Off" from Portnoy's Complaint. So rapid was the escalation that sexual materials came to seem for many serious writers, and within less than a decade, suitable only for comic extravagance or for parody.

A final shift of tactics, in this shorthand summary: the effort of the best realists to achieve a vividpresentness, as opposed to sinuous impressionist remembering, and the corollary effort to present character existentially, in confrontation, rather than through the time-layered insights of depth psychology. Once again, this shift is not found in all serious writers. But we see it in the most representative of the realists.

The anti-realist distrusts: of "reality", of the inherited form. The French anti-novel, so very different from most American experiments, proposes to be truer to things as they are by dismissing analogy, depth psychology, interpretation, the whole "fringe of culture that disguises the real strangeness of things."9 Even Richard Gilman, for all his scorn of fiction as an "expression or interpretation or simulacrum of life", remarks that Barthelmes does in fact reflect faithfully new

youthful modes of consciousness. (Perhaps this is also true for the quieter, more nostalgic discontinuities of Richard Brautigan, who seems to have much the same appeal for young readers as the more realistic Salinger once had. An important factor in the attraction of Brautigan and Vonnegut: their short sentences not only convey "cool" attitudes; they are easy to read.) Richard Poirier speaks of the authenticity of Mailer's language for younger readers. There is a clear temptation, if only to win the attention of the benighted, to argue that the anti-realist (with his comic absurdity, formal disruptions, violence, entropy, etc.) is the true reflector of things as they are, the America of the '60's and '70's. John Hawkes's The Cannibal and Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird came closer, we now see, to the deep realities of World War II than the fat documentaries. And Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, which mentions Vietnam only in its last sentence, is a more rewarding picture of pervasive malady and violence than The Naked and the Dead. The narrator at times wants us to think of his own existence as problematic: one more inducement to vertigo. But the broken, particled, zizagging consciousness is extraordinarily real.

To say that American anti-realism is a truer realism is, nevertheless, to do it a disservice and certainly to mislead. For the distrust of what common-sense proposes as "reality" is radical, though by no means somber. Some of the funniest fiction of our time, Philip Stevick writes, "grows out of the metaphysical conviction that nothing makes sense."lO And often nothing does. The deep distrust of ordinary language and of appearance stems in part from twenty-five years of cold war and political deception: nothing was ever what it seemed, or what on highest authority it was said to be.

Finnegans Wake, as always, led the way, if not the Songs of Maldoror of 1868, in unsettling identities, and fusing the dreamer and the dreamed. What, if anything, happened last summer at Marienbad? Nothing, Robbe-Grillet insists, outside the limits of the film, who similarly insists the watch-salesman

of The Voyeur has no past life or future, and no other identity than the elusive one immediately before us in the text. The Alexandria Quartet, by discrediting in Balthazar the presumed "realities" ofJustine, is corroborating the primacy of imagination over fact, myth over history. A bsalom! A bsalom!, the culminating work of Conradian impressionism, also points to the 1960's in its dependence on unprovable conjecture as an ultimate avenue to "truth", which is no other than collaborative myth. The identity of V (Vhissu, Veronica Manganese, etc.) is no more stable than that of Trout Fishing in America (a book, a person, a part of speech). The identity of Charles Kinbote, also problematic, is doubly deceptive thanks to plausibilities of voice and overtones of old-fashioned detective fiction. Donald Barthelme's "The Indian Uprising" almost seems to surrender a story and meaning. But where, if anywhere, is anything happening? Nabokov'sAda, though it offers many of the ancient fictional pleasures, a book in the best sense erotic, creates its elaborate myth of Terra and Anti-Terra, and of space and time disrupted or superimposed. James Purdy's masterful Malcolm seems to ask many of the same questions as Alice in Wonderland, at times in the same tones:

Thinking still more, Madame Girard asked: "What does he think he is?"

"I feared you were going to ask that," Malcolm confessed.

Madame Girard nodded, understanding.

"I don't suppose he has quite decided what he thinks he is," Malcolm suggested.

"Perhaps, however," Girard spoke up, "if we knew what he thought he was, we could be able to persuade him to come with us."

"You could persuade nobody-nothing!""

Theater of the Absurd has, of course, had considerable influence on a number of novelists, notably on Purdy.

The second great distrust is of the inherited novel form, and of the very act of fictionizing. Distrust and embarrassment. Gifted writers foresaw the crisis long ago: Gide even in Paludes (1895) as well as in the long-pondered involuted Counterfeiters. Hardy observed in his dry succinct way that "Realism is not art". Conrad (who in fact renewed the novel in many ways) saw the novelist as condemned to rabacher the old

formula until the new man came along, who did indeed come along in the person of Joyce. And even Henry James, reviewing Middlemarch, felt the novel had gone as far in this direction as it could.

The embarrassment and restlessness are apparent in Joyce, as he moves from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, but no less so in Faulkner, moving from Soldier's Pay to A Fable, or startlingly, from Sanctuary to Requiem for a Nun, a novel that combines extravagant historical essay and poetic play. Gifted though he was in the traditional modes, a master even of the rhetoric of suspense, Faulkner was increasingly compelled to undermine both form and reality-through juxtaposed or interlocked narratives separate in space (Light in A ugust) or time (Wild Palms); through A Fable's vast structure of occult correspondences, not to mention its three-legged race horse. Faulkner might have said, with Durrell, I want to crackforms. "What's your beef with me Bo Shmo, what if I write circuses?" Thus a voice in Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969). "No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons."

To destroy structure, harmony, radiance and disrupt normal syntax-these may indeed discover new modes of consciousness, but also indicate dissatisfaction with old forms. So too Nabokovian involution; so too extravagance of fantasy carried to the limits of pop art. But surely the most obvious, most recurrent symptom of embarrassment-embarrassment not merely because one is writing something that can be called a novel, and may be drawn to old devices, but also because one is engaged in a self-conscious act of destruction-is the widespread use of parody. Even John Hawkes, presumably the most original of the living anti-realists, has parodic scenes or passages in all his books.

An art form may begin in parody and self-parody, revealing the intense uneasiness of the creator over what he is doing and the materials he is using: Don Quixote, Tom Jones, etc. In

much the same way widespread use of parody by serious writers may indicate, several centuries later, the radical transformation of a genre, if not its exhaustion and "end".

A note on present consciousness (and its escalation)

The nineteenth century novel, and the social realist novel of the 1930's, was a leisurely measured recapitulative form, often depending on the pretense that memory composes the past. This, in the 1960's and 1970's, had become the property of the best-seller.

Serious writers, by contrast, more and more attempt a violent immediacy of consciousness and sensation. "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing I am a recording instrument I do not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity'

Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have a limited function I am not an entertainer "12 Thus Burroughs in Naked Lunch, who combines the activist/vitalist ideal of risk with the literary impulse to convey an absolutely immediate present: Here! Here! Now! Now! Against the distilled understated truth to one's physical sensations of Hemingway is the aim to capture, in its frenetic totality, a consciousness determined to be aware of more and more. An American Dream dramatizes the deep risk compulsion but is still operating with conventional, often banal prose. Statements about odors and allusions to rats and mice during intercourse (vagina dentata again!), shouted claims of excitement-Mailer's prose was hardly up to its subject: "I had one of those splittings of a second where the senses fly out and there in that instant the itch reached into me and drew me out and I jammed up her ass and came as if I'd been flung across the room. "13 Such ancient rhythms are being asked to do too much.

The language of Why Are We in Vietnam? is of a different order. For now we do have, for all its medley of American voices, what might indeed have been a "tape recording of my

brain, and a brain both poetic and wildly colloquial. The voice, nominally reminiscent, yet seeming to create an absolute ongoing present, is in direct rapport with listeners, readers partly because they are, nearly always irreverently, directly addressed. 'The wit is involuted, reacting constantly to itself, without loss of pace. The Alaska chapters contain some beautiful traditional writing, beautiful even when directly parodying or echoing The Bear. But usually the voice is unintermittently staccato, outrageously present: hoping, in Richard Poirier's words, to "shatter the nerves with style, with wit, each explosion a guide to building a new nervous system. "14

The movement fromAn American Dream to Why Are We in Vietnam? dramatically illustrates the escalations of the last decade. "The White Negro" had long since defended the compulsion to test self and push experience and risk to the limit. But the escalations of the 1960's and early 1970's seem determined as much by the need, anxiety-ridden, to crowd novels with excited consciousness. What further tricks to play, what shouts to capture a vanishing public? [ assume Barthelme's "The Show" refers to the novel, or at least to prose fiction, and to the difficulty of holding an audience. Fools were recruited for the show, but fools are hard to find:

We settled for gowks, gulls, mooncalfs. A few babies, boobies, sillies, simps. A barmie was engaged, along with certain dum-dums and beefheads. A noodle. When you see them all wandering around, under the colored lights, gibbering and performing miracles, you are surprised. It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don't know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless;'!

There has operated, too, the artist's impulse to face new challenges. The distances traversed are immense: from the suave impressionist narrator ofLolita to the infinite complexity of Pale Fire, and thence to Ada's games with space and time; from the calm controlled The Floating Opera to the farrago entertainment of Giles Goat-boy and the later fictions; from V (with many pages still in a realist or impressionist mode) to such a limited but extravagant game as The Crying of Lot 49.

James Purdy, a polished stylist in Malcolm, "lets go" ebulliently in Cabot Wright Begins. Mark Mirsky's Thou Worm Jacob has the extravagance of a traditional tall tale, but is rooted in the comic reality of Boston Jews. Proceedings of the Rabble has moved much further toward the grotesque, with radical shifts of focus and hallucinatory interior monologues, and a comic treatment of violence that, dealing with a splinter party's presidential campaign, illumines the latent (and not so latent) hysteria of the late 1960's. Possibly most surprising is the change, in Joyce Carol Oates, from the tedious realism of The Garden of Earthly Delights to such extreme experiments as "Notes on Contributors" or "Turn of the Screw", a story published in double column pages. Is the "old man" of the right hand column the hallucinated double of the person who wrote it? The story might be a technically innovative reimaging of Death in Venice, as Joyce Carol Oates's "My Secret Enemy" is an ingenious recasting of The Old Curiosity Shop, with the incestuous material latent in Dickens brought brutally to the surface.

In other writers the escalation of sexual violence, from tedious anatomy to extravagant black humor, became steadily more intense, with presumably diminishing returns. These changes and escalations multiplied bewilderingly the options open to a young writer.

Some of them appear even in short fiction, which, Philip Stevick remarks, has been "perhaps the most conservative art of mid-century", and which became "in an age in which every other art continued to extend its own possibilities rather predictable and formulaic. "16

Three "texts"

They can serve as convenient introductions to anti-realist impulses and anxieties: Anti-Story, edited by Stevick (1971); The Single Voice, edited by Jerome Charyn (1969); and Fiction, the tabloid quarterly edited by Mark Mirsky, begun in 1972.

Anti-Story is devoted entirely to short self-contained antirealist works, and systematically explores the major antagonisms of experimental fiction. The Single Voice, by contrast, seeks to represent the best of contemporary fiction, of whatever mode, and ranges from a number of fine traditional stories (Flannery O'Connor, Leo Litwak, Jay Neugeboren and others) to short pieces by Borges, Barthelme, Nabokov. There are fairly independent selections from novels by eight writers: Hawkes, Pynchon, Heller, Barth, Bellow, Conroy, Faust, Leonard Cohen. Herbert Gold's "Death in Miami Beach" and three Ken Kesey letters from Mexico are also included, as though to suggest how wavering the line may be between highly personal non-fiction and the extravagant fictional monologue much indulged by a number of anti-realists.

The first issues of Fiction contain work by well-known writers, both realist and anti-realist (Burgess, Cela, Gass, Creeley, Paley, Sukenick, Barth, Hawkes, Beckett, Michaels, Sarraute, etc.) and, usefully, a number of beginning writers or writers virtually unknown, some represented by very short pieces indeed. The editors obviously have no use for standard commercial fiction; otherwise taste seems reasonably eclectic.

It is worth noting that The Single Voice has had a very wide sale, primarily as a college textbook, and that Fiction, at first virtually distributed at street corners by its editors, has been successful beyond anyone's expectations. The public for experimental fiction is evidently much larger than most publishers and editors realize.

The prevailing anti-realist impulses and rhetorical aims are seen most easily through Anti-Story. A few examples:

SeLf-consciousness and anxiety over the fiction-making process, and over the relation offiction to reality; Nabokovian involution. A number of the stories find the speaker at his typewriter or meditating plots, and in some instances pausing to ponder the death of the genre one tries to practice. The selfconsciousness may be intensified by anxious reflections on writing courses, lit. crit., etc. Keith Fort's "The Coal Shovel-

ler" deals with the dangers of academic consciousness of fiction as a disintegrating form; John Barth's "Life Story" takes us into the mind of a learned, witty, very self-conscious writer, also bemused by literary trends. But here are a few voices:

John Barth: "Without discarding what he'd already written, he began his story afresh in a somewhat different manner. Whereas his earlier version had opened in a straight-forward documentary fashion, and then degenerated or at least modulated intentionally into irrealism and dissonance he decided this time to tell his tale from start to finish in a conservative, 'realistic,' unself-conscious way."

Heinrich Boll: "Only one question remains unresolved, and it will probably cause youthful readers some anxiety: what does one do with living people where they are needed for short prose?"

Keith Fort: "Not only am I blocked philosophically from writing a Joycean story-I am also incompatible with its style How subtle should a symbol be? I honestly don't know. I rather imagine that a good symbol is one that takes an English teacher about two minutes to decipher and his students about ten."

Thomas Disch: "A brief interruption in the story: do you feel that it's credible? Does it possess the texture of reality?"

Julio Cortazar: "It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing.

This fiction about the anxieties of fiction-making has, in the end, a largely symptomatic interest. No doubt the story about writing a story is more often boring than not. An exception, in Anti-Story, is Joyce Carol Oates's "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again". For the frame-the effort to write an essay for an English class, duly subdivided into "Events", "Characters", etc.-in fact conveys the hesitancies, suppressions,

fantasies of a troubled girl trying to convert deeply traumatic experience into a version of reality she can live with. The problematic relationship of the fiction to a dimly discerned reality (dropping out, shoplifting, drugs, prostitution, arrest) is less that of an adolescent girl trying to write than of a sensitive mind trying to survive. The involutional method, screening memory and controlling the reader's distance, surrenders at last an old-fashioned fictional compassion.

Formal discontinuity: the impulse to fragment form, consciousness. To break fiction back to the materials of fiction, and separate these into subtitled sections, as in the Oates story or William H. Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country", has become a convention, related to the sudden incursions of authorial poems or limericks in Donleavy and Pynchon, A title breaks in, as in a Godard movie, to remind us that this is not the real world, and to destroy those imperceptible modulations so important in a Flaubertian art. Curtis Zahn's "A View from the Sky" offers a discontinuous yet broad rendering of life at the edge of being organized into fiction. Mitchell Sisskind's "A Mean Teacher" determinedly escapes the spaced timings and smooth transitions of realism in a story of considerable charm. What saves the Sisskind story and Michael Goldstein's very brief "The Self-Contained Compartment" seems to be an overpowering authorial confidence, authority within discontinuity, an overriding voice, a manner authentic even in its whimsicalities. The dominance of authorial voice and temperament surely accounts for the terrible, funny credibility of Barthelme's "Game". How important language may be is seen in Robert Coover's "A Pedestrian Accident", which has much of the Barthelme disregard of causality. But the story is vitiated again and again by forced unenergized humor and by dead filler language: "He didn't know he wondered he had thought he reasoned now that he thought about it, he realized he could see that He smiled inwardly He thought he remembered" All this sludge on the very first page! The free movement of

Mailer's "The Locust Cry" (even its discussion of the French New Novel) is far more satisfying.

Absurd reasoning. Eruption ofthe absurd amid the banal, or vice-versa. These motives, so familiar from the Theater of the Absurd and from French cinema, are present throughout AntiStory (but especially in Boll, Borges, Landolfi, Ionesco, Hildesheimer, Zahn, George P. Elliott, Coover, Montale). There is humor in all these stories, except for George P. Elliott's grim apocalyptic" In a Hole": parable of utter failure to communicate, of a writer's voice, it might be, capable of moving stones but not of reaching a human ear.

Phenomenologicalfiction: notation, meditation, monologue. The three purest examples are, not unexpectedly, French: Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor. A cinema of consciousness, but with no pretense at objectivity, determines the movement of "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and of Gass's "The Cost of Everything" (in the third issue of Fiction). The titles punctuating the former might suggest only one more attempt to fragment fiction. Instead we are exposed to a mind withdrawn from its surroundings, and from certain briefly alluded to past experiences; and compelled to order the visual and mental field. Aphoristic, quietly epigrammatic, given to slower prose rhythms than are currently fashionable but capable of startling leaps I am reminded of Thoreau.

The free-wandering interior monologue, the movement of a mind alienated from the life it observes, in the end talking about its own solitude, or talking to forestall madness or despair, would appear to be a particularly American form. Rousseau on his islands of reverie was less lonely. A great deal of anti-realist fiction consists of such monologues, whether truly interior or spoken to a dim hypothetical listener. A further removal, perhaps, from money, manners, morals, those staples (Trilling) of nineteenth century fiction. The monologue at the same time permits valuable freedoms and a liberated language. This is true, whether in the nominally nonfictional monologues of a

Dahlberg or Mailer or Gold, or in the fictional monologues of various anti-realists.

The Single Voice, probably the finest anthology of contemporary fiction, draws a wider net. Several traditional stories have their saving mad strip of the inappropriate (Stanley Elkin, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, Jerome Charyn). Others survive, even more traditionally, on their reportorial truth and depth of understanding (Litwak, Borowski, Neugeboren). Of the selections from novels, only that from V seems an unfortunate one, though readers of Barth might welcome a more exuberant offering than a chapter from The Floating Opera. "The Indian Uprising" of Barthelme, the opening section of Hawkes's The Lime Twig, Landolfi's "Gogel's Wife": these are already anti-realist classics.

Taking the collection as a whole, the most poignant sign is the effort (amid the ruins of a dying genre and the excitements of whatever is replacing it) to preserve some of the old fictional values. Nabokov's "The Potato Elf', though it characteristically plays with dark materials of suffering and deformitythe minutes long sexual life of a dwarf, his thwarted longing for companionship, love, a son-ends on a note shamelessly compassionate and ironic. Within Nabokov's involutions, behind his many screens, lie real people. Grace Paley's "In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All" is a much richer and more complex story, dealing with the utmost comic control with an ultimate horror: the only way, it may be, some readers could cope with it at all. We have on the surface a boyish experiment with gas and with a "War Attenuator", "one of the greatest bug killers of all time." But we are dealing with New York Jews. The monkey Itzik Halbfunt, who shares Eddie Teitelbaum's room, looks like Mr. Teitelbaum's uncle "who had died of Jewishness in the epidemics of '40, '41." The first experiment miscarries, and all the animals die, even Itzik Halbfunt. Sent to a Home for Boys, Eddie is eventually entrusted with the task of feeding a white mouse to a snake, but shortly afterward hands in his resignation. "While Eddie was

making the decision to go out of his mind as soon as possible, other decisions were being made elsewhere. Mr. Teitelbaum, for instance, decided to die of grief and old age-which frequently overlap-and that was the final decision for all Teitelbaums

One of the least known writers in The Single Voice, Clive T. Miller, contributes one of the finest selections, conceivably the finest: "Where They Burn the Dead", extract from a still unpublished novel. It is a good example of an anti-realist fiction that seeks to preserve some of the old novelistic pleasures: understanding, compassion, controlled gradations of feeling, even narrative entertainment. It comes from a novel full of anti-realist routines: melodramatic coincidences, parodic flights, authorial interventions, and in-jokes referring to his friends and to his own first novel, This Passing Night. The extract records repeated encounters by opera-librettist Tito Corelli (but is he really an opera-librettist?) in the course of travels through India, of a guide/entrepreneur/trainer of canaries named Sam Babu. At the Ashoka Hotel he sees Babu try in vain to make his canaries, wearing miniscule bonnets, perform. In New Delhi Sam Babu tells of "beasties" in a wood, and longs for a transistor that would bring in Ceylon. In Agra Tito and his father find Sam Babu with white streaked markings on his brow, presumably diseased, his canaries visibly dying. In Benares they are involuntary witnesses of his burial.

Logically speaking, the reappearances of Sam Babu are as occult as those of the death's head figure in Death in Venice. And the novel in which this chapter appears belongs with the most playful and audacious. Yet "Where They Burn the Dead" is one of the most compassionate of fictions, conveying with aU the ironic tenderness of Malamud the deep human longing to transcend barriers, racial or other, and communicate with another human being. On this subject Miller is as eloquent, in his less than twenty pages, as Forster in A Passage to India.

It would be unwise to generalize on the basis of a single issue

of Fiction, or even three or four, since an editor may group stories of a certain kind in one issue, of another in the next. There is more traditional prose in the third issue than in the second, for instance, though the third contains Anthony Burgess's weird though largely unsuccessful "Napoleon", where highly intellectual dialogue is sprinkled with modern American slang, with little attention paid to transitions from spoken to interior monologue. The best writing occurs in a brief undistorted description of action. In Grace Paley's "The Immigrant Story", a very beautiful straight recollection of immigrant parents follows movingly upon discontinuous dialogue. (Even Grace Paley adopts the convention of dialogue without quotation marks found in many stories in Fiction.)

A recurring impression given by the younger writers in Fiction is of verve, vis comica, a sense of play. One of the antirealist antagonisms not mentioned by Stevick is to harmony achieved through modulation and nuance: to the Flaubertian ideal of an art that conceals art, and that subdues the reader through niceties of which he is supposed to remain unaware. Transition as a technical art (to which I myself seem incorrigibly bound) is abandoned. Formal discontinuity is most obvious where, as in "The Heart of the Heart of the Country," the fragments are formally separate. No less than five of the sixteen pieces in Fiction (Number Two) offer this visual fragmentation. Leonard Michaels' "Eating Out" offers twenty-four titled fragments in three tabloid pages. The parts of Carol Hill's "The Man from Magritte" are titled by place and time: "Zurich: 1.22 p.m.", etc. Kenneth Koch's "The Red Robins" is divided into four titled fragments in three pages, and is closer than any other story to traditional surrealism. J.G. Ballard's "You and Me and the Continuum" comes in twentysix alphabetized fragments (from "Ambivalent" to "Zodiac") all pertaining in some way to a science-fiction mystery, an insoluble puzzle possibly derivative from V. The strongest single influence on a number of the writers in Fiction would appear to be that of Donald Barthelme. Snow White. Barthelme is not a dark and obsessed writer.

Moreover, he may well be discovering new fictional modes in the very act of presiding over the death of a genre. "The Indian Uprising"17 carries very far the disintegration of fiction into its raw materials, and may dramatize human consciousness in extremis; and dramatize too our capacity to screen ourselves from surrounding violence. The real (?) torturing of real (?) prisoners may seem but the black humor of a film. Or are these glimpses of real lovers "carrying on" in a collapsing world? Is violence fun? Yet I detect in Barthelme less despair over the condition of things (entropy, violence, the increasing per capita production of trash, the mind overwhelmed by phenomena) than bewilderment over the writer's plight-the writer inheriting exhausted language and compelled to shout louder and louder, to escalate literary outrage, in order to gain attention. Or is the escalation demanded by reality? "I think what ought to obtain is a measure of audacity, an audacity component, such as turning your amplifier up a little higher than anyone else's, or using a fork to pick and strum, rather than a plectrum or the carefully calloused fingertips, or doing something with your elbow, I don't care what, I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the scene that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives."

Barthelme then, unlike Beckett, is on the whole a cheerful historian of collapse. Snow White, which is a book about language, is a charming intellectual game: seductive, always comic. "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!" So Snow White, who would like to escape the trin-trin quotidien. As in Alice in Wonderland there is the fun of people unaware they have been caught off guard, and uttering calm banalities or even wise insights from ludicrous dark places: George typing under Amelia's skirt, and so compelled to automatic writing because he can't see to think. Or Edward under the boardwalk: "Edward was blowing his mind, under the boardwalk. 'Well my mind is blown now. Nine matras and three bottles of insect repellent, under the boardwalk. I shall certainly be sick to-

morrow. But it is worth it to have a blown mind. To stop being a filthy bourgeois for a space, even a short space. •

Barthelme satirizes, with very slight exaggeration, the weird inappropriateness of most speech. "My nourishment is refined from the ongoing circus ofthe mind in motion. Give me the odd linguistic trip, stutter and fall, and I will be content." Joyce might have added these words to Oxen of the Sun: "It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon." Does Barthelme convey, as Gilman suggests, new youthful modes ofconsciousness, rather than merely satirize the old? I am not sure, though one of the narrator's statements would support this: "We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a 'sense' of what is going on."

The book's rhetorical trouvaille is to have given Snow White and her companions French voices, the voices of run-of-themill French intellectuals in fact. This is what gives freshness to a book that might, in places, appear very derivative. (There is an entirely-conscious recreation of the orator of The Chairs. The watching narrator's monotone commentaries as from Marienbad or a Godard film, the banalities uttered in the midst of catastrophe, as in Beckett [here parents living in a parking place since 1936, and rooted to the soil], the parodies of RobbeGrillet tedium, the enigmatic capitalized headlines as in Godard, with even a Maoist reference-all this is quite openly allusive, pleasures for the intellectual.) The book is drenched in French idiom: a classifying language and recapitulative style down to the smallest components of syntax: "It does not ennoble you, the fever." "Something suggests to me that it is a bad scene, this drink you proffer." "And you others there, lounging about "That will be amusing, writing out the charges." Or Jane the evil witch: "I think I will go around to

Snow White's house, where she cohabits with the seven men in a mocksome travesty of approved behavior, and see what is stirring there. If something is stirring, perhaps I can arrange a sleep for it-in the corner of a churchyard, for example." Snow White herself has a distinctly French mentality. She effortlessly, glibly measures experience and pours out shapely sentences, the banal or literary formulae that substitute for real thought.

Behind the fun are serious matters: epistemological nightmare and the collapse of language, the widening separation of words and experience, the phenomenological distrust of value: all very French. An esthetician appears in the bathroom to remark, to the seven standing there, that theirs is the bestlooking curtain in town. An alarming statement, given the impossibility of exploring the full welter of bathroom phenomena. Here too an essential charm attaches to the disreputable fact that we still see, if only as through several shower curtains, people, just as we do in the notes to Pale Fire. These fantoches have a marked residual fleshly reality, for all the forces of alienation and de-illusioning. Gilman complained of the incursion of plot; he could as well have complained of throbs of fictional personality, life: a life achieved partly through brisk responses to extreme and absurd circumstance, partly because the circumstances are so visual. The interior monologue once again is reminiscent of French film:

As we stood there shoulder to shoulder in the rotten bathroom, the eight of us, a sort of hunger arose, to know if it was true, what he had said. Felt I daresay by aU of us, including the esthetician. He must be curious sometimes to know if it is true, what he is saying. We swayed, momentarily, there in the rotten bathroom, in the grip of the hunger A shower-curtain scale could be constructed with the aid of the professor of esthetics, or with the aid of shower-curtain critics recruited from the curtaining journals, if there are such critics and such journals

There was the other solution: destruction of the esthetician, who had made the original remark. This thought sighed amongst us, seven heads turned as one to regard the eighth, that of the esthetician, sweating in his velvet coUar there in the rotten bathroom. But destruction of the esthetician, however attractive from a human point of view, would not also ensure destruction of his detritus, his remark. 18

Snow White is a remarkably entertaining performance. Much of its energy, which almost never flags, derives from

rapid changes of context, comic scene. linguistic mode. Yet controlling all these is an authorial voice as distinct as any in contemporary fiction. In diction. in pace and pause and the larger ordonnance of syntax, Barthelme's style really captures movements of thought. It is, even when parodying "sludge" and "stuffing", an exceptionally tight style. Barthelme may have taken the best from the French intellectual while satirizing his glibness.

I will now look, very selectively, at two somewhat less cerebral writers whose language is firmly grounded in psychological process, and in an exceptionally rich access to what is usually repressed. What is proposed is no more than an apercu Infinitely more could be said about their styles.!"

Psychological process as rhetoric: repression, displacement and fantasy in John Hawkes and Jerzy Kosinski.

There is a gulf between the best anti-realist fiction deriving some of its energy from real experience and real fears, and the merely whimsical, unthreatening and unthreatened playing of fictional games. The experience of war and post-war ruin inevitably left its mark on even the most autonomous imaginations. John Hawkes and Jerzy Kosinski would have been remarkable writers without such experience, but would hardly have written The Cannibal and The Painted Bird, as Kurt Vonnegut would not (had he not experienced the Dresden firebombing and its aftermath) have written Slaughterhouse Five. For years Vonnegut found himself unable to write about this central experience of his life; his novel is about repression and withdrawal, and escape through fantasies of time travel.

Only a few pages remain of the Dresden experience itself. Hawkes has rarely referred to his experience as an ambulance driver or his brief time in post-war Germany. But recently he spoke of a crucial incident: seeing a soldier whose head was blown off, a flower nearby, a live chicken; and his compulsion to seize the chicken, take it inside a barn, strangle it. This might account (but only in part) for the strong pressure under

which scenes of mistreated animals emerge in his work, notably the strangled chicken of The Cannibal, with the ghostly face of the Kaiser peering in a window. To hypothesize "real life sources" for powerful writing is not in the least to deny that such scenes may function as sexual symbolism, and that this strangled chicken may be as phallic as the drooping cock of The Day of the Locust. The ultimate phallic fear is, after all, no other than a loss of life.

This is but to acknowledge, unfashionably, that the powerful anti-realist (as opposed to the imitator of mannerism and novelty) has his own deep connections with reality.

Experience of horror appears to have escaped repression in Hawkes and Kosinski, as it did not escape repression in Vonnegut. Extreme passivity and resignation are, after all, what Slaughterhouse Five is about: "so it goes". The Painted Bird, moreover, admirably illustrates the truism that liberated dynamic fantasy may be truer and more believable than quiet realism. The later chapters and the daily life with friendly soldiers, the discovery of the communist world by the "obtuse observer" of the sixteenth chapter, the movement toward the quotidian and the urban-these seem factitious at times, as the earlier fairy story material did not: the little boy in the forest eternally menaced, escaping into new dangers, victim of witches and animals and the elements. Kosinski, like Hawkes, and like Dickens, offers a child's world in which any object can be animated, any animal become frighteningly human.

For all their striking resemblances, The Cannibal and The Painted Bird diverge radically in their use of an anti-realist rhetoric. Certain scenes are closely akin, however. The Duke's prolonged surgical dismemberment of the fox in The Cannibal (a fox metamorphosed from a homosexually pursued child) has its startling analogue in the skinning of the white rabbit in The Painted Bird. Both scenes are obsessively prolonged. The sexual situation, in Kosinski, is more explicit and more elaborately conceived. A few' pages earlier, thrown into a horrible slimy pit by peasants, the boy becomes mute.

His tongue flaps helplessly. In a sexual episode with Ewka he finds her skin grows "taut like a rabbit skin stretched on a board to dry"; in his dreams he seems to grow into her, becomes a horrible growth on her body. He dreams too of the witch ready to mutilate him "foully". This open fear of castration is followed immediately by the command to kill and skin the white rabbit which, under his hands, becomes as slippery and elusive as the Duke's fox. Shortly thereafter the boy is the unwilling spectator of his beloved Ewka copulating with a goat.

The two scenes are comparably explicit: dismemberment of slippery fox, skinning of a rabbit that refuses to die. As a rule, however, we find extreme condensation and displacement in Hawkes, where Kosinski's handling of sexual materials tends to be wildly overdetermined-though nothing could be more compressed than that penis/tongue. Some of the appeal of both writers lies in the fact that these materials are so close to the surface, and are clearly recognized by their authors for what they are, often with comic effect. The penis converted to Thick's rubber truncheon (The Lime Twig), the foaming kisses of the naked soldiers (Second Skin) and the tattooing episode there, the sexual mutilations reported as broken or spattered fingers, the sucking of the rattlesnake bite (The Beetle Leg), the bat in the mouth (Second Skin)-such displacements are conscious and comic, yet powerful all the same. Their use is rhetorical rather than psychological only. Hawkes employs the imagery and mythology of Freudian process as another modern writer might employ classical myth, for effects at once sinister and ludicrous. They are personae in his fictional world.

The recurrent fear in The Painted Bird-of engulfment, of absorption and suffocation-is exceptionally explicit. The boy is crammed into a sack, buried in a pit up to the neck, threatened with drowning; the sea of rats in a bunker, into which the carpenter falls, has a terror which a comparable moment in Vonnegut touches only briefly. The fear is usually of heterosexual embrace, but on one occasion of homosexual

rape. Defending himself against attackers, the boy manages to kick an assailant in the eye with his skate. There follows a fantasy of being pushed under the ice; emerging, he feels only his face alive, the rest of his body "quite dead". But he saves himself with the long pole by which he had been pinned down: an almost comically phallic object: "I tied the ragged remains of my pants to my legs and then pulled the pole out of the ice hole and leaned heavily on it. The wind struck me sideways; I had trouble keeping my direction. Whenever I weakened, I put the pole between my legs and pushed on it, as though riding on a stifftail.

The great originality of The Painted Bird lies in the interweaving of "real reality" (one assumes there was a Kalmuk atrocity); of, presumably, fantasy-wish fulfillment (the derailing of the train); of fantasied horror (the gouging and squashing of the eyeball); of dreams, a few obviously wishfulfilling, more often terrifying. We may assume (chapter 9) the boy did witness Rainbow's rape of the Jewish girl, but scarcely the apocalyptic violence of the dogs coupling on the next page: unable to break apart, bleeding, while watchers laughed and "threw screeching cats and rocks at them" thrown at last into the river and still trying, while desperately swimming, to break apart. "On other occasions people who did not intend to lose their dogs in this manner brutally cut them apart, which meant mutilation or slow death from bleeding for the male." These improbable dogs suggest the way in which the boy-the novel's single "character", really-copes with intolerable trauma, not by repression or displacement but by liberated fantasy: exaggeration so grotesque as to mute the terror ofthe real.

Hawkes and Kosinski, certainly two of the most powerful anti-realist writers, show sharp differences within deep affinity. The dead Merchant (occultly dead both in the latrine of Das Grab and on a battlefield near Cambrai) has a true kinship with the Kalmuks hung by the Red soldiers in The Painted Bird. The terror of the Hawkes passage, intensified by its comic moments tstill fat disturbed), derives in part from a pace

controlled by punctuated pauses. Kosinski, closer to the mythical exaggerations of Lautrearnont, depends less on style. The childish observer again responds to horror by fantasy and exaggeration:

There the Merchant, without thoughts of trade, dressed only in grey, still fat, had died on his first day at the f'ront and was wedged, standing upright, between two beams, his face knocked backwards, angry, disturbed. In his open mouth there rested a large cocoon, protruding and white, which moved sometimes as if it were alive. The trousers, dropped about his ankles, were filled with rust and tufts of hair.20

Ants and flies crawled all over the strung-up Kalmuks. They crept into their open mouths, into their noses and eyes. They set up nests in their ears; they swarmed over their ragged hair. They came in thousands and fought for the best spots.

The men swung in the wind and some of them revolved slowly like sausages smoking in a fire. Some shuddered and uttered a hoarse shriek or whisper. Others seemed lifeless. They hung with wide unblinking eyes, and the veins on their necks swelled monstrously. 21

To reiterate: the dark materials of sexual or other dread, in Hawkes and Kosinski, are above all fictional rhetoric rather than "psychology" for its own sake, which is not to say that they are not true. The very compressed, fiercely comic displacements in Hawkes and the wildly proliferative fantasies of violation in Kosinski have their basis in imaginations for whom the world remains magical.

For both writers, things seen (though perhaps never seen by any other writer) are the groundwork of rhetoric. To understand and enjoy either writer requires a capacity to respond to images: images in isolation and as they recur. A great strength, more noticeable in Hawkes, lies in the intense uncontrived correspondence between a deteriorated, literally menaced and menacing observed outer world and an inner world of childhood fears still wonderfully alive.

Have my remarks on psychology as rhetoric excessively normalized Hawkes and Kosinski, and seemed to explain away the strange? The historic fact is that the now classic The Cannibal appeared to have, in 1949, an unprecedented opaque difficulty, so far as American novels were concerned. Its publication by a standard commercial firm was unthinkable. And it remains a unique book. By the late 1960's, however, a

number of novelists had subverted the realist norms as violently. and at least a few had appeared on the lists of conservative commercial publishers.

The anti-realist novel. like any non-representational or dissonant art, eventually creates (as it were behind its back) the public that will ultimately enjoy it. Really enjoy, not just stare at.

A representative career: Jerome Charyn

What does all this signify to the young writer? The career of Jerome Charyn (now 36) illuminates the plight, and the opportunities too, of a very gifted young novelist over the decade 1963-73: a writer much aware of contemporary life, fascinated by "real reality", but aware too of what is "going on" in fiction. (Joyce Carol Oates would have provided an example almost as striking.) At the beginning of the decade it would have seemed natural, in writing about Charyn's first books, to refer to Philip Roth and Malamud as well as Dickens. By its end one feels affinities with Hawkes (Eisenhower, My Eisenhower) and Nabokov (The Tar Baby); with, that is, central anti-realist impulsions. Over the decade we see an intensifying effort to make it new, to keep up with changing trends, yet withal a determination to preserve some of the old fictional pleasures, most notably the swarming talkative vis comica of subcultures. Charyn is aware too of that other problem that has plagued writers for two generations: how to write about a society and time that dwarf one's wildest imaginings. Can fiction hope to compete, in absurdity and violence, with the newspaper or with the "new journalism"? Finally, not least, Charyn has had to face the economic problem: where has the public gone? How can one write uncompromisingly good fiction, entertaining yet uncommercial, and still win a few readers? Significantly, Charyn at the end of the decade was an editor of Fiction, a magazine determined to find new ways of reaching or creating a public for serious fiction.

Charyn's talent at the outset was traditional in a fine uninhibited way: Dickensian, but within a New York Jewish world. The impulse to create life and to tell stories was exceptionally strong: " Your loneliness goes down in proportion to the number of characters on a page." "The Man Who Grew Younger" and "Sing, Shaindele, Sing" belong with Malamud's "The Magic Barrel" and Gold's "The Heart of the Artichoke": comic, poignant, rich in personality, wise-great stories all four. Charyri's characters experience various forms of generation gap, and the sadness of a vanishing culture. The Dickensian bent appears in the richly loquacious, irrepressible caricatures of Once upon a Droshky, and the climactic mockheroic scene: a cafeteria become a battlefield. We have a rhetorical embellishment of real reality rather than a magic reinvention of the world. Dickensian too is the tendency to give a child's animistic view of things and to reverse child/parent roles though Charyn's most sympathetic treatment is of adolescents and their attachments to older men: tender father-son relationships, usually disguised. There is not much adult heterosexual love in Charyn' s work, nor much that is unequivocally homosexual, and depth psychology has little place. Sexual experience involves a good deal of scatological fun and much language play. Sexuality is rhetorical, in the way psychology is for Hawkes and Kosinski. Charyn had discovered, with many others, that this overwrought subject was by the late 1960's chiefly suitable for parody or farce.

Two other traditional drives were evident from the start. The first was the impulse, which few mediocre writers exhibit, to create sympathy for the foolish and the depraved: to discover, in Mauriac's fine phrase, "the secret sources of sanctity in those who seem to have failed." The second was simply the desire to look up, learn, assimilate, relish a great deal of detail, not for detail's sake, but out of an openness to the American scene. Charyn's novels encompass a good deal of knowledge. All this is but to describe a novelistic makeup not unlike that of

Saul Bellow a generation earlier, though without Bellow's effort. in the quiet early novels, to reflect a drab quotidian reality. Each talent or thrust is ,present in Charyn in a more intense, more eccentric form. (Which leads one to ask: Where would Bellow have gone, how far would he have come, had he first published in 1963 or been born in 1937?)

Charyn's congenial material is evident: the swarming streets, the Yiddish actors and writers, the cafes, the talk: essentially New York Jewish with a background of eastern Europe. But Charyn tried, still in his twenties, to go beyond this given subject-matter-in part, conceivably. because of Solotaroffs hostile review ("Jewish Camp") of 1964, which also singled out the brilliant Seven Days ofMourning of Seymour Simckes. A valid literary movement based on a picturesque reality, but exploited by inept imitators, soon makes the best writers seem derivative. Beyond this Charyn doubtless felt the true writer's desire to face new challenges. To get away from the city scene and Jewish culture Charyn moved, not too successfully, to upstate New York and a reform school, in On a Darkening Green. His narrator is not Jewish, but at one point pretends to be, and a rabbi is surely the novel's most moving personage (pp. 187-9). There are good moments of comic disorder. But technically the novel is of little interest: conventional in structure, chronologically undisrupted, with a relatively dull narrative consciousness. The method tended to limit rather than encourage Charyn's natural impulse to the fabulous; once again, the world is embellished not reinvented. There is no sign, as yet, that Charyn was fully aware of anti-realist possibilities.

A very uneven book, Going to Jerusalem, may reflect Charyn's temporary movement to Stanford, where he taught in the experimental "Voice Project" under John Hawkes. We see the first definite influence of both Hawkes and Nabokov on his fiction. There is a significant shift, within the novel, from the playful, mildly realistic story of a prodigy's chess tour (with increasing sympathy for his antagonist the aged ex-Nazi Kortz)

to more and more surrealist disorder. Charyn, according to Alfred Appel, was reading Nabokov's Defense at the time, and he also suggests echoes of Lolita. Rhetorically, there is an interesting pull between the frenetic effort to be more and more lively, more and more present, and Charyn's evident talent for impressionist, meditative narration. At the heart of any young writer's situation, of course, is the struggle to discover what will be for him the most congenial form and narrative distance.

Going to Jerusalem is a novel full of fictional ideas, rich in Dickensian geniality and comic life, admirable in its effort to achieve a freer form; finally boring.

American Scrapbook is Charyn's one truly unsuccessful book. We see, at an extreme, a young writer's effort to imagine radically alien material (the lives of interned Japanese and Nisei in World War II) and to discover a still unexploited subject. So Dickens, researching the schools for Nicholas Nickleby, turning his back on earlier successes. So too American writers beginning in the 1930' s: the moral obligation to explore new territory. It would be excessive to say Charyn's Nisei always have the mentality and humor of New York Jews, but not excessive to say that Chiuchi's (p. 171) is .the first truly energized voice. One further motive may lie behind this perverse choice of subject: despair over the difficulty of dealing with the surface of contemporary America; an effort to cope with injustice by finding it, as other novelists have done, in an obscure footnote to American history.

Technically, American Scrapbook is not anti-realist at all. Charyn does use what is, for him, a new technique: multiple voices narrating through interior monologues and recording present action as it unrolls, an exceedingly difficult mode, as Faulkner was to find in As I Lay Dying. Charyn had not discerned (and would not entirely in his next book) how uncongenial for him this entrapment in a fictional present could be.

Eisenhower, My Eisenhower is Charyn's first genuinely antirealist, mythologizing extravaganza and first major effort to

reflect the absurd aspects of contemporary urban violence: the riots of 1968, I assume, though the novel is laid at the time of an Eisenhower election. Charyn is back in his beloved New York (Minotaur, Bedlam as Manhattan, Bronx) and his Gypsy separatists have guerrilla headquarters in the Zoo. The Gypsies are sharply separated from the"Anglos"-a term that includes Wasps, Jews, Blacks. Here again it is tempting but unfair to say that Charyrr's gypsies are simply the Jews of his first novel and first stories, though given tails and sexually exciting horns: "moist at the tip, soft in spots, alive with prickles and a cover of down, temperamental, with an eccentric curve, the cause of constant humiliation and shame." No longer tied to "real reality", Charyn has embarked on a second creation. As Hawkes superimposed a mythical Germany on the real ones of 1914 and 1945, so Charyn gives his Gypsies a political structure, a language, a new history (Gypsies founded Ur), a sacred mythology, Karooku their chthonic deity. "He rose out of the earth's crumbling crust to defeat the twin sky gods, Lampuch and Lazaruch, tyrannical sodomists who riled the ocean when they were angry, took scant interest in the world's flora and fauna, and passed their days bunging one another and manufacturing fleecy clouds." This reinventing of the world has its Swiftian and Rabelaisian fun. In the old days, in the torture chamber of a Bedlam police station, "you were dunked in a barrel filled with vomit and policemen's piss, your cock was put in a clamp, and you hung topsy-turvy from the arm of a gibbet tree while the torturers gripped your head and swung you back and forth." Now the assault is on one's dignity, with the prisoner trussed in a kiddie car set on a miniature trolley track, a whirling invention worthy of Clockwork Orange.

Eisenhower. My Eisenhower shows both a delight in the return to New York, its filth and carnality and variety, and an escalated pursuit of vividness and verbal surprise. Stylistically we see, but greatly intensified, Bellow's effort to achieve an excited, tough yet poetic colloquial prose: frenetic or forced

writing at times forces the reader to the wall. Charyn's poem to New York is moving, yet exhibits an embarrassing mixture of linguistic modes. Every word I have italicized seems to me out ofkeeping or belletristic display:

I resented Basil's perspicacity. Why should he be alert when I was a scrump? Didn't need a thatch of cheese-cloth to be my nanny. Promised to watch over myself, to cover Bedlam in a fury, with a firm, undreamy step. An inch of Marzipan between the crabbed houses on the rump of Batchelor HiII squashed my determination. I knew all about the muck and encroaching bog. Borough sinking into its own rot. But the light wisting off the crags in the rough walls of the houses must have honeyed over that inch of bog water: it had a righteous blue tremor and a crystalline green. 22

The poem might have been written by Bellow. But to name Bellow is also to recognize Charyn's fascination with visible and remembered reality, as in the lovely particulars of "Homage to an Ostrich at the Bedlam Zoo" (pp. 99-101). The long paragraph on the ostrich is part of a chapter (pp. 83-114) largely composed of recollections of childhood and adolescence, discontinuous but told in a rich unpretentious prose. The next to last section is titled, significantly, "An OldFashioned Flashback: Dadu, Sandor and Me at Morris Park." It suggests that a retrospective, impressionist mode will be, for Charyn, the most congenial fictional form.

This is at least what I infer from The Tar Baby, a novel on the level of all but Nabokov's best and one that must, like Nabokov's, be read intensively rather than casually, with an alert eye for distortion and nuance. The publisher attempted, most unwisely I think, to minimize the novel's literary claims, and to suggest instead a light entertainment for the general educated public: "The Tar Baby coalesces into a brilliant, story-filled novel populated by an array of brawling academics and earthy townies". The strategy is understandable, given the poor sales of Charyns earlier novels, and the fact that so few literary novels make their way. But this blurb would seem to alienate from the start Charyns natural public, not to mention the happy few who create literary reputations. What lover of Hawkes or Barthelme or Nabokov, not yet acquainted with Charyns work, would be tempted to read any further? All this

points to a central problem of publishing. There is now a wider gap than ever between standard fiction and literary fiction, whether realist or anti-realist, but it is a gap publishers try to conceal.

The Tar Baby is an important book that has not been adequately reviewed; some fuller attention seems appropriate here. It is a highly involuted novel in the form of a literary magazine published by Galapagos Junior College, California: a chaotic memorial issue devoted to Anatole Waxman-Weissman (1931-1972), campus security guard and teacher of philosophy, author of "Wittgenstein Among the Redwoods". WaxmanWeissman was a metalinguist and eccentric genius honored by no less than nine articles and monographs in French, but no prophet in his own home, the Redwood Motel, where he has lived for eighteen years. The Tar Baby combines Pnin's comic pathos of the emigre and miscast intellectual and Pale Fire's shuttlings between a problematic reality and slippery conjecture; the story unfolds, and a world incrementally builds, but only with the reader's most active collaboration. The resemblances to Nabokov are in fact superficial, though influence is unmistakable: Charyn's voice, even at its most suave, is his own: a compressed, ruggedly accented style, inventive yet precise even in moments of abysmal vulgarity. The exaggerations and comic excursions are those Dickens might have managed had he pushed his way further west and been born one hundred and twenty five years later. Dickens' name suggests itself again because of the need, even in this fairly intellectual book, to create vivid minor characters. The fierce pleasures and unregenerate humanity of Martin Chuzzlewit and the American journey! There is now little connection with New York Jewish culture, though Waxman-Weissman's father was an obscure member of the Vienna circle. Charyn has this time used, ruthlessly, his brief acquaintance with California, where it appears he was, in Jamesian phrase, a man on whom nothing was lost. The Tar Baby frankly operates in a comic world of western stereotypes. Yet even the glimpses

of the California past suggest a novelistic knowledge in depth. Through the shifting screens of parody and farce and involutional form we come to know a real place and hear appallingly real (though exaggerated) voices.

The Tar Baby is more than any of the earlier books a rhetorical work, manipulating the reader as it shifts tones and modes, and juxtaposes reality with bungling efforts to interpret it. The novel begins as playful satire of academia: the elaborately parodied magazine with its notes on contributors and their absurd careers; the small college in a raw western town, but with its erotic "personal" advertisements and other items of a counter-culture, scarcely underground. In these advertisements, as in Joyce Carol Oates's "Notes on Contributors", real people with real feelings spring to life in a very few lines. The students, usually in the background, are reminiscent of the already distant spring of 1970. We are closer to the editors and professors and eccentric contributors, and their quarrels over metalinguistics, paralinguistics, etc. The very congenial form is for each contributor to write a wholly uncensored, usually scabrous, monologue; to be totally free, in fact, of the inhibitions ofprint. Thus Provost Birdwistell, on his differences with managing editor Nina Spear: "at one time or another Nina slept with Anatole, Joachim, Dalton Chess, a backlog of Galapagos merchants, postmen, sawyers from Wax's Mill, students, cowboys, and most sadly myself-I'm ashamed to mention our fumblings in my funicular car one winter night (cramped, with frost on my eyebrows, the cables knocking, I had a premature ejaculation, which Nina has never quite forgiven; ergo her malicious digs at my sex) We have lost, to be pedantic, all connection with what, in real reality, a Provost might acknowledge in print. And yet we do-thanks to such details as frost on my eyebrows, the cables knockingsuspend disbelief.

The comic world and plot that slowly emerges appears at first to be merely that of the squabbling editors and contributors, who use the memorial issue to vent their grudges: so many

devastating vignettes and self-betrayals. The articles nominally devoted to Waxman-Weissman are wildly inconsequent reveries, displays of their authors' longings and jealousies. Epistemological nightmare again, the vagaries of biographical conjecture, the impossibility of rendering reality and doing "justice". The articles become more and more solipsistic, more and more deformed by bias and envy, until one begins to wonder where the reality of the dead philosopher-security guard, if any, lies. But solipsism, fictions, words, categories were the concern of Anatole Waxman-Weissman himself, and we begin to detect (behind the vindictive pictures of Anatole the neglected child and eccentric adult) a mind. Some Galapagans and "western linguists" are enraged by his often rewritten essay-story on Wittgenstein, which has the philosopher living in California and working with aphasic children: a decidedly excremental vision as it happens. (The only Waxman-Weissman lecture we hear reaches us through a rodeo hand who understands not a word.) But a marvelous schoolboy essay on the Pitfaces, a defunct Indian tribe, has already revealed a love of linguistic play, language that reorders the world. The adult Anatole makes a map of the town of Galapagos which has no apparent relation to the town others see. "Expecting relaxation, to free himself of analogies and systems, to sketch only those patches of Galapagos that appealed to him, he discovered the opposite: He was mapping the carbuncles on his own body." And if it takes on "the wormy, coiling shape of an intestinal tract, presumably his own?" In all seriousness he "wanted to clear his head of taxonomies, to quit being a reader of griddles and signs." Long held at a distance by the narrators' distortions and inattention, by their violent language and scatological displays, by Charyn's own playful excremental vision, even by Anatole's slangy flights the reader yet begins to wonder what the philosopher as philosopher was really like. He begins to tear at the screens.

The essential novelistic game is between the parodic and farcical literary stance, the playfulness and brutality of lan-

guage, and a fierce western reality surrendering at last a tragic story. Form and style function, that is, in ironic juxtaposition to the material. Most real for anyone who has visited such colleges, or who has followed the darkest couloirs of MLA meetings, is the pathos of the intellectual lost in a raw environment and in a college riddled with jealousies. A number of small substandard American colleges did in fact absorb distinguished and often embittered European intellectuals at the time ofthe migrations of the late 1930' s; and some are doubtless still there. Moreover, one may be an emigre from White Plains. But Galapagos Junior College is only part of this fictional world, which centers not in the classroom but in the Redwood Motel, a venerable brothel. Here the child Anatole would hover, looking for his distraught nymphomaniac mother, surreptitiously a whore three days a week. Here Anatole met and married "Mother" Chace's daughter Cindy Boom-Boom, conceivably his own daughter too. The brothel is the novel's link with the town's business community, its itinerant cowboys, the sheriff-pimp Drexel Fingers, and Turkey Semple, thought by some to be a mythical bogeyman, but in fact Fingers' assassin. Everything, everyone would seem at first glance mere comic stereotype. But the sufferings glimpsed through these screens are real.

The achievement is rhetorical not thematic: an elaborate juggling of a dozen voices, with each new voice leading us to distrust and correct the earlier ones. Gradually attention shifts from the quarreling editors to Anatole .and at last to his mother as victims of western brutality. The novel's genial tone modulates toward a final monologue of extreme callousness, a vision oftotal depravity. The impressionist game of shifting sympathy and judgment is beautifully controlled. We first see "Mother" Chace as the amiable brothel-keeper of parodic westerns: she would sit for hours on her front porch, shotgun in her lap to protect the girls from stray, nonpaying customers. We are told, in a purely conjectural narration, that she plays cards with the child Anatole when he visits the brothel (allegedly they call

each other "Auntie" and "Runt") and she solicitously follows him to school.

An initial sympathy for "Mother" Chace is strengthened by those, the college Provost for one, who feel she has been traduced. Anatole's own narrative well into the book confirms the affectionate genre picture of the good-natured tough western madam, who cuts his hair on the third Wednesday of each month: a two hour enterprise. But these impressions are gradually modified. The sardonic cartoonist Stephen Wax gives us a more reliable picture of Anatole's disturbed childhood and a conjectural idea of Anatole's mother Sophie, who, he suspects, may have been a bit of a whore. Why otherwise her disappearances? "And Anatole would have to track her down with his nose. He'd poke into every door, alley, and bin sniffing for a vomity glove or a pissed-on hat.

The culminating and truthful view is that of "Mother" Chace herself. Her great monologue begins with a distant reminiscence of The Sound and the Fury: Cindy Boom-Boom traveling with her plumber (who tries to sell her to The Tar Baby interviewer for five dollars): uncertain what state she is in, telephoning "Mother" Chace to ask to hear the "googoo" of her child Bruno. The monologue, not exceeded by Jason Compson's for vigor and brutality, continues to distance despair and suffering through environing farce. Now, however, we learn the child Anatole hung around the motel hoping to find his mother, known to the clients of the brothel as Sauerkraut". No talk of card games now, as the child peers in through a screen, with Drexel Fingers his mother's next customer:

He dropped his belt and went to Sauerkraut. Damn if I'd put up with them eyes in my screen another minute. I grabbed a broom and chased the runt down to the edge of Oxnard Street. "You appear again, runt, and you'll be hanging from this stick." He ran backwards, his fingers piggying out his torn pockets, staring at me from behind his fat cheeks. All I could do was wag the broom at him and scowl hard. Only it was tbe German bitch I was sore at, not him.

We see Sophie "crawling, scratching, and moaning herself to

death on my truckle bed." Or, almost in the accents of Jason, "Well, I fixed her on Saturday. Oh, I let her perform. I wasn't going to lose a day's wages. She came out of the bedroom with that tired, unnatural look of hers." No definitive explanation is given for Sophie's despairing nymphomania and final disappearance. Succinctly, "Mother" Chace remarks that "Sauerkraut went to Yuba to piss, drink, and die." The picture of brothel life is now one of cruelty and horror: a scene into which the nine year old Cindy abruptly steps, and the murderer "Turkey" Semple. Our last view of Sophie is in a pornographic film, which a customer screens on the brothel wall, her face appearing at last from behind the three bodies assaulting her. "Mother" Chace is outraged. "Chesbro, I screamed, get Sauerkraut off my wall What the hell you mean bring a dead woman into my house?" (A few pages earlier, in extreme irony, we have a real photograph, hypothetically of Sophie at thirteen or fourteen: a sensitive, intelligent, searching Jewish face.) At the very end we again hear Cindy, telephoning from some nameless Niggertown, hoping once more to hear her child's voice.

Such, most inadequately rendered, is The Tar Baby: derivative in spots and perhaps in overall inspiration, but by no means the mere pastiche of Nabokov that aNew York Tim es reviewer claimed: a book doubtless easy to ridicule through plot summary (as Faulkner was once so easy to ridicule for Fadiman and others); its language brilliantly inventive yet sometimes breaking under strain withal a small masterpiece. How is a writer who is unaided by the publisher's description of his work, and who lacks the forewarning difficulty of Joyce and Faulkner, or Barthelme and Hawkes, to invite the close and above all active reading such a complex work deserves? The game of distancing and screening tragedy through stereotype, parody and distorted narration demands, it may be, a public educated to such niceties; and there will doubtless be many (even those who have praised A Hundred

Years of Solitude) to say that a novelist should not play such games. A decade of experiment has carried Charyn fairly far, in any event, in the direction of involutional form. A novel can take the shape of a literary magazine; within that novel, no one voice is always reliable. There is not one rendered scene of present action on which we can absolutely depend; the reader must turn from mirror to mirror, attendant to shifting profiles, measuring distortion. Yet the whole is rich, comic, sardonic, meaningful. We are entertained; we believe; we care. The Tar Baby does contain that fragment of truth for which we have forgotten to ask.

A writer of thirty-six, moreover, is not yet at the end of his rope-and who knows where Charyn will now turn? But the career is already interestingly representative, and surely reflects both of the pressures an alert young writer is likely to feel today: on the one hand, the obvious fact that the novel form, as practiced by the most gifted writers, appears to be changing radically before our eyes, dissolving even; on the other, the commercial fact that the serious writer, realist or anti-realist, is finding it more and more difficult to reach readers or even be published at all. The obvious inference (that the second pressure is a consequence of the first) will hardly hold, given the very real public that does exist for a few difficult or strange writers: Barth, Barthelme, Hawkes, Robbe-Grillet, Durrell, Pynchon, Garcia Marquez, etc.

But to sum up the representative "case":

-We see a fine traditional talent-more in the tradition of the 19th century than of the 1930's-at first "writing about what he knows". The vis comica of New York, the entertainment of the tall tale, much warmth and compassion. The writer heightens and distorts "real reality", as Dickens regularly did, but does not reinvent the world (Once upon a Droshky, The Man Who Grew Younger stories);

-A developing sense, this perhaps inherited from the 1930's, that there is a novelistic obligation to explore new areas

of American life-preferably those which still allow one to indulge a taste for comic disorder (On a Darkening Green; American Scrapbook);

-A growing distrust of established novel form and a movement toward anti-realistic extravagance and surrealist inconsequence (later portions ofGoing to Jerusalem);

-A radical departure both from "real reality" and from standard novel form; a reinvention rather than distortion of the world (Eisenhower, My Eisenhower);

-An experiment in complex impressionistic and involutional form, striking and original in the extremes to which it juxtaposes comic stereotype and real suffering (The Tar Baby).

The later experiments encourage rather than impede Charyn's natural love of the fabulous; he has not betrayed his first loves. So many changes in such a short time, so much "development", may seem suspect, until we recall the still more radical moves of Faulkner in the late 1920's and early 1930's. As with Faulkner, so with Charyn one discovers certain constants in book after book: the irrepressible comic impulse and the delight in playful inventive language. All in all The Tar Baby, complex as it is, reveals unsubdued the basic energies and impulses with which Charyn began, not least the impulse to tell stories and create life, as much life per page as possible.

The desperate alternatives proposed by certain French critics-no story, no entertainment, no other reality than consciousness and language-and by very conservative American critics-hold tight to the old ways, render render render, go back to social realism or lose everything-would alike seem untenable.· It is, one must banally conclude, still possible to reconcile the old with the new: the human interest in the things people do with the fabulous inventions ofthe liberated imagination, even naive pleasure in narrative with a bright aesthetic pleasure in new forms.

Only the quotidian, in life as in art, in subject and in method, regularly kills.

Notes

I. The Confusion ofRealms (New York. 1970). p. 78

2. Letter to Louise Colet, Jan. 16. 1852, in Norton Critical Edition of Madame Bovary (New York. 1965). pp. 309-10

3. Must We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969), pp. 219-20

4. Gilman, ibid.

5. The Dismemberment ofOrpheus (New York, 1971), p. 254

6. Reprinted in Advertisementsfor Myseif(New York, 1959), p. 338

7. New World Writing, No.3 (New York, 1953). pp. 344-56

8. See my article "Saul Bellow and the Activists", Southern Review, Vol. III, No.3 (July, 1967). pp. 582-96

9. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris, n.d., Idees/Gallimard), pp. 20-1

10. In his excellent introduction to Anti-Story: an anthology of experimentalfiction (New York, 1971), xxii

II. Malcolm (New York, 1959). p. 82

12. Naked Lunch (New York, 1962), p. 212. The dots are Burroughs': a visible repudiation ofcomposed argument.

13.American Dream. New Dell edition (New York, 1970). p. 49

14. Norman Mailer (New York, 1972), p. 132

15. The New Yorker (Aug. 8,1970), pp. 26-9

16. Anti-Story xii

17. Unspeakable Practices. Unnatural Acts (New York, 1965). pp. 1-12. also inA Single Voice

18. Snow White, Bantam edition (New York, 1968), pp. 124-5

19. See my introduction to The Cannibal; my "Second Skin: The Light and Dark Affirmation" in ed. John Graham. Studies in Second Skin (Columbus, Ohio, 1971), pp. 93-102; my "The Prose Style of John Hawkes" in Critique, Vol. VI, No.2 (Fall, 1963), pp. 19-29

20. The Cannibal (New York, 1949), p. 94

21. The Painted Bird, pocket Books (New York, 1971), pp. 164-5

22. Eisenhower, My Eisenhower (New York, 1971), pp. 156-7

Commitment without empathy: a writer's notes on politics,

theatre and the novel

DAVIDCAUTE

In the realm of truth, too, familiarity breeds contempt. Yet it remains the case today, as yesterday, that our world is blotched and distorted by exploitation, oppression and wanton massacre. If we face this fact we cannot really argue-even putting Marx, Bakunin and Guevara in parentheses-that this abominable and humiliating state of affairs is inseparable from the human condition. We do possess, after all, a fund of inherited criticism which enables us to discern the causes of social disease and to glimpse, at the very least, the remedies. But can it be maintained that this whole central province of concern is germane only to our identity as citizens, but never to our calling as writers, as poets, novelists and playwrights? Is art so holy?

For some years past, it has been fashionable to say so. On the great stock exchanges of literary appreciation, the shares marked "commitment" have hovered near the floor, bereft of buyers and depressed by the insistence of the leading brokers

TriQuarterly 51

that the company is virtually bankrupt. Political passion and partisan polemic, we are constantly reminded, enter through the gates of literature as Trojan Horses. "Literature," RobbeGrillet has explained, "is not a means which the writer puts at the service of some cause the novel is not a tool. The writer by definition does not know where he is going." In other words, the only valid commitment for the writer is to the act and art of writing itself. An English critic disparages the "ghastly critical naivete of the so-called committed writer", and reminds us that our polemical intentions will always be thwarted by the "genius" of our native language. And here, for good measure, is an American view:

The problem of commitment arises when the artist is committed to values or actions extrinsic to the immediate concerns of his art, when the moral urgency of outside imperatives forces him into non-aesthetic areas of consideration.

So: periodically Dame Literature, so often laid and mislaid, smooths down her skirts and announces her scorn for the coarse blandishments of polemicists thirsting to inseminate her. That she feels compelled to put on this act periodically should alert us to the provocations and insults she suffers at the hands of agit-prop ideologues, those politically infatuated rogues who cannot distinguish a harlot from a lady of somewhat elastic virtue.

Nevertheless, whenever she wends her way to church and bends her knee at the altar of art for art's sake, we do well to sniff the incense. It is never very pure or consistent in texture. And the high priests of formalist criticism, too, beneath their cassocks of white, have not washed themselves with care. Pay attention to their sermons: the denunciation of Sartre followed by a pretty tribute to Camus; a swipe at Sholokhov followed by a message of comfort to Solzhenitsyn. Certainly Sartre, at a certain moment of time, gave his blood to the idea of une litterature engagee ; but why is Camus, whose novels and plays so often represent a systematic transcription of a political and philosophical standpoint into fictional terms, hailed as a pure artist? Juxtapose, for example, his essays, Lettres a un Ami

allemand, with his novel, The Plague; or trace the central notions of The Rebel to that highly didactic play, The Just. Could it be that Sartre was chosen as the whipping-boy not because his novels and plays were politically committed, but, on the contrary, because they were committed in an uncomfortable direction? As for Solzhenitsyn, which contemporary novelist can match him for sustained and passionate-even obsessive-political commitment?

One senses the objection to this argument, but the objection is a trap. Both Camus and Solzhenitsyn, it might be argued, and Orwell too, raised their voices against the devastating effects of dogmatic ideologies; their plea and call is to give man, the individual, a little breathing space, the chance to be true to himself. But such an attitude, given its particular frame of reference, is also an ideological one. It is a common fallacy, notably among conservative literary critics, to equate ideology as such with "extremism" or radicalism, whether of Right or Left, and to imagine that the peaceful pastures of the central status quo are irrigated by common sense. The reason for this error is not obscure: movements calling for social change, for a disruption of continuities, are compelled both to fashion coherent theories and to emphasise the distinctive identity of the class or group demanding the change. The possessing or conservative classes, on the other hand, make their first line of defence a pretended community of interest within society, at the same time insisting that certain moral and rational values are relevant and available to all men, regardless of wealth or station. Thus, the French bourgeoisie, in its moment of revolutionary pugnacity, was pleased to trumpet the rights of the Third Estate; but soon afterwards, threatened from below, by the sans-culottes, this same bourgeoisie shed its particularist identity and equated itself, simply, with Man (The Rights of Man, etc.).

These reflections are not intended to disparage Orwell, Camus or Solzhenitsyn, to challenge their radicalism, or to characterise them as servants of the status quo. But it is useful,

at the outset, to demonstrate that a good many apparently aesthetic objections to committed writing, socialist realism and utilitarian art, are in fact prompted less by absolute literary principle than by ordinary ideological prejudice. In our own century, a recurring theme of conservative ideology has been the assault on ideology as such, combined with the elevation of philosophy-conceived as a force altogether more disinterested, universal and noble-as the proper source of literary inspiration. Normally, religion is accorded an equal indulgence.

It is not, however, my purpose here to embark on a backs-tothe-wall, fundamentalist defence of social/socialist realism in an age which, for reasons I hope to explore, can no longer accommodate it. If, as is the case, the political and artistic avant-gardes have for many decades regarded one another with suspicion, and even enmity, the fault lies partly with the dogged aesthetic conservatism so prevalent within the Old Left -I mean the socialist and communist generations whose style of thought and expression was programed in the late nineteenth century. In these circles, one still encounters a faith in a type of literary realism which aspires to representational mimesis and to the creation of a self-sufficient fictional universe, a canvas on which no brush strokes are visible. The reader is invited to suspend all disbelief and, by way of empathy, to surrender completely to an illusion. While this mode of writing may have represented a vanguard stance a century ago, I do not believe that socialist writers living in the electronic age can afford any longer to rely on an Anschauung evolved in the age of the steam engine. A dead voice produces a dead song.

Of course, we must not deny the Roundheads their due. In so far as naturalism and realism are relatively comprehensible literary modes, and accordingly more accessible to the ordinary reader, our desire to communicate with that wider audience which must of necessity be the agency of social change will keep us working within certain naturalistic boundaries. Nor is the distrust felt by the Old Left for that elitist,

masturbatory art, which has remained haute culture, altogether to be despised. Nevertheless the general suspicion of Modernism which prevailed among political radicals prior to the emergence of the New Left was sustained at too high a price, involving as it did a rejection of a crucial and authentic contemporary sensibility: self-consciousness and self-doubt. When the Soviet critic demands: "Write the unvarnished truth", we are bound to reflect that all writing is a kind of varnish. The emerging certainties of the nineteenth century had been anticipated during the Renaissance: we can admire both epochs, but we cannot follow. "That painting is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented," noted Leonardo da Vinci. Over three hundred years later, the Russian materialist and political radical Chernyshevsky reiterated this point of view: "Thus, the first purpose of art is to reproduce nature and life, and this applies to all works of art without exception." Gorky added: "Literature must attain to the level of real life. That is the point." Some years later, a French Marxist critic, Jean Freville, put it as follows: "Realism demands that nothing be interposed between the world and its literary representation." In all these statements the central thread is mimesis. The naturalist philosophy took root in an age when progressive, rationalist opinion was inclined, broadly, to accept the claims of Saint-Simon, Comte and Durkheim that ultimately sociology and even politics could be understood on a basis no less scientific or "positive" (to quote Comte) than physics and chemistry. Zola drew the simple conclusion that literature, too, could and must achieve the status of a science. "What we need," said Zola, "is detailed reproduction." Everything within the pages of a book must be "lifelike"; everything must march "in step along the great naturalistic road." The incidents portrayed in a novel or play should be "absolutely typical" of both the social cycle and the life cycle. Engels was of the same opinion, calling as he did for "the truthful representation of typical characters under typical circumstances. "

But our own epistemology is and has to be rather different. We no longer believe that language, correctly conceived and accurately deployed, constitutes part of a mental superstructure which reflects a socio-economic infrastructure; that concepts derive from reality and are then mirrored faithfully in words; or that it is possible to eliminate the hiatus between the signifier and what he signifies. The partial dualism of language and the world confronts us whether we like it or not, and so, unless we play the ostrich, or simply continue to spin exciting yarns without regard to the shape of the web, we are bound to confront a number of related dialectical processes: languageperception-language structure-reality-structure literature-writer-literature subject-form-content action-description-action

These, I admit, are steep slopes. And maybe the writer's fate, on such gradients, will inevitably resemble that of Sisyphus; but, unless one continues to push, to climb, one may as well fall asleep in a library of old books on a hot afternoon (which, I again admit, is pleasant enough).

There exist, in addition, pragmatic considerations. The committed writerjoins battle within the broad arena of communications. That is to say, he is no longer merely engaged in a debate with other, competing voices, as in the Oxford Union; he is also placed in the role of the opera singer undergoing an audition to prove that his voice is not only strong but also authentic. The struggle for men's minds and allegiances is today waged within a network of proliferating signals, images and hypnotic affects, a syndrome of calculated distortions and manipulations patronised by vested interests which, almost by definition, are dedicated to the defence of the status quo. False consciousness and systematic cretinization are big business, yielding dividends which outstrip the immediate financial returns. Therefore, we have become increasingly aware that the first confrontation for radicals is not what is said, but how it is

said (since the "what" is so subtly enslaved by the "how"). Compare, for example, a change of substance or subject, on the one hand, with a change of content induced by a shift of form, on the other:

A. Negroes rioted today. Whites rioted today.

B. Negroes rioted today. Blacks rioted today.

Quite obviously, a literature which aspires to combat false consciousness in its audience must first attempt to excise its own; for example, when I begin, drifting with the Good People, to substitute the word "black" for "Negro", I must admit to myself, and my readers, why. Yet the old naturalistrealist technique, even when used by writers of exemplary socialist vision, was in effect substituting one mystique, one illusion, and one attempt at hidden persuasion for another.

Although commitment is traditionally regarded as antithetical to doubt, I am sure that a literature prepared to probe the ambiguities surrounding social behaviour cannot afford to trade in certainties or to present itself as a precision instrument. If, as novelist or playwright, I attempt to smooth over the artifices and disguises endemic to my art, then the world I depict emerges crippled by innocence. John Berger has put the case very well:

The new totality which reality represents is by its nature ambiguous. These ambiguities must be allowed in long-term art. The purpose of such art is not to iron out the ambiguities, but to contain and define the totality in which they exist. In this way art becomes an aid to increasing self-consciousness instead of an immediate guide to direct action.

Now it is certainly the case that there have been instances when a novel or play, avowedly didactic and agitational, has exercised a remarkable influence on public opinion, precipitating healthy reforms. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle apparently speeded the passage of the pure food laws through Congress (though it is worth noting that both public opinion and Congress were more recalcitrant about legislating socialism, which

I take to be the real, normative demand of the novel). Galsworthy's play, Justice, is said to have provoked a reform of British strike law, and not long ago a British television play Cathy, Come Home, generated a popular outcry about housing conditions which no documentary could have provoked. But such examples merely remind us that cartoons are not paintings, and that short-term agitational writing provokes a favourable and tangible response only where it appeals to values already widely accepted. The real problem lies elsewhere: to convince people with a highly developed sense of artistic appreciation that political commitment need not impurify art itself. In this respect, serious works of literature are subject to a law of reentry precisely the opposite of the one governing the safe return of spacecraft through the earth's atmosphere: entering too narrow a funnel at too precise an angle, they burn up. The brief flare brings light only to the already converted. And indeed the flaw in so much committed writing is that it is confirmatory (or celebratory) rather than exploratory, a kind of mass rally wedged between paper covers.

My line of reasoning here forces me to link the concept of 'art' to a certain level of achievement, to a value judgment. If one accepts this premise, one notices that the higher art rarely thrives in a social inferno. The novelists we tend to admire usually take evasive action when the guns are actually firing or -to revert to the point made in the preceding paragraphwhen they themselves intend to fire guns on the printed page. Either they side-step immediate actuality by resorting to allegory, utopia, dystopia or an historical setting, or, alternatively, they lay aside fictional invention altogether in favour of direct reportage and didactic exposition. The American writer who reached Hiroshima within days of the bomb was unlikely to write a novel about it. Confronted by Nazism, by a reality so overwhelming and menacing, the German democratic writers turned to history for perspectives and solutions. Both Malraux and Sartre abandoned fiction when they advanced from the speculative politics of theatre to the more urgent and coo-

suming theatre of politics. One also notices that America produced a brilliant galaxy of Negro novels in the years when America had merely a Negro "question" or "problem"; but when, abruptly (or so it seemed), the Negro became the black and threatened to consume the whole social fabric in flame and thunder, then the Negro novelist virtually disappeared, giving way to the black reporter, polemicist and literary agitator. And why? Because for both writer and reader alike, the practice and enjoyment of art, fantasy and imagination are luxuries to the extent that they require a modicum of withdrawal, relaxation and detachment. Presumably, even the men of the Iron Age painted their caves only after dinner; when the wild bull is charging, you don't attempt to capture his likeness on the wall; on the contrary, you shout, "Bull", and that shout is not art. Nevertheless, it is the first seed in the family tree of agit-prop.

We live in an age of radical epistemological doubt. And if we are hesitant about knowing, we must inevitably be hesitant about what we know. The committed realist novelist who blandly conceals that his own work is an artifact, and therefore artificial, will with a crippling innocence "iron out" the ambiguities to which Berger refers. Nor will our disbelief be suspended by the realist whose very didacticism and partisan commitment to a renovated society dynamites his claim to be holding a camera with a flawless lens up to the lives of men. When Lukacs speaks of "the timeless rules of epic narration", he gives the game away. The nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, which Lukacs so admired, offers a certain shape, a chronological, consequential, unfolding shape, to the notion that "no man is an island". However, life itself is not a Bildungsroman, any more than it is a sonnet, an elegiac couplet or a stream of consciousness. The lens is merely the view. Neither my life nor yours is punctuated by chapters, paragraphs or semicolons, and it is obvious that a novelist's search for what is socially typical is fairly different from a sociologist's.

One sees why Marxists and radical writers in general have 59

been governed by the naturalist-realist heritage, by Jamesian illusionism, by the literary equivalent of the conjuror's proud boast: "Look, no hands!" Marxism trades in certainties; it proclaims itself a science; it means what it says and it says what it means. Generally, Marxist dialecticians have contrived to ignore the dialectic of language itself, leaving the (ever) declining bourgeoisie to fester in their morbid doubts about words and meanings, about authorial interventions and manipulations. At the same time-until the 1960's brought on a rush of self-awareness, a kind of cultural Treaty of Brest-Litovskthey resolved the old problem of form and content with equally emphatic simplicity. Content (society) was accorded primacy, and form was regarded as a kind of conveyor belt running from an initial truth to the reader's eye. Admittedly, there have been more (Ernst Fischer, for example) or less (Ralph Fox, for example) sophisticated variations on this theme, but the essential argument remained the same.

Now let me turn my attention for a moment in the opposite direction, towards those who not only argue that art and commitment are incompatible, but make a fetish of art as an absolute en-soi insisting that form alone governs the meaning of a work of literature. This kind of criticism talks of autonomous internal codes, synchronic systems, and structures explicable by a purely interior analysis. Northrop Frye once wrote that "the work of art must be its own object: it cannot be ultimately descriptive of something, and can never be ultimately related to any other system of phenomena, standards, values or final causes." Robbe-Grillet has told us that "content resides in form", and that a true writer "has nothing to say, only a manner of saying it." According to Roland Barthes, "the word [La paroLe] is neither an instrument nor a vehicle, it is a structure." A proper reading of language thus becomes strictly symbolic, and language assumes a notational nature as strict as that ofmusic.

Common sense surely refutes so extreme a view. Certainly the two sentences, "she is here" and "here she is", achieve a

shift of meaning by means of a purely structural alteration. But, "there she is" involves asignificative modification. It seems to me that, during the long argument about form and content, both the dogged realists and the more fashionable structuralists or formalists have confused "content" with "subject" or "theme", thereby forgetting that the content of a book or play is in fact the subject mediating and mediated by the form employed. A writer aware of this triadic process, and honest enough to acknowledge it, will attempt to show how what he writes about affects and is affected by how he writes about it, the result being what he says; or what is said. Such a programme, of course, is equally relevant to the "private" or politically unconcerned type of writer, but in such circles it is more readily adopted than among those legionnaires of the pen who fear that the slightest tremor of literary self-consciousness will blur the message, demoralise the potential militants, and so perpetuate the reign of darkness. However, serious literature should not and cannot, contrary to what Clifford Odets once cockily asserted, shoot like bullets. A typewriter is not any kind of barricade; nor is a theatre. Acceptance of this (perhaps chastening) fact might purge the scene of much superficial posturing and noisy rhetoric.

Which words carry me to a brief consideration of the cultural style now associated with-very loosely defined-the New Left and the Underground (whatever that is!). Obviously this anti-culture provides no solution at all, though it apparently generates a lot of Fun, and though it could be construed as an attempt to marry socio-political commitment with an adventurous approach to artistic form. In the "third theatre" one encounters not only illiteracy but anti-literacy, a distrust of coherence and a concomitant appetite for the fairground swirl of loud sounds and strong sensations, the cult of spontaneity and improvisation (more often than not carefully planned) which really capitulates to the commercial inebriation it affects to fight. A throw-away art will not persuade audiences to reach and see beyond surface kaleidoscopes, to think as well as feel,

to judge as well as react. In the productions of, for example, The Living Theatre, I find that sincerity or dedication fails to atone for stereotyped political protest, wild caricature, glibness, simplistic nihilism, raw, uncooked emotionalism, meaningless sexuality, and a cult of violence which shamelessly presents itself as the enemy of violence. Witch-doctors also share the pathetic belief that the enemy can be exposed and so destroyed by mere mimicry and parody. The attempts of such theatre companies to disintegrate the distinction between the cast and the audience is either a charade or a rather nasty form of dishonesty-test, as a member of the audience, the limits of your initiative, and you'll find yourself handcuffed or beaten to death. Behind the cult of manic participation there lurks a distinctly totalitarian mood.

The key, or first principle, of a truly dialectical and critical literature or theatre lies in the principle of alienation (as in the German word Verfremdung). This means above all else recognising things for what they are: a play is a play, a performance a performance, just as a novel is a novel. An audience walks in out of the cold, off the street, unrehearsed: it remains an audience. A theatrical event is always a performance, by some for others. Any attempt to integrate or immerse that audience in what follows is merely to vary the old, tired strategy practised by practitioners of the illusionist novel or the 'wellmade' play; in the one case, the actors invade the auditorium, in the other case, the spectators are asked to live inside Pinero's stage drawing room as ifit were real. Though the style is very different, it would not be pressing a paradox too far to argue that traditional, empathetic realist theatre represents a kind ofcontinual Happening. For what happens? The audience is encouraged to lose itself, its own identity, and therefore its own critical faculty. But the silliest thing about the modern Underground theatre is its childish desire to have an id without a superego.

This derni-culture falls headlong into the trap presented by the permissive society which, neither an accident of Supreme

Court decisions nor a symptom of Rome's waning influence, is precisely the logical field of energies evolved by a highly profitand consumer-oriented capitalist system. Being free to say anything, the writer traps himself by doing so, like an infant offered a big bag of candies; he thereby assumes both the license and the ineffectuality of the court jester or fool. As soon as the artist's role is socially typified as one of scurrilous iconoclasm, no one takes him seriously. He squats on the boulevard making rude gestures at the passers-by; sometimes they drop a penny into his lap and give him an answering wink. "Real life" grinds on all around him, but he is not part of it, though he is probably congratulating himself on his fearless honesty. The day comes when he reads enviously of censorship and even imprisonment imposed on his colleagues in the Popular Democracies; suppression is at least a sign of some respect. Long ago, Marcuse made the point that art tends to win its freedom from the reality principle in proportion to its irrelevance to the reality principle. In the long run, there is one thing that THEY up there fear we might do, en masse: think for ourselves. Art, naturally, is not purely a cerebral or conceptual affair, but all the feeling and emotion involved, all the appeals to beauty, rhythm and subconscious transport, must ultimately converge and coalesce in the notion of criticism. The man who is aware is the ultimate subversive, not in isolation, but in massive fraternity with others who aspire to see things as they are. That may be impossible; we mayall, artists and audiences alike, be thrusting up the same slope as Sisyphus; but the motion, thejourney, is the only conceivable undertaking.

Yet we cannot begin to see things as they are until we see how we see.

Any mundane historian or sociologist or economist knows that. He supports assertion with evidence: en route to his conclusions, he lays bare his process of deduction. In other words, he shows the works, the engine beneath the polished hood. Why should art be subject to an altogether different law -pretence, hypnotism, cosmetics and (one has to say it) bad

faith? Art is not a deep dark forest of voodoo and black magic inhabited by faith healers. It might be tedious to publish our novels complete with the original notes, deletions and insertions, but that in a sense is what we have to do if the product is to be understood as a process, the "finished" work as simply a moment, more or less arbitary. in which the motion is frozen, offered, retailed.

I am well aware that what I am proposing cannot really be done. When the Brechtian actor declares, Look, I'm only an actor. I'm only pretending to play Galileo", or when the novelist inserts a footnote to the effect that the chapter originally had a different conclusion, when such "confessions" are made we continue to reside within the orbit of cunning and artifice. Similarly, the partial dualism of words and things, of literary structures and the reality they try to portray, cannot be eradicated, but they can indeed be depicted both as an active space and as a span of tension. The writer adopting the dialectical approach will certainly renounce all claims to mimesis, acknowledging his ambivalent role as both the master and servant of the medium in which he works. And if, as is inevitable, the writer cannot completely jettison the weapons of mimesis and empathy, if the invitation to suspend disbelief must occasionally be extended to the reader, then these pretences are adopted only to be unmasked.

Unfortunately, any politically committed writer who subscribes to any of the self-scrutinising techniques associatedbroadly-with the modernist movement must undertake the onerous task of liberating those techniques from the pessimistic and obscurantist attitudes towards the human condition which have been so characteristic of modernist writing and theatre. I mean the derisive dismissal of all knowledge as mere subjectivity, the view of history as chaotic and arbitrary, a cycle of animal spasms. According to this Weltanschauung, with its great debt to the philosophers of the late nineteenth-century anti-Enlightenment, man is never more free than a slave crawling east along the deck of a boat travelling west. Alienation is explained as strictly ontological, as rooted in the human

condition, and therefore as incurable. Ever since the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, an influential group within the artistic avant-garde has turned its fastidious back on the popular masses, at best a passive herd, at worst a vile, iconoclastic mob of philistines. Chronological time has been dissolved and with it the concept of personal identity. Who am I?-"Je est un autre." With pronounced Schadenfreude, this elite has celebrated the helplessness of man.

As a result, we are bound to revere the efforts of those writers who have tried to marry genuine social commitment with a genuinely modern approach to writing. Yet their fate has not been encouraging: the brilliant Russian avant-garde of the post-Revolutionary years was soon shown the door by a regime devoted to literary realism; the French surrealists were hounded out of the Communist Party, Mayakovsky committed suicide, and Brecht survived only by cunning, compromise and good luck.

The techniques employed by Brecht in his pursuit of a genuinely dialectical theatre, together with the theories expounded in his notebooks, are by now so well known that it would be superfluous to recapitulate them here. Nevertheless, one must emphasise that Brecht remains for the committed playwright a giant of inspiration in whose shadows we can comfortably linger. One must also emphasise a point picked up by Brecht-that a rupture with the conventions of nineteenthcentury realism, far from amounting to a defiance of timeless laws of art, signifies instead a return to honoured traditions of honest self-awareness. The medieval Corpus Christi cycle, though models of passionate commitment, scorned total illusion and mimesis. The actors portrayed not the complete character of God (admittedly some task), but merely a selection of His actions. No actor attempted to perform the entire role of any single character-a blow to mimesis. In the streets and open spaces of the medieval town, the spectators crowded round to witness a performance, and no attempt was made to hypnotise them into a trance of absolute empathy. And if we move a little closer in time, we find that Shakespeare, Calde-

ron, and other playwrights of the early modern age relished a theatrical self-consciousness which was rejected as naive or clumsy in the age of Ibsen. Listen to Shakespeare's Cleopatra: and 1 shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' th' posture of a whore.

Let us look briefly at Genet, who wanted The Maids to be portrayed by male actors, this portrayal to be an ostensible metaphor for what is portrayed. In Genet's work, the essential alienation is conveyed by and through the ritual, symbolic and allegorical resources of the theatre. The world, the writer, his beliefs, dreams and art, the play itself, are all wrapped round each other; and yet Genet's plays are authentically political, obsessed as they are with a fundamental theme, the relationship of the rulers to the ruled. The two maids, the clients of the brothel in The Balcony, the blacks in The Blacks, all perform, acting out their lives in a conscious acknowledgment of the circumstance of their own incarnation, which is theatre. Thus they are both the subject and the object of art; art comes back at them, helping them (not always conclusively) to bridge the gap between their predicament and their aspirations.

In The Blacks, Genet sets up two complementary structures: (a) "actors" and "audience" within The Blacks; (b) actors and audience of The Blacks. A shift in the racial composition of anyone of these four elements automatically generates a modification of total meaning for the real audience. Genet, therefore, provides us not only with multiple reinsurance against illusion and empathy, but also with a delicate commentary on the interplay of art and reality, on how content emerges from the dialogue between subject and form. He uses myth, symbol, ritual and allegory to delineate the levels of consciousness and political aspiration operating in the world outside the theatre. In a less elaborate manner, Brecht had already achieved the same effect in Arturo Vi, a play which achieves its political impact by a central device of displacement (the Chicago waterfront, not Berlin), in itself an important form of alienation, whether realised in terms of time (We, Brave

New World, 1984) or place (Penguin Island, Animal Farm). Brecht does not attempt to mirror the real Hitler; instead he offers us a theatrical image as a means of persuading us to get away from Hitler in order to see him the more clearly. However, it should be noted that displacement is only one contributing element to dialectical writing or theatre, and can be somewhat neutralised-as in some of the novels mentioned above-by the author's insistence that we fully empathise with the artificial scenario he has created.

In this context I would like to mention one other play, Barbara Garson's MacBird!, which, largely because it attracted so much attention at the time of its first production, is now no doubt dismissed as an emphemereal period-piece. But it is worth remembering. Garson offered, and then juxtaposed, two myths: the mode of Shakespearian political sentiment and the mode of American machine politics. Cutting across both was the cult of hero and villain. From the moment that a middle-aged man wearing a business suit and carrying a sword declared, "Oh for a fireless muse, that could descend ", Garson sustained a truly penetrating alienation-effect. However passionate the author's rejection of the Vietnam war, American imperialism, racism and cynical political maneuver, she attained a higher level of political consciousness by divorcing the chosen subject from its most obvious form of expression, thereby achieving a content, a critical awareness, capable of raising the audience's general political sensibility.

MacBird! is more than just an amusing satire, and so indeed is Brecht's A Man's a Man. Both make the central "as if' of artistic representation a focal point of the representation. (Picasso draws a distorted nose to persuade us to see what real noses look like.) This fond caressing of the "as if' is also crucial to the work of such great exponents of political mime as Chaplin and Fialka, who make a deliberately extended theatricality into an aid to vision, a means of seeing rather than just looking. The adult puppet theatre carries the same potential. For children, puppets pose the (unconscious) question: how close can art approach to life? For adults the question is, or

should be. reversed: how close does life approach to a mocking art'! I n the Japanese Bunraku theatre-a form with immense political potential-the puppeteers, much larger than their puppets, make no attempt to conceal themselves. Thus, the illusion (the actions of the puppets), and the counter-illusion (the visible presence of the puppeteers) both foster and explode empathy in a continual interaction. The effect is reinforced by the Joruri singer, highly emotional in his tone, pitch and tempo, yet alienating on account of his physical detachment from the action, his aloof role as chorus. I should add that what little I have been able to see of the New York Bread and Puppet Theatre confirmed my belief in the political potential of this kind of theatre.

I turn now to the question of the novel. Needless to emphasise, I regard the illusionist manicure so dear to Henry James as both dishonest and unsustainable. (Unsustainable if only because one reads on the second page of "Washington Square", It will be seen that I am describing a clever man Later one is pulled up short by this: "I doubt, however, whether Catherine was irritated, though she broke into a vehement protest." The dangerous word here is not "I", since the authorial presence can claim omniscience and so admit its existence, but the "doubt", which makes us sceptical about all the certainties hitherto offered.) In fact, the naturalist and realist novelists have always slipped on the banana skins presented by the desire to supply information, or to convey a heavier message than the narrative itself can bear. Dreiser, for example, was capable of hurling his reader right out of nineteenth-century Philadelphia with some such observation as, "the telephone had not yet been invented." Upton Sinclair and Louis Aragon, groaning to discharge The Message, were apt to abandon the illusionist mode in the last chapter, ushering in the Coming Day by means of long climactic sermons. Alternatively, when Richard Wright, in Native Son, wished to impart his own thoughts without revealing his own authorial presence, he was compelled to stuff those same thoughts into the head of simple Bigger Thomas, and then to excuse the

whole trick improbably with the explanation, "I n a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this.

It is curious, looking back from the prevailing realist assumptions, to recall that Don Quixote, widely regarded as the foundation stone of the modern novel, positively celebrates its own nature as a contrivance. "Notice that this second part of Don Quixote, which I place before you, is cut by the same craftsmen from the same cloth as the first Where Richard Wright tries to hide the authorial voice under a stone, Cervantes mocks any such attempt: "When the translator of this history comes to write this fifth chapter, he declares that he considers it apocryphal, because in it Sancho's style is much superior to what one would expect of his limited understanding Brecht pointed out that epic structures convey alienation effects more easily than dramatic ones. In Don Quixote, there is certainly a discernible sequence of events, one thing leading to another, but the structure is sufficiently episodic to permit a reshuffling of the chapters. Most important, Cervantes emphasised that literature to a large extent creates what it expresses. In the second part of the novel, the knight learns that he is already the subject of a book by Cide Hamete Benegali! How could this be true, he wonders, if the blood of his slain enemies was scarcely dry on his sword blade? Well, if it is so, he will henceforward have to justify and exceed his own literary image.

Cervantes turned the assumptions of the Renaissance upside down, just as we, in a sense, have to repudiate the cultural assumptions of the age of Darwin. In Cervantes' work, writing refuses to posture as the mirror-image of a coherent world, and words do not pretend to be immanent to things. He appreciated that the relationship of words to things must be understood as a code of signs and analogies. What at first sight appeared to be a case of madness (the knight's loss of contact with reality) is ultimately interpreted analogically in terms of literature's own internal contradictions. On his death bed, Don Quixote repents of having given the author the occasion to publish "so many gross absurdities." Don Quixote was published in 1604. One

hundred and fifty years later, Sterne still wrote under its shadow, rejecting the hidden god and insisting on the nature of art as artifice. But with Fielding we find a writer with a foot in two centuries. gradually surrendering authorial honesty to the growing demand of the bourgeoisie for a literature which would reflect its own comfortable certainties.

Paradoxically, the anti-bourgeois socialist movement altered the certainties but retained the demand for comfort. The rebellion in our own century has, unfortunately, been spearheaded not by politically committed novelists (though Zamyatin provided an isolated inspiration) but, rather, by essentiaUy "private" writers such as Gide, Moravia and Butor. In short, the novel lacks its Mayakovsky or Brecht. Nevertheless, most readers can, I expect, think of one or two talented novelists who, if not yet figures of universal stature, have successfuUy adopted a dialectical approach to creative writing, thereby fostering the sense of freedom through a freeing of the senses. * Brecht remarked: "What the spectator, anyway the experienced spectator. enjoys about art is the making of art, the active creative element." Brecht perhaps mistook the wish for the reality, and the statement, in any case, does not cover the whole experience. But the direction is right. As writers, particularly as committed ones, we can help to coax those "experienced spectators" (and perhaps swell their number) towards the attitude of expecting and demanding greater honesty of the author. To do this, we must cease to hurl at them messages as unequivocal as a gust of wind in a language as selfassured as machine-gun fire. A good novel or play should not be, and cannot be, merely an extended slogan.

·Dos Passos' USA constitutes a half-buried metropolis worth limitless excavation. Of more recent fiction, I would particularly draw attention to Alberto Moravia's The Lie, the work of Gunter Grass and Michel Butor, and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (although the orientation of these writers is not ostensibly political); to Uwe Johnson's Two Views and Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnaml ; to passages or tendencies within Sol Yurick's The Bag and E. L. Doctorow's The Book ofDaniel; and, perhaps most stimulating ofall, toJohn Berger's recent novel. G.

Enter the frame RICHARD PEARCE

A "curious literary form called the novel" came into being at about the same time as the philosophy of Descartes, which "makes the whole of intelligible reality depend on the mental processes of a solitary man." And Hugh Kenner concludes: "The novel, for all its look of objectivity, is the product of an arduous solitary ordeal" (Samuel Beckett).

The narrative is distinguished from all other forms of art by the voice of the solitary narrator that intercedes between the subject and the listener or reader.

The "curious literary form called the novel" is distinguished by the narrator's view-a self-contained visual entity that stands between the subject and the reader. The narrator's view follows from his choosing a detached and fixed vantage, even when he narrows his focus to the mind of a central intelligence, and from his enclosing the subject within the frame of his visual imagination. It is in this sense that the whole of reality depends on the mental processes of a solitary man. And the narrator's

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view gains in objectivity and clarity through a suppression of the frame which he imposes upon his subject, and a suppression of the medium through which he fashions his narrative picture.

A new fiction, aptly termed "surfiction," derives from a radical change in narrative dynamics. The narrator is no longer situated between the subject and the reader, he no longer stands on a fixed vantage, and he no longer encloses the subject within the frame of his visual imagination. Indeed, as he enters the frame, the medium asserts itself as an independent source of interest and control. The narrative voice loses its independent and dominant status. And what the reader sees is no longer a clear picture contained within the narrator's purview, but an erratic image where the narrator, the subject, and the medium are brought into the same imaginative field of interaction, an image that is shattered, confused, self-contradictory, but with an independent and individual life of its own.

Samuel Beckett may be considered the progenitor of surfiction, and each in his own way, Robbe-Grillet, Pinget, Calvino, Cortazar, Borges, and Barth have followed his lead. In what follows I shall expand on the dynamics of traditional fiction in order to focus on the transition to surfiction.

Let us return to Descartes through a series of innovations by solitary men who made the whole of intelligible reality depend on their mental processes and established a new intellectual and imaginative approach to reality. In his Dialogue of the New Sciences, Galileo shows how he arrived at the principle of inertia: "I conceive as the work of my own mind a moving object launched above a horizontal plane and freed of all impediment. In a solitary ordeal and a break not only from tradition but from reality, Galileo imagined an ideal picture freed from the impediments which objects naturally encounter. And, as Ortega y Gasset remarks, it was by just this imaginative act that Galileo founded the new science. But Ortega, in seizing on the relationship between science and art, only begins

to realize the potential of his subject. For it was a particular pattern of imaginative activity that distinguished Galilee's achievement-a pattern like that which established the new philosophy, the new art, and the new literature. Galileo' s pattern can be divided into three stages, although Galileo himself might not have conceived them this way. First, he created an ideal picture; that is, from the detached perspective of a solitary but ideal viewer, he framed his subject or isolated it from the clutter and continuity of its context. Second, he reintroduced the impediments to reconstitute the "full" or "real" picture, implying a relationship between the impediments or a quantity of visible elements and a sense of reality. Third, he transformed his three-dimensional mental picture of a moving object into a two-dimensional and static model-a series of dots framed by the coordinates oftime and space.

Now Galileo did not invent the system of coordinates, nor did he realize their geometrical potential, and the history ofthis mathematical construct has two interesting parallels in the history of Western arts and letters. Shortly after the coordinates were invented, Alberti invented a system of perspective. By looking through a tiny opening in a small box, he found that he could translate the exact proportions of a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional plane. Alberti established a new art, like Galileo, by imposing a frame upon a cluttered and continuous field from the detached perspective of an ideal viewer, by filling his frame with a quantity of' 'realistic" detail, and by reducing a three-dimensional and dynamic perception to a static, two-dimensional form.

The second interesting point in the development of coordinate geometry came shortly after Galileo used the system to discover the principle of inertia, when Descartes helped develop it into a major scientific tool. For Descartes applied the same imaginative pattern in his Discourse on Method to establish the new philosophy. As Descartes doubted the lessons of custom, habit, authority, and the senses, he imposed a frame upon the clutter and continuity of history from the

perspective of an ideal. solitary, and detached viewer; his ideal picture. freed from all but the necessary elements, consisted of the fact of his doubting and, hence, of his existence. From this certain fact he reconstituted the "full" or "real" world: the First Cause. the heavens, the stars, the earth, water, air, fire, minerals, etc. And he arrived at his picture of the world through deductive logic. That is, he reduced and translated a dynamic field into that static language of geometry-a system of points whose relationship, he tells us, could be best understood if viewed as "subsisting between straight lines."

Alberti imposed his frame upon the whole field of visual experience, Galileo upon a universe filled with moving objects and impediments, Descartes upon a history of assertions about the real and the true. And a similar step was taken soon afterwards by DeFoe, Fielding, and, in a less obvious way, Richardson in the art of narrative fiction. Of course the frame was not invented in the Renaissance, but it did serve a new purpose and carry a new message. In the Middle Ages the frame was an outer edge-a limit to the imaginative construction which called attention to the act of imagination and to the fact of its being shaped in a particular medium. In the Renaissance the frame began to be a limit imposed upon the real world. As the novel developed, the narrator gradually shifted his role from that of professional storyteller toward that of witness. He found ways to disguise or suppress the fact that he was conveying a fiction through artificial conventions, and he imposed the frame upon reality itself. Boccaccio, following in the specific tradition of the fourteenth centuryfavellatore and in the general tradition of storytellers from the epic to the fabliaux, was retelling stories with eloquence and evocative power. His "Preface to the Ladies" called attention to itself as a frame that enclosed his stories. Chaucer created a narrator who claims to have witnessed the events of his narrative; but his pretense is an obvious convention, and his frame is seen only as a more skillfully created device than Boccaccio's. What distinguishes the novel from the epic, the early short narrative,

and the stories told within the walled garden of a plagued city or the time encompassed by a journey to Canterbury is our sense of the narrator not as a storyteller but as a witness who has imposed his frame upon reality. Whether his story is told in the first or third person, the narrator is present as a witness who holds a world of time and space within his solitary purview. And the epistolary novel conveys the presence of an arranger with the same function.

Indeed, the narrator ofthe novel, with his detached and fixed viewpoint and his enclosing frame, is very much like the ideal intellect postulated by Laplace at the end of the 18th century and which would serve as a scientific model for the next hundred years. This "intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes."

In the Renaissance, a stance was developed to view objects defined not by their inherent qualities or limits but by their relation to a fixed observer governing a closed system. * And the term "realistic"-deriving from the Latin "res ," or thingaptly applies to this kind of objectification. It applies, that is, to Galileo's ideal picture, which he transformed to a coordinate graph; to the view through Alberti's little box, which he transformed onto a two-dimensional canvas; to the world picture generated by the solitary mind of Descartes, which he structured on the principles of geometry. And to the purview of the narrative persona who imposes his frame on a continuous stream of events, holds the past, present, and future before him, and fits the complicated details of character, setting, commentary, motivation, and action into the grid of his plot.

It is the frame that gives the narrator's picture its peculiar clarity-a clarity, for all the novel's illusion of movement

*For a fuller discussion of the closed system see my "Limits of Realism," College English (January 1970),31:335-343. 75

through time, that is essentially geometrical. And yet in order to evoke an illusion of objective reality the frame, as an idealized or esthetic limit, was suppressed. The frame would seem to say, "The world of space and time outside of me is qualitatively the same but is unnecessary and would blur my focus. Moreover, you should forget that only some of the visual details (not every blade of grass) and only some moments in the sequence of time (not every word or action) are actually included within me." As realism in the arts and sciences developed, more and more details were included within the frame and more skill was manifested in their representation, and the message was always that the creation was real and full.

And the picture's clarity was achieved through a suppression of the medium, for not only was the frame suppressed, the canvas as a two-dimensional object, the stage as a framework for carefully plotted and skillfully executed action, and the novel as an artfully contrived sequence of words virtually disappeared. The two-dimensional canvas would seem to say, "I am three-dimensional reality. The proscenium stage would seem to say, "I am a real room with the fourth wall removed." The novel would seem to say, "I am really happening.

Let me try to demonstrate my point and develop a transition to the dynamics of surfiction by focusing on four works where the story-frame plays an important role: Henry James's Turn of the Screw, an apparently simple illustration of fiction reaching for a sophisticated extreme of objectivity; Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, where the story as story asserts itself as the true subject; William Faulkner's Absalom, Absaloml where the story as main subject is beyond the grasp of the storytellers and the reader; and Samuel Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable), where the central conflict becomes that between the storytellers and the story, indeed, between the storyteller and the storytelling voice -or between various formal elements of the fiction itself.

Henry James's novella, The Turn of the Screw, is a useful

illustration of traditional fiction reaching a limit, not only because it is short but because one of its chief aims is to bring an ostensibly fantastic story within the grasp of realistic objectivity. The narrative structure begins with the frame of a detached and fixed narrator, who underscores his detachment by remaining nameless. Within his frame is the frame of Douglas, who is telling a story to the guests of the manor. Douglas is not so detached from the story, for he had been involved with the protagonist in a way that he can only intimate for twenty years, and he has preserved this relationship in his memory for the twenty years since she died. Within Douglas' frame is the frame of the governess, this time not the voice of a living character telling a story from memory, but the manuscript of a woman long since dead, who, as the style suggests, composed a traumatic experience into an extremely controlled story. Hence the real subject, contained within her frame, is absolutely beyond our grasp. This does not mean that the ultimate picture is unclear. Quite the contrary. We see the frame imposed by each narrator and the story contained within these frames with absolute clarity. It is only the interpretation of the story that remains beyond our final grasp. The story is not unclear but ambiguous. And our perception is like that of the viewer who tries to fix on the ambiguous picture of the duck-rabbit, which E. H. Gombrich describes in Art and Illusion. This is a picture that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. But, as Gombrich points out, it can never be seen as both at once. The images may be contradictory, but no single perception contains a self-contradiction. This distinction should become more meaningful when we examine a later illustration where the subject image is self-contradictory.

Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness is also structured on the principle of a frame within a frame, but the dynamics are entirely different. Again the largest frame is provided by an unnamed narrator. He is not so detached as the first narrator in James's novella; as a comparison of his opening and closing descriptions shows, the story has a profound effect on his 77

consciousness. Nonetheless, he imposes his frame from a detached and fixed vantage. Within his frame sits Marlow, in the lotus-flower position, who tells the main story. But Marlow's stories are not like those of the typical seaman--or those of the traditional narrator. including the narrators of Turn of the Screll'-' 'the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut." For Marlow, "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out. The subject of the Hearl ofDarkness is not a series of events contained within a frame but Marlow's story as story. a dynamic process where style, description, characters, symbols, actions are constantly evolving-and where all these elements are brought into the same field of imaginative perception and meaning. The resulting picture is not clear, partly because Marlow tends to generalize and to keep his focus from the "heart of darkness," but more because his focus is not on the kernel, a static entity within the shell or frame, but on the "enveloping" and developing "tale." The reader is offered a stable vantage, even though the first narrator's perspective changes as a result of his vicarious experience, for the first narrator encloses his subject within a traditional frame. And hence we can designate Hearl of Darkness as an ideal transitional work between fiction and surfiction.

Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! aims directly at the kernel, or at the character of Sutpen, whose story would seem to provide the meaning of Western history-from its sources in classical and biblical times to those of frontier America and the ante-bellum South-and to provide the link between the past and the present. But the kernel is approached from the vantage of four characters with different preconceptions, needs, obsessions, and degrees of relationship to Sutpen: Rosa, the one character who ever saw Sutpen, who was the object of a traumatic insult, and who was obsessed by puritanic repressions and a gothic imagination; Mr. Compson, who heard a great deal of the story from his grandfather, an apparently

reliable witness, and who has come to terms with the outrages of history; Quentin, who is obsessed by chivalric values and the love for his sister, who is ambivalent about a history where the sources of affirmation and negation are one; and Shreve, historically, emotionally, and psychologically detached from the central situation but genuinely curious and possessing a sympathetic imagination.

What we see in our experience ofAbsalom, Absalom! is not a clear or even an ambiguous picture of Sutpen or the events of his legend, and while the novel leads us to reconstruct the events and fit the pieces of the picture puzzle together, to end at this point is to lose sight of the experience as a whole. For the legend of Sutpen is beyond our perception, due to the psychological and historical limitations of each narrator. Indeed the gaps between each narrator and the central story assert themselves as a dramatic part of the novel's fabric. Nor, as in The Turn ofthe Screw, do we see a series of frames, one within the other. What we see are four partially overlapping and constantly shifting frames attempting to enclose a subject that is not there. The subject of the novel is not an enveloping or developing story but a montage of storytellers as they try to impose a frame and reconstitute the' 'full" or "real" picture.

To illustrate the dynamics of montage, let me refer to Sergei Eisenstein's first film, a short comedy designed to fit into his production of Ostrovsky's play Enough Simplicity in Every Sage. The play, as Eisenstein describes it in Film Form, is an elaborate intrigue in which Glumov deceives his uncle by courting his aunt, while at the same time deceiving the aunt by courting their niece. For the film insert, Eisenstein made use of the play's stage set, which was shaped like a circus arena with a small raised platform at one end. The scene with the uncle took place downstage in the arena; the fragments with the aunt took place on the platform. "Instead of changing scenes, Glumov ran from one scene to the other and back-taking a fragment of dialogue from one scene, interrupting it with a fragment from the other scene-the dialogue thus colliding,

creating new meanings and sometimes word-plays. Glumov's leaps acted as caesurae between the dialogue fragments.

Eisenstein's montage is more immediately applicable to Joyce's Ulysses, which was contemporaneous with the production of Ostrovsky's play; but the key elements and the dynamics of montage are also applicable to Faulkner's novel, which, of course, was influenced by Joyce. The key elements are fragmentation, collision, leaping, and caesurae. The picture which we hold ofAbsalom, Absalom! in our imaginations is of the dynamic pattern of the storytellers, of their fragments and their collisions-and of the caesurae over which we leap as we turn from one page to the next. As in the Heart of Darkness, the various elements of the subject and the medium are all brought into the same field of imaginative perception; but they are not enclosed within the frame or purview of a solitary, fixed, and detached narrator. Indeed, the shifting frames that attempt to enclose the subject are themselves dramatic elements that collide and leap. And the caesurae, or the main story's gaps, assert themselves as equally dynamic and important.

What we have seen so far in this development from fiction to surfiction (a development that is not historical but paradigmatic) is that as the narrator relinquishes his detached stance and reduces his distance from the subject, he can no longer enclose the subject within his frame. The medium, instead of being suppressed, asserts itself as an independent and vital part of the subject. And the resulting picture or view loses its traditional clarity. In the trilogy of Samuel Beckett, not only the view but the very voice of the narrator is called into question. And the medium itself-indifferent, threatening, capricious-comes to dominate the narrator, the characters, and the story.

In Molloy, the question of the narrator's voice can have two answers: either Molloy is telling his own story, in part one, and then telling the story of Moran; or Moran is telling of his conversion to Molloy, and the chronological beginning is in

part two. But this dual interpretation is not like that of James's Turn ofthe Screw or Gombrich's duck-rabbit, where only one picture presents itself to the imagination at a time. Given the symmetrical structure of the novel and the caesura or gap between its two parts, and given the contradictory nature of Molloy's voice or the voice which Moran finally achieves, the culminating picture is self-contradictory. The images leap the caesura and collide, and they are kept in continual and erratic motion. When we are introduced to Malone in the next novel, who seems very much like the first two narrators but whose identification is precluded by the caesura between the novels, we cannot be sure whether he is the first narrator, who has told the stories of Molloy and Moran while waiting to die, or whether he is one of the characters in a story being told by Molloy or Moran. Another shifting frame is added to our montage. And when we are introduced to the Unnamable, a stump of head and torso living in a jar beneath a restaurant sign, and who tells us that he sees Malone passing before him, "unless it is I who pass before him," the shifting frames are multiplied to a point suggesting infinity. But the Unnamable brings the trilogy to a further extreme, when he claims that the voice with which he is compelled to speak is not his own. He tries to tell the story of Mahood but finds it was Mahood who "told me stories about me his voice continued to testify for me, as though woven into mine, preventing me from saying who I was."

A key word in the vocabulary of the trilogy is aporia, the rhetorical device of doubting. But unlike Descartes', the Unnamable's doubting cannot end with the affirmation of a doubter, and hence of his existence. For the Unnamable goes so far as to doubt the very voice with which he speaks and thinks. The narrative voice, at once liberated from its traditional position between the subject and the reader and gratuitously imposing itself upon the narrator, usurps the main character and his narrative view. In breaking from traditional fiction, Beckett creates a new subject: the conflict between his

narrator and the narrative voice, or between his main character and the limits of his medium.

Hugh Kenner has shown how Beckett extends and parodies the line of Descartes, who, like those followers who gave birth to the novel, "made the whole of reality depend on the mental processes of a solitary man." But we might go further and see how Beckett stretches this line to its breaking point-and destroys not only the Cartesian enterprise and the strategy that gave rise to classical physics, perspective painting, and the novel, but the very essence of the narrative.

The achievement of Beckett's trilogy is in its ability to evoke a positive, indeed vital and creative sense of personality, even though all the sources of personality-the narrator's view and the narrator's voice-are denied. This potential is achieved from a medium which has a life of its own, and from caesurae, narrative gaps, and silences that can assert themselves as positive elements and collide in our imaginative picture. With his trilogy Beckett completes the transition from fiction to surfiction and opens a Pandora's box for practitioners who succeed him.

My life in American literature

TONY TANNER

It's certainly a complex function, if not quite a fate, being an English critic of contemporary American fiction. I have been invited to comment informally, even autobiographically, on some aspects ofthis complexity, and the result is a piece which is discursive, ambulatory, and discontinuous, as I move from considering personal factors to wider considerations. In general my position is anomalous, though not untenable. When 1 was at university in England, American literature was not only not taught, it was neither read nor recognised. Next year-1974 -for the first time students at Cambridge can choose to take one optional paper on American Literature in their final year. So, while teaching English literature here 1 have had to establish a sort of alter-life for myself in America. One result has been that 1 often feel closer to Americans with whom 1 correspond than to colleagues 1 see every day. Here, 1 am still considered slightly odd or suspect for having decided to spend a lot of time writing about recent American fiction. "I suppose someone has to keep up with all that stuff," said a Professor to TriQuarterly

me in a moment of tired candour. Reading American fiction? Our juniors will do that for us. It would have been too long a task to try to convince him that there was more energy, more inventiveness, more imaginative exploitation of the resources of the language to be found in contemporary American fiction than in-well, I would say any other contemporary literature. Things are changing among the students-I have one addicted to John Barth, another to Robert Coover, but my preoccupation with American writing has resulted in a certain amount of intellectual isolation in an otherwise extremely amiable community. On the other hand, although the experience that comes to me through American fiction continues to fascinate me, I know that ultimately it is not my experience. In both realms then, English university and American fiction, I feel both strong attachments and also slightly not-at-home. On the whole I think I prefer it that way, but, as I say, there are some attendant complexities. I will start with a specific example. Last year James Purdy published I Am Elijah Thrush. The English response was mainly hostile. But apart from the "It's like being pelted with warm meringues" level of criticism, and some predictable shudders from the"Ugh!" school of reviewers, one reaction did give me pause. This was a review by Margaret Drabble and it started like this. "It is probably a good thing every now and then to read a completely incomprehensible book. And when the book is by a distinguished author, the exercise must be salutary. But that, in the case of James Purdy's latest book, is all that can be said." It was a short review. I was struck by this because I had recently 'written a review of the novel for an American magazine (Partisan Review, Fall 1972), in which I gave my opinion that it was about a number of very discernible and far from unimportant matters concerning the problems of discovering and maintaining an identity, modes ofexploitation and deracination, and the experience of a hapless consciousness struggling for utterance in an alien medium. My comments on the' 'incomprehensible" narrator were along the lines that "Albert is full of

words but has no language to call his own, employing instead the synthetic language of those around him." 1 am not trying to demonstrate any supposed superior powers of reading, which would be absurd. What interested me was this. Margaret Drabble is a popular English novelist, whose work also does well in America. She read English at Cambridge around the time that 1 did, and did extremely well in her final examinations (better than 1 did, I think, though that may have been her sister). We have never met, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that we were two English students of literature with a comparable educational background; we both (presumably) share an interest in contemporary fiction. Yet within some fifteen years of leaving Cambridge, she can find a contemporary American novel totally meaningless, while I found it both enjoyable and full of meaning.

Since 1 wrote a lengthy review of Purdy's book it would be pointless t9 repeat my reading of it here. But 1 think one general point can be made. For Miss Drabble, the status of narrative language is, or would seem to be, unproblematical. The medium is reliable; there are unspoken covenants of comprehension and expectation between writer and reader. Her prose can let through strange experiences and new objects -the one thing she liked in Purdy's novel as 1 recall was a list of flowers-as long as they have been stabilised within a familiar language. But when the very subject of a book is the instability of language, its fragmentation, dissolution, dislocation into mannerism and inauthenticity, the various miseries and absurdities of our talking state-this, it seems, simply cannot get through the scanning pattern of Miss Drabble's prose. The verdict thus emerges: not "new content", but "no content"

The irony was further compounded. Around the same time 1 met the American novelist Stanley Elkin. He had just read four or five of Margaret Drabble's novels and was fascinated by them on account of the exotic world they opened up. I, on the other hand, have never read further than a few pages into any

of her novels. I find I come up against sentences like" Hamish and I had just come down from Cambridge at the end of the Christmas term," or On the other hand I wouldn't have married Stephen Halifax had he been the last exit open to me," and my attention wanders. To me the novels promise a species of gossip. (This is no doubt unfair. I haven't looked at any of Margaret Drabbles recent novels. This is quite simply prejudice on my part and I put it down as being, in its way, symptomatic of something I hope to mention later on.) This is not because I demand that a novel should immediately announce itself as obsessional, hysterical, written at the far edge of conventional narrative. There is nothing wrong with conventions. They sustain us all. But there is a kind of conventionality which strikes me as being potentially tyrannous in its modesty, over-assured in its tentativeness, pre-emptive in its self-effacement. Thus I'm frightfully sorry, I know it's awfully silly of me, but I'm afraid I somehow can't seem to understand a word of your distinguished novel. (You illiterate pretentious barbarian.) I know the tone. You can still find it in some TLS reviews, and at times I'm sure I've used it myself. We manufacture it over here and pour our meanings into parenthetic silences. But conventions should surely be more like windows than bars; ways of seeing rather than ways of notthinking. Any Englishman writing about contemporary fiction should be aware of our often excessive attachment to the comforts ofthe barred mind.

The moral of this little anecdote is that one man's exotica is another man's gossip; one woman's non-sense is another man's sense. Let it stand as a preface to the following remarks which, one way or another, are simply about what it is like being an English critic writing about contemporary American fiction (looking out over the back lawn of Kings College, Cambridge, and writing about William Burroughs). One problem the anecdote points to is the problem of the open and closed mind. I will attempt to amplify and dignify that generalisation by having recourse to a literary example. You will remember in Heart of

Darkness, when Marlow's ship is attacked by natives, Marlow promptly closes the shutters of the deck house. His native helmsman opens them and is killed by a spear. Marlow comments: "Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint, no restraint-like Kurtz." The comparison is perhaps at first rather surprising. But we note from Marlow's description of Kurtz's station that the building is decayed, that there are holes in the roof, and there is no enclosure, fence, or rails of any kind. The geography has phenomenological implications. Kurtz has done away with anything that shuts his consciousness off from the environment, or shuts the environment off from him. He did this out of an engorging appetite, an egotistical desire to transpose the world into subjectivity. "I saw him open his mouth wide-it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." He wanted to devour all the surrounding not-self, and it devoured him. Almost. Near the end he suddenly says, '''Close the shutter. I can't bear to look at this,'" and, with his last flicker of consciousness, as we all know, he passes judgment, confronting the non-human mystery of being with the human mystery of a word.

This is not as remote from my subject as it may sound. Conrad is dramatising a problem which confronts any modern mind which moves out of familiar territories which automatise consciousness, into unfamiliar ones which challenge and disturb it. Africa is anywhere uncolonised by familiarity. And the problem, to phrase it in terms suggested by Conrad's story, is how far do you open the shutter of the mind? What happens to the helmsman physically happens to Kurtz mentally. If you open up totally to the unknown and possibly menacing otherness around you, you may well be destroyed (annihilated or absorbed). Marlow, with one part of his mind rooted in the pragmatic and prudential west, knows when to close the shutter. But he does open it up to Kurtz, turns to him "with relief" after encountering the unbearable, permanently shut

minds of the west and the trading stations. The mind that never opens is dead ("world-proof" in Conrad's terms; "impermeable" in Sartre's). The totally open mind ceases to be a mind and abandons the ground of its own identity. It can be, as Marlow precisely says, "a choice of nightmares". Talk of nightmares is not entirely out of place when considering the business of writing about America and American literature, and even here a form of the problem obtains. How far do you open the shutter?

To change the focus I want briefly to think about the origins of my own interest in American literature. I grew up in the suburbs around London with no "romantic" deprivations and a good amount of solid sensible direction and familial affection. (We even had an indoor lavatory and thus, according to the John Osborne of some years ago, couldn't know anything about Life. Or was it Reality") Suburbia. The main point about it is that you don't know what it is until you get out of it. Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, you may remember, "had no suburbs-in the ordinary sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line. " I lived in the line, but by my time, in my part of the world the line was everywhere. Country and town obviously offered themselves as vague tempting areas of new experiences, new freedoms-Wordsworthian and Baudelairean respectively. I only developed two fanatical interests while I was growing up, which towered above the usual litter of cigarette cards, stamps, train numbers and so on, which secretly bored me. These were boxing and jazz. The interest in boxing was not so healthy as it might sound. When it came to doing it I was abysmal, double-jointed elbows and constitutional timidity not offering themselves as the best possible basis for success in the ring. What drew me was the glamour, the feverish crowds, the smoky darkness, the spotlights on the ring, and the sudden entrance ofthe heroes surrounded by their satisfyingly seedy entourage. The heroes were not middle-class men. They could be Americans. They could even be black. (I remember making a journey across London, as a schoolboy, to

call at the house where I had discovered Joe Louis was staying during a brief visit. I knocked on the door to be answered by an enormous black man in an orange dressing gown who told me "Ahrn afraid Mr. Louis is in-dis-posed." Still, I got my autograph.) When I first heard New Orleans jazz during the post-war revival I thought I hadn't known what pleasure was until that moment. So much excitement combined with so much nonchalance! And more glamour, more smoky darkness, more heroes. And of course, more Americans, more blacks. Whereas the idea of my going to boxing matches and gymnasiums had merely disturbed my parents greatly, the idea of my going to jazz clubs made their hair stand on end. Obviously, I had instinctively been attracted to two areas of human enjoyment and modes of releasing energy which, in those days, were still anathema to a clean-living (very) Christian, lower-middleclass suburban home. Such unco-nscious disaffiliation from suburbia is of course very common; indeed, my gestures of revolt and partial repudiation, if that's what they were, must seem positively pastoral in their mildness today. The point is that in both cases my passionate attention was turned to this great unknown place, America, which produced all the great boxers and all the great jazz musicians. Thus in my adolescent suburbia-horizoned mind, an idea of America took hold. London was to some extent not-suburbia. But America was not-suburbia with a vengeance. It is hardly surprising that shortly after graduating from Cambridge I should be arriving in Berkeley, California, about to embark on the pleasures and discoveries made possible by paid deracination, innocent abroad in reverse, passionate pilgrim in wonderland.

Whereas it seems to be accepted as quite normal for someone living in the Midwest or the deep South to devote his life to studying Spenser or Milton, in my experience it is often regarded as rather strange for an Englishman to devote a lot of his time to reading American literature, particularly contemporary American literature. This was more the case when I was

first in America than it is now. To some Americans, often as modest as they are generous, it perhaps seemed that, culturally speaking, it made sense to go from a void to a plenum, but not the reverse. What such people could not realise was that, consciously or unconsciously, I had come to get rid of something. Not culture exactly (I wasn't notably overburdened in that way), but a whole mess of ways of regarding and assessing people, things, values. oneself, experience, God, and the like. I had come to the point where I felt that reality around me had been over-mapped. Coming to America was a way of leaving some of the maps behind. And I think I also came in search of something. This is hard to describe and may once again be related to a particular kind of class/educational background or have more purely psychological reasons. But I never felt that I had a voice of my own. (One interesting fact here is that at school we were always taught to avoid saying "I", always to say "one". which must have helped in some way to depersonalise our opinions, alienate us from our own thoughts.) Not only was I literally a rather good mimic, I could readily assume whole vocabularies of people I met and was impressed by (as easily in the college as in the barrack room). When it comes to terminological empathy I may have rivals, but there can't be many who can take it as far as I have in my time. Perhaps this was one reason why I found myself able to get into the widely different rhetorical modes of so many different American writers. And one of the things I admired in contemporary American writers was the way they seemed to have the confidence, determination, energy, etc., to create an original style for themselves, not content to think and articulate in the inherited modes (we all know how important the self-parenting figure is in American literature). L'homme, c'est Ie style. I think one of the things I hoped to find in America was my own style. Which is another way of saying that I wanted to become my own man.

As I had reached this particular point, it will easily be seen how attractive California in 1958 seemed to me. I didn't

consciously think about it at the time. but the book I was writing there. stressing, perhaps disproportionately, the importance and prevalence of the attitude of wonder in American literature, was an indirect testimony to what America then meant to me. I suppose it is some kind of a comment both on me and the different period of American literature I chose to concentrate on, that my second book should attempt to diagnose a preoccupation with waste and entropy. In America, it seems, Wonderland abuts onto the Valley of Ashes.

Perhaps one other autobiographical point is worth mentioning here. When I first arrived in California in 1958, America really was for me a wonderland. But in 1971, also in California, I succumbed to a combination of nervous exhaustion and endogenous depression. The reason for this was not simply a rather hectic quarter teaching at Berkeley (and I would like to record my unbounded gratitude to that university for so many things). The illness was more connected with the effort of writing a rather long book on recent American fiction, called City of Words, in a little over a year, with teaching commitments on the side. More generally, however, it may well have been connected with what I had been doing to myself over the previous decade. The point is perhaps more symbolic than medical. I came to America to escape certain kinds of parochialism, perhaps even to 'trade lives', to use the arresting phrase of the Yankee pitchers involved in that notorious wifeswap. I went quite a long way (my wife is Californian out of Brooklyn). But America is the continent of all possibilities, and if on the one hand I found there a high degree of emancipation, I was suitably reminded of the ambiguity of the realm of the possible when I also came to my breaking point there. Perhaps there are latent perils in the deliberate attempt to unmap your life, or trade it. Certainly the contrast between my condition when I first arrived in California, and the state I was in when I last left it, would offer some sort of lesson to anyone with a taste for paradigm.

My general point is that I found myself then, as I find myself

now. in sympathy with a whole range of attitudes to be found in contemporary, and not so contemporary, American fiction. But I cannot identify with them completely. This ambivalence clearly has its effect when I am trying to write about American fiction, so I will try to indicate-demonstrate perhaps is the better word-the kind of disconnected thoughts that it can provoke. I write of a sense of an over-mapped reality. The echo I find to this in recent American fiction is a deep suspicion of 'pattern', 'system', any hint of interior or exterior programming. If I just think of examples from recent reading I can recall the narrator of a Robert Coover story speaking of lives poisoned by pattern"; or ofthe narrator of a Ronald Sukenick story quoting one of his students as saying "Destroying the systems destroys the chaos." In a related vein Kurt Vonnegut writes in his latest novel: "I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out ofproportion with life as it really is outside my head. Which comes as a characteristically engaging echo to, say, William Burroughs' more desperate attempts to disburden himself of all that has been beamed into his mind. Burroughs wants to wipe the tape clean: cf.-make my head empty. The nostalgia is no longer for the mud, but for the tabula rasa. Vonnegut is amiable and speaks of "junk"; Burroughs is scatological (among other things) and speaks of everything conventionally considered unspeakable. Both participate in a widespread American feeling that what is fed into the consciousness in America is waste. Not only among novelists but critics too. Richard Poirier, for example, has given a very interesting reading of a lot of modern literature as being written in an awareness of literature itself being a form of waste. Perhaps Thoreau's bonfire is somewhere behind all this, but the feeling is now a more inclusive one. Consciousness, consciousness conditioned by society that is (and what is the

alternative?), is a litter basket, an ash heap, a wasteland, a cesspool. The metaphors may vary with the virulence of the disgust and nausea, but they are all from the same landscape. If America is running down-as so many entropy-obsessed American writers seem to sense-then it is also running down the minds it runs. That seems to be the feeling. So we find a literature aimed at producing a post-literary silence (silence after long speech is one order of the day), books which will somehow un-book the atmosphere, forms which will de-form themselves and their readers, fictions which will decontaminate psychic and perhaps social spaces.

My feelings about all this are mixed. I don't think all the thinking in this area is very clear, and some distinctions could profitably be made. For instance, is all conditioning equally undesirable? Yes, say some American voices, it is conditioning per se which is to be fought. But is there not a difference between a set of words trying to programme you to buy a product, and a more complex set of words urging you to resist conditioning? (I recognise that the debasement of language can be very extreme in common American usage, and this necessarily provokes a militant reaction.) The unexamined life may or may not be worth living; but the unconditioned life does not exist. So survival must depend on discriminating among different kinds of conditioning, differently motivated, with differing effects. Isabel Archer thought she was living an unconditioned life, so she was blind to the malign intentionalities in the air around her ('intention' is a key word in the book). But it would surely be disablingly paranoid to consider all intentionalities as equally menacing to the poor little self. I have the sense that while no set of words which we incorporate is wholly innocent, completely neutral, they are not all equally tyrannous, imperialistic, fascistic (language as a corrupt political system is more of a French idea), nor are all equally wasteproducts, shoals of foul detritus (there is a notably hygienic tone, a hint of complaints about bad plumbing, in some of the American attacks on linguistic entities). To read some contem-

porary writers you would think that to be alive in America today is by definition to have a head full of shit. But what organ of self-reflexion or self-transcending contemplation passes such an adverse metaphorical judgment? How come all contemporary American writing isn't shit writing? Some English critics would be happy to pass such ajudgment, but clearly that would be to ignore some of the most exciting fiction being written anywhere today. The cesspool is full of gems. There is no need to labour the point. Certainly there is a detectable amount of fiction being written which demonstrates a built-in awareness of its own ephemerality: the self-trashing book is with us. And it does pose problems for the critic as to how to write about it. My reaction is that there is waste and waste; or rather, I regard such books as examples of strategic pseudowaste aimed at combating the other kind of waste. Just as there is a language that cleans the mind as well as one that clutters it. And, I would want to add, cleans it without emptying it. Fiction can repattern the mind without depatterning it.

I think that this literature of silence and waste-Operation Unjunk-is closely allied to another type of recent American literature which interests me, and that is literature as play. Of course novelists have long realised that the forms of fiction are not limited by whatever we experience as the forms of life. But it is especially in America in recent years that novelists have insisted that the form of fiction may operate quite independently of any notional relationship to any other forms. I wrote something about this some time ago, and recently I found this in a story by Ronald Sukenick called "The Death of the Novel" (and it is pleasant to see the cliche fictionalised, preferably prior to disposal). The narrator of the story writes: "What we need is not Great Works but playful ones in whose sense of creative joy everyone can join. And what characterizes play? Freedom, spontaneity, pleasure. This is as distinguished from games, games are formularized play we have to invent games-and then discard them and invent more. This

then is the beginning of our literary re-education. A story is a game someone has played so you can play it too and, having learned how to play it, throw it away." There we are. Fiction is a game and a disposable object. I remembered that I had seen a piece by Sukenick on "The New Tradition" in fiction, a tradition from Sterne to Barth, etc., which quite frankly did not strike me as all that new. This is not a reproach levelled at Mr. Sukenick so much as another indication of the problems attendant on writing about fiction now. Sukenick offered his extension of this tradition in what I take to be an appropriately playful manner. "This new thing is a style that we have come to call the Bossa Nova, an elaboration of the new tradition. Needless to say, the Bossa Nova has no plot, no story, no character, no chronological sequence, no verisimilitude, no imitation, no allegory, no symbolism, no subject matter, no 'meaning.' It resists interpretation The Bossa Nova is nonrepresentational-it represents itself. Its main qualities are abstraction, improvisation and opacity." To my mind improvisation depends on rehearsal, and words are opaque only as ink not as signs, but 1 would not try to quarrel with the spirit of the piece. The overstatements in it are merry enough, and he himself refers to Bossa Nova as a "hopeful fabrication". But it does pose another potential problem for our contemporary critic. How would he write about Bossa Nova, or is part of its aim precisely to render the critic redundant? And if he finds a way of writing about Bossa Nova, how will he approach such writers as Boll, Beckett, Grass, Marquez, Tournier (I am just picking names from my own recent reading), who can all "play" in their different ways but who are not, to my mind, Bossa Nova? Can there be any satisfactory criteria to apply to the novel as waste and/or play? And are such novels not in danger of becoming as formulaic as the rigidities they seek to undermine, the patterns they wish to escape from? These are not rhetorical questions, but 1 don't pretend to have assured answers. There is very little assurance for the critic of contemporary fiction.

One thing did occur to me in reading Sukenick's piece. He is pointing to the kind of novel which seems to be visibly trying to climb out of literature altogether. Inasmuch as the novel as a genre is closely connected with the whole empirical tradition, and the anti- Platonic identification of Reality and materiality, then an immersion in traditional fictional forms could be related to an addiction to materiality. Which can in turn shade into materialism, as we understand the term. Thus, I think the spectacle of some American novels trying in a variety of ways to disengage themselves from the genre of the novel might have less to do with Laurence Sterne and more to do with a revolt against materialism, a gesture of extrication from a thing-struck society, a way of being in the world, or rather not-being in the world, rather than a way of describing it. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that the idea of "language as gesture" and the sense of literature as a "performance" have originated with American critics. *

The emphasis on fluidity, provisional forms, the liberating displacement of given orderings I found and still find exhilarating-for me at least it serves as a healthy antidote to a tendency to fixity and acceptance nourished by certain tendencies in an English upbringing. There is, admittedly, the possibility that such fiction may collapse into a private anarchy of a low order of interest. All play and no work makes Jack a dull boy. And there is another danger among the "waste" writers: giving the impression of being too much at home on "terminal beach" (Ballard's phrase), or of being dreck-happy. But every mode has its attendant risks. Fortunately there is room for many different kinds of novel writing. Though having written that, I am bound to recall that, having defended what might be termed fictional pluralism in writing about a large variety of American writers, I was attacked by British critics for undiscriminating catholicity and various other moral failures of critical character. I can see that there is a point in choosing to *The notion of the "performative utterance" is not, of course, new to British philosophy; see J. L. Austin's How To Do Things with Words. But I have little sense ofits penetrating British literary criticism.

concentrate on certain kinds of fiction rather than others. Ihab Hassan, for instance, wrote well on "radical innocence", and later on the literature of silence, by selecting certain writers to concentrate on. Similarly Robert Scholes espoused "fabulation" and wrote persuasively about his chosen fabulators. William Gass is particularly adroit at considering meta-fictions. And so on. Let us imagine that, in a moment of dizzying synthesis, a critic was able to speak on behalf of a school of silent meta-fictional fables, what would he say about-well, Joyce Carol Oates? Here is a comment I culled from a book review she wrote praising Sol Yurick: "Any modestly gifted writer can venture into 'surrealism.' Few indeed can handle the densities and outrageous paradoxes of 'real' life. The straightforward sections of 'The Bag' and 'Fertig,' and the unfantasized horrors of this collection's realistic stories, have a power to move us, urgently and deeply, that cannot be matched by any of the author's superficially sophisticated contemporaries. And one might argue, ultimately, that ordinary life in our great modern cities is already fantastic enough." Who needs Bossa Nova if you've got New York? Well, it could be argued that the people in New York might need it. But the point is that here is a contemporary American writer willing to invoke comparatively traditional criteria of realism and to suggest that surrealism can simply be a mannerism a writer adopts for the occasion. I noticed recently that Joyce Carol Oates was also ready to express some reservations about N abokov (rare enough among American writers). The main point of her reservations, as I read them, was that "Nabokov empties the world of everything except Nabokov." Here, then, is a contemporary American novelist who wants to de-subjectivise, and un-fantasize the novel. Not a world elsewhere but the world out there. Real houses with real bruises in them. AntiBossa Nova. And she is very popular.

This is just to give one example of the kind of difficulty a critic of contemporary fiction may find himself facing. It's not just that you cannot talk about, say, Margaret Drabble and

James Purdy in the same language. You can't even use the same terms to discuss Joyce Carol Oates and, say, Donald Barthelme. Writers are expected to have strong preferences and dislikes, and if Saul Bellow dislikes the work of William Burroughs, or Joyce Carol Oates deprecates the superficiality of certain surrealists, fair enough. They are more interested in their own kind of writing. But does a critic have to commit himself to anyone currently operating mode of fiction? My own view is that he does not. The forms of fiction are constantly mutating, if not evolving, and it would be counter to what I have learned from my American experience to attempt to substitute a new orthodoxy for an old one. Fiction comes to us as a product-we have had ample reminders of the materiality of the book-but we experience it as a process. In reading a novel we do not so much read about a new world, as "novelize" our sense of aspects of the given world-which includes, to be pedantic, simply everything. In this connection, I don't think the critic need struggle with eroding and dissolving categories, trying to decide what is avant garde, modern, post-modern, and so on. Nor, because he finds himself confronted with so many different styles, does he need to declare that we are now living in an age of no-style, as some have done. A critic of contemporary fiction, it seems to me, has to confront new novels unprotected by established categories. Of course he will be aware of such categories but he should let the novel change the category rather than use the category to hold the novel down. One thing a critic can do is to demonstrate how a particular novel can change our way of talking about fiction, provoke us to new terms and thus help to revivify critical discourse. A critic should surely retain a sense that there are any number of ways in which fictions can rerealize the world, which is always there and always to be discovered. Novelists everywhere now seem to have more of a sense that language is not outside reality, describing it; but inside it, a changing heuristic activity. Critics should share that sense. In my experience you can respond to a whole variety of

novels, not by assessing what they seem to describe, but by trying to register what they do. This may leave you without an all-embracing theory, or the conveniences of a creed, but to me that's the name of the game. In an interview recently, Robert Coover spoke of "undogmatizing" accepted metaphors and entrenched mythic material, and indeed he does it with real imagination. By the same token, the contemporary critic should undogmatize criticism in the act of writing it. Dogmatists disagree.

At this point I might mention one or two other aspects of the difficulty of being a critic of contemporary literature. I would like to start by saying how much I dislike the appellation "critic"; no matter what one says, the very word carries pejorative connotations, with Dryden's image of the pygmy lopping a giant always somewhere in the background. I wish there was a word more like "appreciator" since I see my task as not primarily one of evaluation-hence certain attacks on my work by some English critics-but of helping to maintain a discourse. Judgment, like the grace of God, comes in many forms, and the least interesting one seems to me a series of haughty verdicts inscribed on the tablets brought down from Mount Criticism. But, something else. We hear much, no doubt rightly, ofthe travails, torments, and agonies ofcreation. Metaphors of difficult births are commonplace when authors discuss the "delivery" of their product. But the critic is not, by contrast, a comfortable parasite, waiting to do a passionless autopsy on the latest book put before him. When [ set out to try to understand the work of some twenty-five recent American novelists, I did not find myself engaged in a relaxing holiday pursuit. On the contrary, by trying to project myself into all their various fictional undertakings, I found I was taxing myself immoderately-with a physical/mental cost [ have previously alluded to. I have no regrets about this; I felt a personal enrichment of consciousness which I would not be without, whatever the price. And there is another thing. One tends to forget that as a "critic" of contemporary literature,

one is likely to meet the authors whose works one has discussed. This may seem like a very marginal occupational hazard but it is not always so pleasant. For instance: I was, some years ago, asked to write a short book on Saul Bellowthe first, as it happened, to be written on him. For the record, he was extremely hospitable while I was writing the book, and 1 did in fact stay with him and enjoyed his entertainment as well as his incomparable conversation. But when 1 published the book-a modest enough undertaking, in all conscience-it obviously offended him. 1 would not begin to defend it as a book of important insights into his work, though I will say that it was written with respect and appreciation. But he certainly didn't like it. One of his comments was that 1 had made him sound more like a cheese, while he felt like an orange. Unabrasive enough, and since I happen to prefer cheese to oranges, the blow was necessarily a glancing one. But later on, at a party in Evanston, a well-meaning man drew Saul Bellow and myselftogether and asked if we knew each other. "I know everything about him, but he doesn't know a thing about me," said Bellow quickly. And walked away. Well, OK. Obviously I had not pleased Bellow by what 1 had written about him (I think it was something to do with the fact that I had pointed out that while he himself had said that "civilization depends on dialogue" his own work showed an inability, or disinclination, to move beyond monologue, which annoyed him, though in general my book was, if anything, fulsome in praise of his work). 1 could add some other Bellow stories to that one. It isn't very serious. But it also isn't exactly pleasant to lose a possible friend, or at least acquaintance, in that way. Also, I suppose I would have liked a bit of recognition that 1 had spent a year trying to do justice to his work and help extend his audience. It doesn't always work out like that, of course. I remember that by an entirely unanticipated coincidence I met John Updike at a dinner party just a couple of days after my review of Couples had appeared, a review containing some distinct reservations. But when we met, an imperturbable good

humour radiated from him-as if it might imply. yes I'm a very talented, successful, good-looking WASP and I know it and I'm grateful and I certainly don't mind an ephemeral nonmalicious if cool review of one of my innumerable books We soon established that he, St. Edward the Martyr, and I all had the same birthday. It was that sort of conversation. And I can recall many other distinctly pleasant encounters. For instance, an evening with Richard Brautigan in London just after I had reviewed his work in the Times. He arrived late, explaining that he had been waiting on a street while some thirty-five thousand full taxis had passed him by. and he was soon developing a fantasy of standing on that street for ever while an eternity of taxis sped past him Asked his impression of England, I remember he embarked on a complex image of a pigeon made ofjello which was slowly melting, but I lost him at that point. The evening ended, in suitably surreal circumstances, at the Savoy Hotel. However, I don't wish to seem to be indulging in mere anecdotage. It is the general point I think it is worth bringing forward-simply that one's relationship to a living writer is not necessarily restricted to one's reconstruction of his or her text. Henry James isn't going to care one way or another what I might say about his late style, but I can think of a large number of contemporary writers whom I now know as persons, not names on a title page. And this, I think, does introduce a problematical aspect into writing contemporary criticism. It is certainly true that I would in some cases decline to write a review of a book I didn't like by someone that I did like, on the very simple grounds that I will sacrifice a review for a relationship, but not the other way round. If this is an abdication of my role as a critic of contemporary fiction, maintaining standards (which? whose?) at whatever cost-well, so be it. All this is not a bid for pityspare a thought for the poor critic-but simply a reminder that there are a number of more or less subtle risks in writing about living authors which do not arise when you address yourself to the works of the dead. (To end this point on a happier note, I

might add that I have received entirely unsolicited letters from some American writers who expressed gratitude at being sympathetically understood, etc. But the self-congratulation stops here.)

It used to be that you could discriminate between the English and American novel by saying that the former dealt with manin-society. and the latter concentrated on man-alone. The differences resist such easy formularisation today. Let me juxtapose two passages from recent reading.

But novelists write for countless different reasons only one same reason is shared by all of us: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. That is why we cannot plan a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator The novelist is still a god, since he creates what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority.

And this:

And has not the world become, for many novelists, a place not only vacant of gods, but also empty of a generously regular and peacefully abiding nature on which the novelist might, in large, rely, so to concentrate on cutting a rme and sculptured line through a large mass taken for granted so that, with all these forms of vacantness about him, he has felt the need to reconstitute, entire, his world? Then, too, the novelist now better understands his medium; he is ceasing to pretend that his business is to render the world; he knows, more often now, that his business is to make one, and to make one from the only medium of which he is a master-language.

I suppose it is not too difficult to decide that the first is from an English novelist (John Fowles) and the second from an American (William Gass). It is noticeable, for instance, that the loss of a reliable "mass" gives the American novelist complete linguistic freedom whereas the English writer wants to set up an area in which he can bestow freedom on his creations. Gass points to the opportunities of vacancy; Fowles points to the obligations of empire (not for nothing is the variously transformed figure of Prospero central to his work). Still, the vocabulary of the two novelists is flowing together. and in some areas the fictions of both countries seem to draw closer as well. Iris Murdoch is one of Mr. Scholes' fabulators: Joyce Carol Oates is not. My point here is that any critic seeking to write about contemporary fiction must to some extent de-

nationalise himself. Not totally-even if that was possible-for each mind carries the distinctive coloration, the grain, of the locales that have nourished and nurtured it, and often it is this sense of coming out of one or more locales which gives someones writing its peculiar value and strength. We obviously don't want a mass of supermarket minds for critics, or for anything else. On the other hand, we don't want critical minds like the oldest and quaintest village store. (Some years ago it seemed that the New York Review regularly employed conservative English critics to review contemporary American fiction, with predictable and largely pointless results.) On the one hand, one doesn't want to become a pseudo-American; on the other hand, one must resist the temptation to play the stage Englishman (a role not always discouraged in America). Obviously, somewhere around here the whole question of identity and ego-strength arises. It is often those who experience identity-diffusion or ontological insecurity (one term from each side of the Atlantic) when abroad who assert their national mentality most assertively. And reading foreign fiction is a mental way of going abroad. Given a certain amount of stable sense of self, it is possible to transcend national modes of thinking without abandoning them completely. It is not a question of willed mental expatriation or repatriation. Rather the need is to re-experience oneself in a new place, namely the changing land of fiction where one can, and should, take out dual, multiple citizenship.

Having mentioned English contemporary fiction, I should like to mention that prejudice I alluded to earlier in this essay. The undeniable fact is that for years I cultivated a deliberate prejudice against contemporary English fiction (with the exception of William Golding-he was my token English novelist). I was at college when the first Kingsley Amis novels started to come out, and while everyone else was rolling around the cloisters, I kept my distance. There were various reasons for this, but they included an instinctive unwillingness to align

myself with the very assertive (and honest) provinciality which the novels celebrated. Obviously, Amis awakened a lot of fellow-feeling in his direct attacks on anything that was pretentious, phoney, or simply' 'bum" in contemporary England (and elsewhere). And no doubt about it, he wrote some very amusing books from this point of view. But there seemed to be something defensive about this sort of no-nonsense Englishness, the admirable contempt for the false masking at times a less desirable fear of the new. More than "bum" was being thrown out with the bath-water. When I felt (or indeed feel) this to be the case I begin to experience a twinge of that timehonoured American sensation of being a citizen of somewhereelse. There is a clear example of what I mean in Amis' novel I Like it Here, in which a good deal of ridicule is levelled at Henry James, or Jamesian-type writing. The hero is Fielding, as becomes clear when the protagonist visits his grave. "Bowen thought about Fielding. Perhaps it was worth dying in your forties if two hundred years later you were the only noncontemporary novelist who could be read with unaffected and whole-hearted interest, the only one who never had to be apologized for or excused on grounds of changing taste. And how enviable to live in the world of his novels, where duty was plain, evil arose out of malevolence and a starving wayfarer could be invited indoors without hesitation and without fear. Did that make for a simplified world? Perhaps, but that hardly mattered beside the existence of a moral seriousness that could be made apparent without evangelical puffing and blowing." Fairly said. But a few stops further down that road and you could arrive at the kind of unadventurous philistinism which I wanted to avoid. I wanted Fielding, but I wanted James as well. I like it here too, as it happens; but I like it there as well. To read only the English novel-the English English novelwould be to take up permanent residence in the too familiar suburbs of the mind. Claustrophobic. In part to escape such a danger, I committed myself to an attempt to understand contemporary American fiction in all its manifestations. To do

this, I now see that I deliberately, if unconsciously, undervalued contemporary English fiction (and perhaps over-valued the American works I was studying). But I think that some such act of over-commitment is one strategy for breaking out of fixed habits of reading and thinking. In conversation with an avowedly conservative colleague, we agreed on the rough formulation that my danger was of drowning in the works I studied, his was a refusal to get his feet wet. He thinks I open the shutters too wide; I sense he keeps them too closed.

In many ways, all that I have written is a prevarication, an evasion. I was invited, among other things, to consider how one should approach contemporary "living" fiction, and by way of an answer I have preferred to demonstrate a few of the problems involved. The majority of critics and scholars deal with literature which, if it hasn't been canonized, has at least been categorized. This is perhaps as it should be. But I believe there is a need for some critics to expose themselves to contemporary fictions, not with a view to speedy classification with a series of wary taxonomic gestures, but with a view to exploring what such fictions are doing, what energy they release, what possible mutations of self or psyche they bespeak, what new forms and freedoms they enact or reach for. What, in a word, they convey of waste and wonder. To this end, let the critic abandon pre-ordained criteria of what fiction is or ought to be. I think there is a case for the critic of contemporary fiction being a sort of bricoleur. He should allow the individual work to suggest the group of terms and concepts which will be most fruitful in discussing it. When a critic moves his words up to the words of a novel, I don't think the initial intention should be to "place" it, but to see what it releases; the critic's words are like a testing area or arena in which the writer's words display some of their potential. Potential for what? Potential for arousing interest. Dullness is the enemy. If nothing else, the critic's words form some kind of an answer to a novel, transforming monologue into dialogue. Inevitably, 105

some people will accuse you of merely trying to be with-it; the answer to that is the virtues of being studiously without-it are not clear. To the more general complaint that all this is to capitulate to the work, I would reply that I think such capit­ ulations are salutary. You do not lose your self or abandon your integrity ifyou allow a book to rewrite your mind for a short time. Or if you do, then your self and integrity were perilously based. In reading fiction, you only drown if you can't swim.

Of course there are those who think that as an aesthetic exercise the novel is moribund. But this often means only that such people have fallen prey to their own metaphors of decay, decline, termination, whatever. When Ortega chose the metaphors of quarry and mine to illustrate what he took to be the position of the novel, his verdict on that position was inevitable, since quarries and mines are exhaustible. Though even he wanted to leave open the possibility of great things still to be done within the novel form, as in the following (and notice how he moves from orchards to mines-it might be revealing to do a topographical study of various critics' discourses): "This is one of the reasons why I believe that the novel is one of the few fields that may still yield illustrious fruits, more exquisite ones perhaps than were ever garnered in previous harvests. As a routine production, as an exploitable mine, the novel may be finished. The large veins, accessible to any diligent hand, are worked out. What remains are hidden deposits and perilous ventures into the depths where, perchance, the most precious crystals grow." "Production" is a key word there; Ortega is thinking of the novel as a product needing particular raw materials. Rules of scarcity, both of quality and quantity, operate here as in the realm of other products. But if instead of deposits and crystals we think more in terms of gestures and performances, it is possible to feel that the novel has an indefinite future. Not as this or that kind of fiction. (Any Bossa Nova can soon seem like Bossa Viejo.) But as a symbolic space in which impossible objects may be produced for our joy

and amazement. I take the phrase, deliberately, from an English novel by Nicholas Mosley (I record in passing that it was an American novelist who drew his work to my attention). The novel is called Impossible Object and has this in its closing page, or coda:

I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality.

The full implications of that last sentence tantalise but elude me. But the idea of cutting out one dimension to get at a fourth seems to me arrestingly succinct. In that fourth dimension things are possible which are thought to be impossible in three, hence the strange freedoms in the curious depths of printed fictions. The novel becomes an impossible object, figuring oddly in our familiar living spaces. But can we be sure just what is possible and impossible in life, or in fiction? Failing such undesirable certainty, we should, I think, be glad to encounter the impossible objects of contemporary fiction as they come to us, countering our tendency to get set in unitary readings of reality. Contrary to what some critics say, we have nothing to lose but our psychological insularity.

I think that the best stance to adopt towards contemporary fiction is an adaptable eclecticism. There is no one orthodox established critical tradition for dealing with the kind of fiction coming out of America, but does that matter? Isn't it even perhaps a good thing? One of the nicest comments about my book City of Words was made by an American professor who said it was like reading an account by an explorer of hitherto uncharted areas. Why not see contemporary criticism as an act of exploration (and you never know quite what kind of equipment you're going to need until you're actually in the territory), rather than a rehearsal of pieties? I have been priggish enough in my time, and used phrases like "slack catholicity" about critics who had time for more writers than I did. But to those

who would now regard my position as betokening a collapse into inconsistency. or an assumed and cultivated interest in the contemporary for its own fashionable sake, I would say that they are the losers, whose devotion to certain established writers of the past is suspect if it is based on a refusal or inability to open themselves to the literature which is being written now. Every classic writer was once a struggling contemporary. There is so much good, interesting, inventive fiction coming out of America today that I think it would be both a loss, and a rather sterile withholding, to ignore it for whatever reasons-fear of the new. disinclination to engage with the ephemeral, provincial bias, or sheer inability to read the evolving rhetorical modes of contemporary fiction (and you can find such attitudes as easily in Paris as in Cambridge). Borges is modest enough in one poem to express the desire that he may be remembered for the books he read rather than the ones he wrote. I don't suppose the race will be able to manage that for him, but his point is surely, in part, that good readers are as important as good writers. We lose-you could say "kill"-so much by simply not reading it, that it is possible to see the act of reading as a kind of bestowing of life, a contributive rather than passive act. I want to be a good reader; and I want to try to find the most appropriate words, drawn from whatever disciplines and discourses, to recreate my readings into texts. I regard myself as an explorer, and as I set out into yet more new fictional territories, I will--eclectically- borrow a line from the English poet Ted Hughes, and say to myself, "Very queer but I'll go on looking."

Notes on writing a novel JOHN HAWKES

A scholarly, gifted, deeply good-natured friend once remarked that "Notes on Writing a Novel" is a deplorably condescending title. And I think he's right.

At that moment, as one more brief illumination gave way to typical frustration, I thought of a metaphor with which I'd ended a talk on fiction ten years ago at Boston College, when I said that "for me, the writer of fiction should always serve as his own angleworm, and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out ofthe darkness, the better."

But when I proposed "The Writer as Angleworm" as an alternative, my friend pointed out that preciousness is worse than condescension.

"Notes on Writing a Novel" is condescending because of its deceptive simplicity. In fact it represents everything that I deplore in any discussion of fiction, since it suggests that the writing of fiction is really a very off-hand matter; that we all do it, all the time, between various chores; but worst of all, that the writing of fiction is an orderly process. The implication is This piece appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Brown Alumni Monthly.

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that if you learn the tools of the trade you'll be able to build the house, which may be true enough for certain carpenters but not, it seems to me, for writers and artists. That is, the learning of the craft does not necessarily result in authentic art or writing. (Here I ought to say that if a student used that homely "house-building" metaphor, I'd be outraged, and rightly so. But we are all our own worst betrayers.)

The other idea--of the writer serving as his own angleworm and fishing himself out of the darkness-raises the problem of the relationship between the writer and his fiction, and implies that fiction is simply about the writer or that the fiction writer can only write what he "knows," which is another popular misconception about the dazzling and painful process of writing. On the one hand there's the thoughtless notion that the finished novel is simply a book at best produced by some longforgotten machine instead of by a living or once living person. And on the other hand there's the equally misleading notion that the ultimate key to the novel lies in the life of the writer, which is untrue.

At any rate it's the "dazzling and painful process" that I'm trying in one way or another to expose.

My novel Second Skin was written in eight swift magnificent months in 1962-63, when my wife and children and I were living in the natural lushness and clarity of an island in the Caribbean. But this novel actually had its genesis in the distant past of my childhood, was related to other fiction I'd written by that time, appeared to depend on a few strange moments when literal event and imagined event coincided, and underwent a fairly extensive metamorphosis several years before we lived on our splendid island. So for me Second Skin lends itself in special ways to the discussion of the fiction process.

There are other more specific reasons why I -like talking about Second Skin and why I've tried (unsuccessfully) more than once before to reconstruct its beginnings, and why I'll no doubt continue in the future to try (unsuccessfully) to convey

how this novel was written. Second Skin was the first novel I knew I wanted to write entirely in the first person; it was a novel I finally managed to write with genuine ease and considerable pleasure; it was the first novel in which I was explicitly attempting to write comic fiction. (I might add that I'm no longer interested in writing comic novels, that I'm wary now of the "safety" inherent in the comic form, that from now on I want to come still closer to terror, which I think I'm doing in the short novel I'm trying to write at the moment.) Furthermore, Second Skin does, as I say, have some of its sources in actuality. But whereas much of my earlier fiction was concerned with what Albert J. Guerard has called' 'landscapes of sexless apathy" (and it was in Albert Guerard's class at Harvard that I wrote my first two short novels), Second Skin reveals for the first time in my work a kind of sexual affirmation, since it's told by a 59-year-old ex-Navy lieutenant, juniorgrade, who is an artificial inseminator of cows on a tropical island, and since the novel ends with the birth of a black childall ofwhich I still find pleasurable, despite my longings for pure terror.

In brief, Second Skin is about the futile efforts of its narrator, who is known variously as Skipper or Papa Cue Ball, to prevent the suicide of his only daughter Cassandra. Skipper tells his "naked history," as he calls it, while living in idyllic timelessness on a floating tropical island with his Second World War mess boy, Sonny. As he waits for the birth of Catalina Kate's child, who may have been fathered both by Sonny and by Skipper, and as he lyrically impregnates great Brahmin cows or swims in the clear limpid midnight sea, Skipper recalls how he attempted but failed to save the life of Cassandra who, on a small cold island off the New England coast, finally jumped to her death from an abandoned lighthouse. The juxtaposition of the two islands, the juxtaposition of Cassandra's death and the eventual birth of Catalina Kate's black child-these are the essential opposites ofSecond Skin.

As I say, this novel is certainly not autobiographical. I

myself have only seen the unhappily banal process of artificial insemination. And the true sources of fiction-interesting fiction-no doubt lie buried in some inaccessible depth of the psyche. And yet the two islands in Second Skin share obvious similarities with two quite real islands, while many images and the deepest thematic preoccupations of this novel do have their shadowy counterparts in memory.

Here, then, is something of the personal chronology that lies behind Second Skin. When I was a thin, horseback-riding, asthmatic child of about eight years old, we were living in a small old-fashioned Connecticut village on the edge of Long Island Sound. And one of my earliest and strongest recollections is of a girl, a first cousin, who now for me is only mytil but whom I loved as a child.

When I was about 17, I happened by accident to enter a room in which a relative of mine was threatening to commit suicide. Or perhaps this moment was merely a dream.

When [ was 22, Sophie and I were married at the end of one summer that was all the more beautiful because we lived it in the brilliant barrenness of Montana. It was there in Montana, while waiting with fierce eagerness and fierce anxiety for the moment of marriage, that I first turned to fiction and wrote about half of my first short novel, Charivari, a highly surrealistic vision of a middle-aged couple, Henry and Emily Van, who are embarking on marriage with all the fear and innocence of youth. Emily's father is a general, Henry's a parson. The projections and transformations are obvious, though I was fairly unaware ofthem at the time.

When I was 24 and finishing my first novel, The Cannibal, in Albert Guerard's course, and also finishing my last two years at Harvard (I was always a poor student and had lost several semesters thanks to the war), Sophie and I became friends with a younger student, an enormous life-filled humorous artistic person whom we loved until his death, and still do.

When [ was about 30, I began to teach at Harvard, where

Sophie and I became friends with Edwin Honig-who helped to allay those earliest terrors of teaching, who gave us his poetry, who talked even then of an island off the New England coast where he had spent one perfect isolated year writing poetry.

The next year Edwin Honig came to Brown. The year after, I too came to Brown. The following spring Sophie and I read a poem of Edwin Honig's called "Island Storm." And that was the summer we managed to spend on the island of Edwin's poem, where we ate blueberry pancakes while watching smaller off-shore islands emerge out of the dawn, and where I began to try to write a novel which-abortive, unfinishedbecame the written genesis ofSecond Skin.

Two years later, in the spring, our life-filled friend from Harvard committed suicide. That fall Sophie and our by now four young children and I went to our coral-ringed island in the Caribbean. There at last I had Second Skin firmly in mind and wrote it.

From this brief personal chronology, I would infer so far that if we're lucky our friends are poets, while events of the imagination precede and sometimes even outdo the events of life itself. I say this because my life owes much to poets and because in the case of the New England island, at least, I experienced some version of it as a child, imagined a truer version of it as a young man writing Charivari, glimpsed in the real island the one I had already written about, found this island most real in Edwin Honig's poem, then tried to create it one last time from the vantage point of its opposite-which was a serene and spice-scented island in the tropics.

By now it's obvious that I'm obsessed among other things with the sea and with islands, and whereas Donne says that "no man is an island," I myself believe that we're all islandsinaccessible, drifting apart, thirsting to be explored, magical.

I remember very little of my marvelous mythical cousin. She was tall, she was beautiful, she was energetic, no doubt she was to me another version of my own mother. But in light of 113

the imagination, at least, and incestuous implications aside, surely she must have been my first love.

1 can't remember anything about my cousin and me-the slender invisible girl and the skinny child-except that we walked. Again and again I see the two of us walking, merely walking, and always down the same empty lane in the twilight toward the water and, most important, into a great abandoned half-built house on the very edge of that gray darkening ocean. I remember longing in some vague way for the love of my cousin. Now it seems to me that she must have spent all of her adolescence taking me on exactly the same thrilling but also dreadful walk at the end of each of the days of my childhood. And what kind of lovely and lonely adolescent girl would want to spend her afternoons taking her little cousin into the empty rooms of a monstrous castle-like hull of a house that was built so close to the sea and so imperfectly, so incompletely, that the ocean would suddenly roar up inside the unfinished room where we stood holding hands, great waves smashing onto the black rocks actually visible below us at the edge of the unfinished floor, and then receding and leaving spumes of foam lying around our wet shoes? The wind and the sea used to roar through that hopeless house, and I would be terrified and more in love with my cousin than ever.

I don't know what kind of person she was. She was probably only an ordinary young girl helping her aunt by occasionally taking her aunt's little boy on a walk. But that same girl led me happily into the terrors of a microcosmic New England, into the world of dead houses with beams like great bones, and toward the ocean that lies vast and ominous at the end of a country road. She embodied what I've feared and yearned for ever since, and the abandoned house she used to take me to is clearly the source of three related visions or images that have obsessed me as long as I can recall: the abandoned lighthouse, the abandoned ocean liner leaning on its side in low tide far from shore, and the New England fishing village on an island. The island fishing village is something I've long pursued,

then, in the imagination, in fiction, and finally in actuality. And in various forms it appears in Charivari, "The Nearest Cemetery" (the fragment preliminary to Second Skin and written on the island where Edwin Honig lived), and lastly in Second Skin. The abandoned lighthouse is central to Cassandra's death in Second Skin. But my vision of the ocean liner hasn't appeared as such in my fiction, and still remains what it's always been: a personal waking dream in which I stand alone at the edge of a straight empty shore at low tide and gaze with both fear and longing at an enormous black derelict or damaged ocean liner that looms in awful silence in knee-deep water about a mile from shore. A few lifeboats hang halfway down the side of the ship from their davits; on the ship there is no movement, only the black immensity and the smokeless funnels and the occasional small flash of some piece of metal on the deck or in the rigging. And then I am compelled to walk slowly but deliberately into the muddy shallow water and toward the ship.

In this waking dream I know that I am going to have to walk the entire distance from shore to the listing ship. I know that I am going to climb somehow to the tilted deck ofthe abandoned ship. I know that I must discover its vast world, must pry open some metal door rusted half ajar and enter the ship until I discover what it contains--either its treasure, if childhood hopes prevail, or its emptiness, its floating corpses.

The vision, no matter how personal, is one of potential and desolation. It suggests the undiminishing power of childhood experience, it defines what I'm most interested in writing about, it becomes suddenly literal in Second Skin when Skipper happens to see a long dark ship drifting by on the horizon and finds himselffilled with bothjoy and dread.

Charivari, from which we get our word "shivaree" (the comic and vulgar rites for harassing newlyweds), is about marriage. In this youthful short novel (which is to say that it's whimsical, surrealistic, clumsy, indulgent, often poetic in quite 115

the wrong way), Henry and Emily Van are, as I've said, a strange and lonely pair of middle-aged people newly married. At the hands of each other, and especially at the hands of their aged parents, they undergo a kind of double suffering-of the indignities of middle-age and of the vulnerabilities of youth. Whether Charivari was at the time an accurate self-portrait thinly veiled in wild distortion and surging prose (since at the time of our marriage I thought of myself as dourly old), or whether it was instead a kind of terrifying glimpse into the future (some of my friends still consider me deplorably adolescent), nonetheless even Charivari evokes its share of universal burdens of desire and anxiety framed in the rituals and conditions of married life.

One of Henry Van's worst fears is the possible loss ofEmily, and one section of Charivari is devoted to the moment when Henry's fears come true and Emily disappears. In a violent storm and in a small archaic fishing village, Henry does catch a sudden dream-like glimpse of the missing Emily, only to lose her.

Tbe wind sbot down tbe main street, oscillating, sbimmering from side to side, pulling witb its giant tail armfuls of driving rain from tbe doldrums; it broke off in tangents to be drawn into a cbimney Due, to swirl madly, trapped in a dead end, or to Dy swiftly and vertically up tbe crevice between two bouses, to be spent in tbe still aimless air high above. Tbe main blow beat its way down tbe narrow street, tearing leaves from trees and rattHng windows, smasbed between two warebouses and jumped out to sea, tearing frantically at tbe waves. The rain was almost impenetrable; it beat Hke nail beads on the rotting wood, and covered cobblestones witb a running slime.

Henry lost his nerve. Pummeled be stood beaving to and fro, neundering, napping wildly, in tbe middle of tbe street before ber bouse. His bands sbifted and beat tbe air, tbrusting outward to c1utcb at lost supports, to maintain a precarious balance; be hung by the good graces of tbe wind. He laugbed and felt himself sboving off at last, but he simply couldn't go to tbe bouse.

Tbe door opened and sbe came out and walked easily into tbe storm. For a moment sbe was but tbirty feet from bim. Miraculously tbe black bat stayed in place. He could almost see tbe features of the face, ob, Emily, yes, yes, tbe bowHng wind, tbe shadowed moutb open to gasp for air behind tbat wind, tbe eyes covered by a constant veil, the hair beating upon tbe open threat. Fisb were being hammered against the logs, clouds collided witb mountains of water, tbe fisbing nets tore loose, and wandering, Dying, Dung tbemselves on teakwood ribs, sky, and rocks.

For one brief moment bis bope and desire came togetber, to walk up to ber, bold ber, speak to ber, bold tbe blowing hair. Tbe taste of salt was on his Hps. Then be turned and was carried off down tbe street. Once be turned back and saw tbat sbe was foUowing.

This was his gigantic hold, the town of water. He noticed each blurred metallic color or lack of color, each gray and black, each wet shadow, salt and iron of the sea and blood. Drawn to her, he fled from her, happier In each dolphin-winged spasm, careening along with pillaging, battling black birds. To catch flsh. To catch grain. To shed the strengthening water. He bent his body and ran disjointedly for cover. The inn door. Pieces of driftwood were pounding on the shore; a deep loud voice from the doldrums. Sailors from Madagascar, ships from the Caribbean, the Puritan, iron hulks from Liverpool, plunging their crimson sails and tarred lines through the surf, they hovered in the harbor. No sun, no moon, only hurling starfish and tine foam, water hauling in the wizened lives.

Leather rots; rubber comes alive; the beach erodes; the fungus grows; the sound of the wailing bell. And always that barely remembered woman behind him, the faint flush of youth and scrubbed cheeks.

Despite the many embarrassing moments in this passage, this is at least the first moment when my imaginary island fishing village became fictional. The passage embarrasses me for its awful adverbs, for its colloquialisms ("Henry lost his nerve, which is a shocking lapse from the rhetoric of" running slime"), for the extremely youthful lapse into Henry's interior consciousness ("oh, Emily, yes, yes"), for its sentence fragments, for its lapses into iambic pentameter. All of these are distracting indulgences, the extremes of inexperience. They're all to be avoided.

And yet Henry's "town of water" is precisely my own seaside Connecticut village and that empty half-built house echoing with the sound of waves at the water's edge-though while writing Charivari I'm sure I never gave a thought to my childhood. Then too, this passage reveals the beginnings of my own fictional insistencies (the wind and rain become animated and start to take over the passage, the writer dwells lovingly on images and details of decay and corruption) and reveals too the beginnings of my own writing voice (heard, I think, in such phrasing as "beat like nail heads on the rotting wood"). But the association of the "barely remembered woman," who is idealized for her "faint flush of youth," with a vast violent world of death, sexlessness, and misogyny, is in fact the thematic center of all that I've written. And what I realized some time ago was that the language of this passage had served as an unconscious source for much of the language in Second Skin.

A few moments after catching his glimpse of Emily in the storm, Henry watches while a group of hip-booted old men haul up Emily's drowned body in a basket stretcher from the low tide at the end of a rotting pier. And yet by the end of Charivari this death is revealed to have been merely hallucinatory, and Emily lives. Emily Van is the only pseudo-victim in my fiction. All the other victims stay maimed or dead, as the case may be.

I n the spring of 1960 Edwin Honig gave Sophie and me a copy of his then newly published book of poems, The Gazabos. And it was at that moment, when I first read aloud to Sophie Edwin's poem "Island Storm," that the island (or lost New England world) of my own preoccupations leapt out from the page-as real, as tangible, as powerful as it has ever been, before or since.

My reading of "Island Storm" was and still is personal, selfish. since while being aware of the poem as a gift of art. I was most elated at the sudden shocking appearance of a specific imagined world which I took as real, as suddenly created by another writer out ofthe rain and sea, and as mine.

When I read this poem I felt that I too was a version of its narrator, and that I too was surviving the battering rain, the darkening storm in a place I recognized and wanted to be indespite its cataclysmic chaos, its unavoidable terror. And even then I thought that the poem had already made inevitable our actualjoumey to the "cold, Atlantic island, as Skipper calls it in Second Skin. Here, then, is "Island Storm":

All morning in the woods I heard the bushes choke Among dead boughs tbat creaked and groaned, And no other murmur than the Durry of live prey Grappling in the wind's slow teeth.

A starling toppled near the river-run, black As stone. A garter snake shivered Up a root and instantly turned brown. It began On such a day prophets used To rave about-"Stiff-necked mankind, remember Sodom and God's frown!" Through miles

Of tensing acreage only two eyes peeped when It Came down. The road became a falls Where hubbubs fell to foam across a glazed surrendering Of channelled stone. In the hollow beat Of some annihilating warmth, tumorous old stumps Were ground to muck. "Will it be day Again?" I heard the brittle window ask the lightning Flash, and tremble three full hours As it spoke. Often, while the sea coughed distantly, Infamous last words of misanthropes Ransacked my brain for counter-prayers. Below the eaves, Crackling like a greasy frying Pan, only a Oorallampshade quavered hope.

When at last the silence trickled in, I found The fungi like great plastered wounds, The stupefying sweetness everywhere. And when The weather turned gigantically And padded otT, I found the world it left nearby: On the bloated attic floor

Two drowned mice; through the skylight, one fir Permanently bowed; above the flooded Garden, the first fierce dart of an exploratory crow. 01<

This, it seems to me, is a dark and unmistakably New England world, ringing with loneliness and all the destructive frightening cadences of the old puritanical voice, which is "saved" or finally destroyed by the poet's own voice. I like the moments of awesome sound in this poem, I think its beauty depends magnificently on the way the world of nature is first mythologized, or personified, and then "collapsed" to a few palpable details of concrete reality. But I myself quicken most of all to the "tumorous old stumps" and to the fungi "like great plastered wounds," since these images make me think, of Charivari ("Leather rots; rubber comes alive; the beach erodes; the fungus grows; the sound of the wailing bell"), and since this special sympathy for decay, deterioration, destruction (and for the maimed, the victimized) is one of the essential qualities of the imagination, evident as it is in "The Ancient Mariner," say, or in the mammoth, bruised and battered and aged tortoises of Melville's Encantadas.

*Reprinted by permission.

And then, and only a few weeks later, we went to the Atlantic island. On a cold, bright, early summer morning we sailed with our then three young children on an old white fishing boat converted to carry passengers and, on its spongy, wooden deck, a single car, until we had crossed the 11 necessary miles of brilliant sea, with the boat smelling of dead fish and engine fumes, and our little five-year-old girl seasick down below in her mother's arms in the dark and foul-smelling cabin, until we sailed down the length of the island and rounded a promontory and for the first time saw my imaginary fishing village clustered around its shimmering boat-filled harbor (as I had known it would be), and then docked and carried ashore our little girl who was already a victim-poor thing-of the island I myself was so terribly drawn to.

This was what the imagination had suddenly and at last produced: the sun, the black shining sea, the cluster of bleached houses, the bright boats, an enormous abandoned white house on another promontory, and overhead the marvelous white scavenging gulls. And only a few miles from the village we saw for ourselves the row of "permanently bowed" fir trees from "Island Storm."

So for that summer we lived on the island, eating our blueberry pancakes on a veranda overlooking the sea and a few smaller islands, sleeping in bedclothes that smelled of mothballs in a small clapboard house with wrinkled linoleum on the kitchen floor and a playable, wooden pump-organ in one of the small rooms. The privy was like an upended coffin, there were stunted apple trees on the slope between the porch and the sea, we lived in the rhythms of bright sun and heavy fog. We walked, we explored the island, the children painted designs on rocks and pieces of driftwood, and up under the eaves of one of the narrow bedrooms (that smelled of camphor and dead insects) I wrote about 50 pages of the fragment called "The Nearest Cemetery" that immediately preceded Second Skin.

The landscape, charged as it was with personal meaning, the 120

landscape at once familiar and unfamiliar, the constant dreamlike appearance of symbols in nature (the gigantic rocks like human skulls, the foreboding trees), and that strange psychological pull exerted by the unexpected confluence of sloping farmland and open sea-in the context of all this I was, for the first time, prompted to try to write fiction out ofthe very world I was living in. I was so moved by the vivid mythical atmosphere of the island that I thought I could overcome the dangers inherent in immediacy. And perhaps in Second Skin I did finally overcome the risks of immediacy.

An anecdote, a real woman, and a few rumors cohered to give rise to the story of "The Nearest Cemetery." We hadn't been on the island a week when I heard an anecdote about a local barber who had been accused of molesting a child and who managed to jump overboard and drown himself when he was being taken from the island back to the mainland for arraignment and trial. And then there was a woman, the wife of a summering New Yorker who lived somewhere up the island road from us, who daily passed our cottage wearing a pale blue kerchief and waving and calling out in a lovely voice to the children. The rumors (and I disagree with Mary McCarthy's notion that fiction is a form of gossip, yet sometimes can't help valuing the malice and humor of good gossip), the rumors were that this marvelous woman in the .blue kerchief was in fact known throughout the island. She was known, according to the rumors, in culverts, in fields, in dank places among the trees, in abandoned farm houses filled with rotting mattresses and broken whiskey bottles. She was everywhere, we heard, this defenseless and unhappy and smiling woman, and I thought of her as everywhere and pure. I called her the Princess. I used to sit in the privy and think of the Princess or hear her voice, as she called out to our children from the country road, and imagine her blue kerchief which she always wore when the wind was blowing and when it was calm. The fiction that came to mind was about a woman called the Princess who had many

lovers and was murdered by the local barber. "The Nearest Cemetery" begins with a kind of stage setting and Faulknerian cast of characters:

Scene of narration: a small state penitentiary in New England.

Characters:

The Princess: summer visitor to Bloody Clam Shell Island; unhappy wife of a New York meatpacker; woman of beauty; victim of the local barber.

Mildred: the barber's wife.

Captain Red: lobsterman in his fiftieth year; first lover of the Princess.

Blud: lighthouse keeper; Mildred's brother; second lover of the Princess.

Iomo: otT-island gas station attendant and vicious smalltown sport; third lover of the Princess.

The Barber: narrator; fourth and final lover of the Princess. He loved her from afar and killed her.

My notion was that three ordinary men-Captain Red, Blud, Jomo-had all committed various crimes for the sake of the Princess, with whom they had all experienced extravagant and not entirely loveless sexuality, and so at the time of the barber's narration were to be imprisoned; and also that the barber, whose love for the Princess was purely imaginary, had finally murdered the Princess in order to preserve his ideal love. At the time of his narration, then, the barber was to be imprisoned with the other three, was to spend his days cutting their hair and waiting for the inevitable moment when he, the barber, was to be revengefully murdered by the other three. In my mind, at least, the barber had buried the dismembered remains of the Princess in the town dump, and was a doomed romantic worthy somehow ofcompassion.

Here's an example of the barber's interior voice, of the barber talking to himself at night in his prison cell, obsessed with the dead Princess and with his own wife (Mildred, the New England Puritan) and aware of his own approaching murder by the men who actually did have some kind of crude capacity to love.

So tbe mind lies between the echoing coffins of the ears-a barber's ears-and you try to calm it in the midst of all that roar and wbisper while a sbadow falls tbrough tbe bars and sweeps your chest. But then I raise my bands; I hold one ear; I hold both of them; I press witb my palms. Because then it is not Mildred's voice I bear-not tbe voice, thougb I hear it often enougb-but rather Mildred playing steadily on tbe churcb organ,

Mildred pumping her feet, Mildred pushing the keys and Mildred maklnl the reeds and seagulls shriek. And in each of Mildred's chords is the heavy harmony of the Lord and bass voice of Mildred's other brother who died from drink. And I cannot bear to listen. The barber cannot bear to listen to Mildred pumping and marching with the Lord at the town's church organ. The Lord and Mildred deafen me. They make me think of lying dead and naked beside the body of the shipwrecked woman on Crooked Finger Rock at the height of the gale.

Short as the watch that ends the night is what I hear, and Time like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away is what I hear, the phrases filling the mind with their monotony and fear, and Theyfly, forgotten. as a dream Dies at the opening ofday-all of it this booming, this beating of hymn on slick shingles and empty beach, and the Lord and Mildred are bearing me away to the Rock. Singing. Bearing off the naked barber to the heart of the hymn that is the late, carrying me away at the center, easily, while the plankton spurts aloft into the dark of the storm, and I fly, fly, while Vinny cranks his truck in the wind and Mildred sings with the lost brother.

The barber. But even the barber has his tongue and toes and fingers, his hidden hair. The barber too has his lungs of twisted and dampened paper, his ears in which the islands float, his eyes that gleam, his sensitivity to skin, his touch. And sometimes I think I am all water. Hair and water. What the crack leaps upon, leaping to deform the image further, is nothing and my shop is on Bloody Clam Shell Island--closed, safely boarded up-while I am here.

No doubt this is the rhetoric of tormented sexlessness and a punitive religious preoccupation with death. These are the guilt-ridden lofty cadences of someone beguiled by but also hating New England puritanism. I like this deadly situation and hymn-book prose (deriving as it does from Charivari and, more important, serving as the immediate source of the language in Second Skin). But the fact of the matter is that the very intensity or inflation of this interior monologue was the reason "The Nearest Cemetery"failed.

By the summer's end I gave up on the barber, partly because I couldn't sustain his relentless interior monologue, partly because I had already heard another anecdote, this time of a man who with remarkable tenderness and selflessness was devoting his life to a futile attempt to save his daughter from the oblivion of emotional illness. And suddenly I was much more interested in the selfless father (who couldn't be entirely blameless for the emotional state of his daughter) and in the deteriorating girl who was to become the object of her father's steadfast care and unwitting love.

For the next two years I thought about this story of an older 123

man's unsuccessful efforts to preserve his daughter's sanity on a New England island.

And then in the spring of 1962 I came down with pneumonia (when Providence was a place of iron and ice and fever and dead morality rattling in the bitter wind). And in that same terrible and often delirious season we heard by telephone that our humorous. artistic, life-filled friend from Harvard had committed suicide. Weeks later I knew that [ wanted to write a novel about an older man attempting to preserve his daughter not from insanity but from suicide, that the real center of the novel had to be sexuality and suicide, that the novel would be comic, and that [ wanted to write it not in infectious Providence but on a tropical island, where we would all flourish in the sun and I, incidentally, would gain new detachment from the Atlantic island.

Thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and, once again, Edwin Honig, who gave us a ten-year-old guide book called Paradise Isles ofthe World, we did indeed flee Providence for the West Indies-where all of our children became violently sick when we drove from the airport over the mountains and through the rain-forests to our crescent of perfect beach, and where we did flourish (on the beach, in the clear sea, surrounded by tropical wildflowers and hummingbirds and the underwater coral beds of the earth's navel), and where I spent my timeless mornings sitting on a veranda in the trade winds (wearing gangster-style dark glasses and holding a clipboard against the wind) and writing Second Skin. Surely Paradise Isles ofthe World is final proof of the poet's invulnerability and unerring vision, since the island we found was in every way as lyrical as the one we read about, which means that Edwin's own poetic vision somehow "corrected" a guide book ten years out of date.

In those eight months of warmth and clarity I felt suspended, free, detached, confident (as if life itself had become a fiction or the purest kind of ritual), and it gave me a secret, even crafty pleasure to invoke the cold dark Atlantic island while sitting

amidst the light and spices of a tropical world. or to fictionalize Skipper's tropical landscape while having freshly in mind some recently written scene of New England coldness and brutality. Skipper was now a heavy benevolent middle-aged disreputable Prospero creating both his present and past life on a wandering tropical island (since my fictive plan was once again invaded by actuality-Brahmin cows, towering sugar cane, sea fans waving in the depths of the clear water, candles burning at night in a sunken cemetery-so that now I had to write about the southern idyllic island as well as about the northern one); and the Princess became Skipper's daughter Cassandra; the barber's wife Mildred became the heavy-set seductive landlady who fails to win Skipper and so plots to involve Cassandra with Captain Red and Jomo, knowing that these sexual liaisons will lead inevitably to Cassandra's suicide; while Captain Red remained the same, as did Jomo-except that I had the pleasure of deciding that Jomo would be one-handed, so that the steel hook that served as his missing hand would also exemplify the ruthlessness of his sexual greed. On the tropical island I believed more strongly than ever that the Atlantic island was filled with men like Jomo and Captain Red. They carried knives, they had long black sideburns, they lolled on the wharves and back roads leading to abandoned trysting places, their skin was made of fishscales-and they were poor, violent, isolated, admirable. In the sun of the tropical island the dangerous death-ridden landscape of the Atlantic island loomed with a beauty quite the equivalent of the Caribbean island paradise.

I'd like to leave you with a final vision of the abandoned lighthouse which in its desolation organizes the fears and longings of childhood, but also remains standing everywhere in New England-in the form of old houses, fallen tombstones, half-sunken boats, and most of all in the endless long-empty factories still somehow suggesting the piety and callousness and expended energy that no longer exist.

In this passage Skipper is climbing up the inside of the 125

abandoned lighthouse in his futile effort to prevent the last sexual encounter between Jomo and Cassandra. But Jomo and Cassandra have already made love at the top of the empty lighthouse. Jomo has already fled the scene. Cassandra has already leapt naked from the top of the lighthouse to her death on the rocks below-a fact which Skipper knows but can't admit.

The iron gut of the tower remained intact, and I crawled to the top and crawled back down again without mishap, without a fall. But the damage was done. I knew it was done before I reached the top, and I began to hurry and began to whisper: "Cassandra? He's gone now, Cassandra, It's all right now .•. you'll see •..• I heard nothing but the echoing black sky and tiny skin-crawling sounds above me and the small splash, the eternal picking fingers of wave on rock below. "Cassandra?" I whispered, and tried to pull myself up the last few shaky steps, tried to fight down dizziness, tried to see, "you're not crying, are you, Cassandra? Please don't "

But the damage was done and I was only an old bird in an empty nest. I rolled up onto the iron floor in the smashed head of the lighthouse and crawled into the lee of the low wall and pulled myself into a half-sitting position and waited for the moment when Dog's Head light must tremble and topple forward into the black scum of the rising tide far below.

"Gone, Cassandra? Gone so soon?" I whispered. "Gone with Gertrude, Cassandra? Gone to Papa? But you shouldn't have, Cassandra. You should have thought of me

The neat pile of clothing was fluttering a little in the moonlight and it was damp to the touch

I clutched a couple of the thin rusted stanchions and in the gray moonlight started out to sea. The shoals were miles long and black and sharp, long serrated tentacles that began at the base of the promontory and radiated out to sea, mile after square mile of intricate useless channels and breaking waves and sharp-backed lacerating shoals and spiny reefs. Mile after square mile of ocean cemetery that wasn't even true to its dead but kept flushing itself out on the flood tide. No wonder the poor devils wanted a lighthouse here. No wonder.·

I hope very much that all this says something-and something affirmative-about the writer, the angleworm, the barb, and the darkness. I hope too that we can all keep finding our islands.

* Reprinted by permission.

Metaphors for the novel PlllLIP STEVICK

Among the most memorable lines in modern poetry are those that offer a metaphor for poetry itself. Readers who could not remember another line by Archibald MacLeish can remember that poetry is a fruit. And readers with no particular taste for Marianne Moore can recall fondly that poetry is a garden, with toads. It is a classic impulse, making metaphors for poetry, and it appears from time to time in the poetry of all periods.

Probably the poet most given to making metaphors for poetry was Keats and an entire book exists to comment upon Keats's various comparisons, that poetry is a woman, that poetry is a drug, and so on. It is significant that metaphors for poetry generally occur in poems, rarely in prose discussions of poetry. The fact establishes their special character: metaphors for poetry have, themselves, a kind of lyric status, existing in an "as if" world, highly individual, highly charged with linguistic complexity, ambiguity, nuance. As for the other arts, most of

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us would be hard pressed to think of a single memorable metaphor for architecture, say, or sculpture. There was a vogue, to be sure, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for saying that a poem was a picture and a picture a poem. And music has sometimes suggested a conceit, music being the food of love in Twelfth Night and the brandy of the damned for Shaw. But these are exceptions. The art of fiction, however, has stimulated a range of metaphors of extraordinary virtuosity and great seriousness.

Such metaphors for fiction are at least as interesting as those for poetry. And, unlike the metaphors for poetry, metaphors for the novel occur in every rhetorical situation, both within and out of fictive works, sometimes as heavily charged with wit and ambiguity as the cleverest metaphor about poetry, sometimes quite lumpish and programmatic. At times transformations in the art of the novel have turned upon metaphors. Certainly transformations in the way we read novels have turned upon metaphors.

The first thing to do with metaphors for the novel is to collect them; the second is to make sense of them. Providing attributions tends to limit our thought about them. To take a single example, if we recall that Fielding said the novel was an epic, then the power of Fielding's metaphor is reduced by our attribution. Calling a novel an epic is likely to seem to us a very time-bound thing to do, involved with Fielding's own attitudes toward literary hierarchies, attitudes that we no longer share, involved with Fielding's establishment of a noble lineage for his novels, half-seriously, half-ironically, a lineage that is not likely to interest us any more. If we withhold attribution, however, and simply list Fielding's metaphor along with somebody else's, a copywriter, say, for a middlebrow publishing house, then the metaphors can do their work, free from the historical condescension we are apt to give to Fielding and free of the aesthetic condescension we are apt to give to the copywriter, who may, for all of the wrong reasons, have happened upon a perfectly luminous trope for the art of fiction.

Here, detached from context, is my own list.

A novel is a machine.

A novel is a dream.

A novel is a polemical tract.

A novel is a cri de coeur.

A novel is a photograph.

A novel is a prayer.

A novel is a river.

A novel is a game.

A novel is a baby.

A novel is a bomb.

A novel is a labyrinth.

A novel is a poem.

A novel is a play.

A novel is an essay.

A novel is a diagram.

A novel is a sermon.

A novel is a therapeutic act.

A novel is an act of political aggression.

A novel is an act of coitus.

A novel is an act of masturbation.

A novel is an act of ritual.

A novel is a phonograph record.

A novel is a house.

A novel is a mirror.

A novel is a lamp.

A novel is a dance.

A novel is a musical composition.

A novel is a map.

A novel is a sermon.

A novel is a living body.

A novel is a dead body.

A novel is an act of vision.

A novel is an act of speaking.

A novel is an autopsy.

A novel is a feast.

A novel is a passenger train.

A novel is a painting.

A novel is a movie.

A novel is a scientific experiment.

A novel is a world.

A novel is a puppet show.

A novel is a hjgh-wire act.

A novel is a book.

A novel is a newspaper.

A novel is an encyclopedia.

A novel is a history.

A novel is a suicide note.

A novel is fingernails on a blackboard.

A novel is a pudding.

The easiest way to begin sorting out the metaphors is by attending to motive. Fielding's motives I have alluded to. Let Fielding's apparent motives stand for a consistent motive among writers, readers, and critics of the novel from the origins of the genre to the beginning of the twentieth century, the wish to confer dignity upon the genre by offering comparisons with objects which we regard highly and in so doing to direct our attention to those aspects of the novel in which the novel shares all of the power and craft of those cultural objects that seem at the time to be indisputably great. To be sure, this defensive maneuver differs from period to period-from the eighteenth century, when the novel was in need of defense as a late comer among genres, to the early twentieth century, when the novel, then pre-eminent among genres for a century and a half, seemed to need defense against the narrowness of its audience and the rarefication of its art or against the apparent moribundity of its classic forms. Of course the vehicles of such defensive metaphors shift, also, according to the cultural assumptions of their times. That is, in a period in which the novel is found to be morally trivial if not morally salacious, one can counter, as Richardson and his partisans did, by calling the novel a sermon. In an age in which the novel is found to be a facile entertainment, lacking in rigor and precision, one can counter, as Zola and the naturalists did, by calling the novel a scientific experiment. In an age in which the novel is found to be heavy, didactic, and documentary, one can counter, as Thackeray did in a gesture at once ironically self-deprecatory and triumphant, by calling the novel a puppet show. In an age in which the novel is understood atomistically and shallowly, one can counter, as James did, by calling the novel a living body. Strange things happen when we detach these metaphors from their highly specific historical situations. Is there some permanent sense in which every novel is a puppet show, even the most dogged and fact-ridden novel one can think of, Germinal for example? Of course it is, though probably not in the senses Thackeray intended his metaphor to carry for his

own book. Is there some sense in which every novel is a scientific experiment, even a novel which is visionary and fantastic? Is Alice in Wonderland a scientific experiment? The use of metaphor as a cultural defense of the novel is out of fashion at the present time for one obvious reason: it is necessary to defend only what is attacked and, although the fiction of the seventies is widely ignored, it is rarely attacked. Besides the wish to confer dignity and importance upon the novel, there is the wish, carried forward by metaphor, to correct what one takes to be a prevailing misapprehension. Consider the power of metaphor as a tool of revisionist theory in the hands of F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny critics. "The novel is a dramatic poem," they wrote, and those of us who can no longer remember what they said about Wuthering Heights or Hard Times can recall that, for them, the novel was a dramatic poem and should be read like one, in aggressive defiance of prevailing critical method. It is hard to see how the phenomenologists could function without revisionist metaphors, insisting, as they do, that a novel is not simply a form or an aesthetic object but an extension of consciousness, which is to sayan act of vision, an act of coitus, a dream, a cri de coeur. And in recent years, the revisionist wish that we attend to the novel not as an ethereal cluster of disembodied effects but as a printed book, held in the hand, has been carried forward by its own family of metaphors.

All of these motives have a positive intent. It is certainly possible to invent a metaphor which supports a pejorative intent, separating other people's novels, popular novels, oldfashioned novels, from the kind that one likes or writes oneself. The novel is a pudding. Not all novels, of course. Only bad novels.

It is also possible to invent a metaphor which borrows authority from the whole genre by asserting that what happens in a special case is true of the whole of fiction. The novel is a musical composition. Some novels do, of course, have remarkable musical affinities, Point Counterpoint and Doctor Faustus

come to mind. In some sense any novel can be said to share certain qualities with music. If one wishes to advance the fortunes of the kind of novel which is intentionally "musical," one can employ the metaphor which will connect musicality with the consistent purposes of fiction in all times and places. The novel is a musical composition. Or the novelist who feels that his own novels perform, for him, a certain therapeutic function can shore up his own aesthetic by asserting that all novels are exercises in self-therapy. And, to some extent, all novels are.

Such shifting back and forth between the general and the particular suggests a common characteristic of most critical discussions of the nature of the novel, whether such discussion centers around a metaphor or not, and that is the likelihood that the word "novel," intentionally or not, will be allowed to mean, variously, the whole genre, as it is understood by conventional historians of literature and described in histories of the novel, an abstracted and idealized continuity within the whole genre, using the word novel so as to include, for example, the refinements of James but exclude the crudities of Captain Marryat, and finally a single text or a group of closely related texts. "The novel," writes Lawrence, "is the one bright book of life." It is not clear from that sentence, not even particularly clear from the whole discourse within which it appears, whether Lawrence means the novel as a genre from Defoe to his own time, certain possibilities within the historical genre, or only certain potentialities within the form of the novel exploited mainly by Lawrence's own fiction. Of our list, take the well-known metaphor comparing a novel to a world. It is frequently not clear whether the person who uses the metaphor wishes to say that all novels are worlds, that it is the nature of the novel to be a world, or whether he only wishes to say that a few special novels, such as those of Dickens, create a world.

It is finally possible, speaking of motives, to make a metaphor as a kind of exercise in provocation, as an irony, in which

the terms of the comparison are not at all clear, deliberately so, inviting us to interpret at a number of levels, finding complexity in the local works in question, complexity in ourselves, complexity in the entire genre of prose fiction, where we had previously found simplicity. The novel is a machine, writes Sterne, or rather Tristram Shandy, in what is surely the most unmechanistic novel ever written. Is it a total and transparent irony, asking us to see through Tristram and discover how unmechanical Tristram Shandy is? Is it a comment on the selfgenerating effect of fiction, the principle that things set in motion, within a novel, follow their own laws, generate their own energy, run their own course? Does the metaphor point not so much to the people and events within a fiction, as they generate their own energy, but to the author and his lack of control, Tristram's machine-like book being rather like Charlie Chaplin's assembly line in Modern Times? Is the metaphor really concerned with the conventions of Sterne's book, its use offamiliar bits and pieces so as to make a functioning whole? Is the metaphor connected in some way to the intellectual history of its time, a body of thought in which the image ofthe machine plays a small but highly significant part? Surely it is not presumptuous to project onto Sterne the wish to confound and provoke us with a metaphor for which more than one interpretation is a legitimate one.

Puzzling over Sterne's metaphor suggests a further ambiguity of such metaphors, the capacity of at least some of them to mean three quite different things, as they are taken to refer to the creative act of the author, the work itself, or the experience of the reader. Saying that the novel is a house means that the making of a novel is in some ways like the act of a carpenter or an architect, that the novel itself is like an integrated set of functioning rooms, and that the reading of the novel is like experiencing the organized space of a building. Saying that the novel is a game means that the composition is a playful activity circumscribed by certain arbitrary rules, that 133

the novel itself is in certain ways autotelic, the source of its own laws, a repository of "fun," and that the reading of the novel is like learning the rules of, then playing, a game. Saying that the novel is a therapeutic act means that the writing of it offers therapy for the writer, that the novel itself is an aesthetic rendering of a health-bestowing process regardless of writer and reader, and that the experience of the novel is a potentially sanative experience for the reader himself. It undoubtedly often happens that the inventor of a metaphor will think of it in one of its three possible senses and realize, only after it has gained currency, that it can be used, is even being widely interpreted, in one or two other ways.

Besides the motives of their inventors, metaphors for the novel can be sorted out according to their primary focus of reference. The most obvious of these is the reference to another aesthetic object: a novel is a painting; a novel is a movie. Whatever the motive, such a metaphor has the effect of confirming and intensifying our sense of the artistic status of the novel. Conversely, a metaphor may refer to an area of experience or an object which is deliberately not aesthetic and whose comparative value seems to detract from the artistic status of the novel: the novel is a newspaper; the novel is a scientific experiment. For a genre which ordinarily appeals to a mass public, there is some tactical advantage in such a metaphor, since it seems to claim that, unlike poetry, painting, and symphonic music, which tend to be esoteric, fiction tends to be exoteric. There is the further tactical advantage of deliberately vulgarizing the novel, removing it from the class associations of the other arts with their salons, galleries, patrons, and limited circulation magazines, placing it instead in the area of the visceral, the physical, the quotidian, and the deliberately classless. Perhaps the most curious focus of reference is to extensions of the person, simple acts or gestures that are essentially private: a novel is a prayer; a novel is an act of coitus; a novel is an act of vision; a novel is a suicide note. All

art is an extension of the person; but the family of metaphors that apply to the novel seem not to refer to the general exertion ofthe creative will upon the plastic materials of one's medium, as with the other arts, but to point instead to a special subjective exposure or a special in-extremis quality with which the extension of the person is invested, for which the agony of Flaubert can stand as exemplary. Finally, the focus of reference in such metaphors may be to an object or process which is seen kinetically, as a force, so that our attention is directed toward an effect upon recipients: a novel is a bomb; a novel is a passenger train; a novel is a polemical tract. Part of the reason for the existence of such metaphors is undoubtedly that the novel is a commercial product, whose force upon a potential audience must always be asserted by those who could wish that audience to buy it. It is also true that the force of a novel is inevitably diffuse since one experiences it over a sustained period of days and for that reason there is a certain utility in having the power of a novel compressed and represented in a single trope.

Just why this multifunctional, relentless metaphor-making should exist is hard to say, in any final way. It is clear, however, that criticism of the novel means two things: it means sustained, deliberate, analytical discourse, of which there has been, until the last two decades, rather little, and it means a fluid body of phrase-making, stance-taking, attitudinizing, and categorizing, of which there has been, from the beginnings of the novel, a very great deal and of which the metaphor-making process is central. It is clear that the novel has served an institutional function more potent than that of any other genre during the last two hundred years and that this institutional primacy has permitted an enormous group of people with different training, interests, and sophistication to speak their minds on it: authors themselves, critics, casual reviewers, editors and publishers, clergymen, teachers, politicians, and ordinary readers who would not dream of speaking their minds 135

on any other literary form. It is also clear that the novel, as a genre, is a loose assemblage of extremely diverse works and that at any given time since the middle of the eighteenth century there has always been a plentiful number of writers practicing kinds of fiction different from what one conceives to be the center of the tradition, a situation inviting the spiteful derogation of one's opponents with a dismissive metaphor, or the elevation of one's own kind with an honorific metaphor. And it is finally clear that the novel, being prosaic, invites critical rubrics that insist upon the wit, the imagination, and the verbal power of both the critic and the novelist, who is never so prosaic, such criticism tells us, as the surface of his prose would make him seem.

What has happened to such metaphors as the dominance of the modernists has given way to the fiction of the present time is, first, that the enterprise has diminished, as polemical stancetaking has seemed less necessary than it used to be, second, that certain metaphors that seemed to be permanently attached to the nature of the novel have ceased to be useful or even true of recent fiction, and third, that a few metaphors, for obvious tactical reasons, have come to prevail over a large body of quite diverse fiction.

There have always been static novels-Clarissa moves only a few times and Jane Austen's contentment with her few square inches of ivory is legendary; but so many novels have arranged their events around travel, from adventure to adventure, from country to city, from home to away, from class to class, that those metaphors indicating movement have always seemed central to the novel's purposes: the novel is a river, a passenger train, a map, a mirror on a road. It is hard to imagine a time when nobody will wish to read another novel that shows a transition from province to city, class to class, place to place, and novels that structure themselves upon an axis of physical movement are still being written, some of them with skill and insight. But the metaphor is dead: nobody, not even the writers

and readers of such novels, would now say that the novel is a river or a train. As Raymond Olderman maintains in Beyond the Wasteland. the novel of the sixties projects a basically static individual as he interacts with basically static institutions, and the movement of such fiction is incidental, a description that seems to me to apply equally to most of the fiction ofthe seventies.

Metaphors which attempt to borrow the authority of factthe novel is a scientific experiment, the novel is an encyclopedia-are no longer useful since, despite the wave of interest in the convergence of fiction and journalism, nobody really believes that fiction is dignified or definable by its factbearing qualities. Those metaphors which point toward a kinetic relationship with the reader-the novel is a bomb, a polemical tract, a sermon-all seem curious relics of another time. And, of the metaphors that make a comparison with another art, only the comparison of novel to movie or photograph seems to have any vitality. Yet, for all of the obsolescence of many of the classic metaphors, a few figures, as old as the novel itself, survive, in altered senses perhaps but with undiminished power. The novel is a world, Butor argues, thereby meaning to suggest the rendering of the consciousness of complex, interrelated space characteristic of extended fiction. Butor's emphasis is different from the emphasis we might give if we were explaining the metaphor as it has been applied to Dickens or Jane Austen, but it is by no means exclusive of those older applications. For, despite differences of emphasis, there is a remarkable continuity that unites some very old ways of understanding the novel with some new ways by the use of that rich and durable metaphor. William Gass's Fiction and the Figures ofLife is surely the best repository of such surviving metaphors: in a tone unmistakably of our time, he argues that the novel is, for many readers, still a history, for himself a voice, a poem, a world, a game.

The novel is a game. If we try to hold in the mind some

representative recent fiction-City Life, Breakfast ofChampions, The Blood Oranges, Gravity's Rainbow-what seems to unite them is an autotelic, non-referential quality in which the value of the fiction inheres in its invention, its wit and intricacy of texture, its appeal as a made thing, obedient to no laws but its own. It is the nature of critical metaphors that they be reductionist. If a figure encourages us to see the autotelic qualities of a body of fiction, it thereby encourages us to overlook the extent to which such fiction is critical and engaged. If a figure encourages us to see the wit and play of a body of fiction, it encourages us to ignore the agony and despair. Still, it's not balance and judiciousness one wants from a metaphor but insight. Fiction in the seventies is dream, prayer, cri de coeur, and fingernails on a blackboard. But preeminently, as Fielding, Sterne, and Jane Austen knew, the novel is a game.

Contributors

DAVID CAUTE lives in London. He was formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at New York and Columbia Universities. His most recent books are The Decline of the West (Macmillan). a novel, and The Illusion, an Essay on Politics, Theatre, and the Novel (Harper & Row). RICHARD PEARCE, professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, is the author of Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett. "Enter the Frame" was extracted from a work in progress as a contribution to Raymond Federman's SURFICTION: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, just published by Swallow Press. JOHN HAWKES's novels include The Cannibal, The Lime Twig, Second Skin, The Blood Oranges, and Death, Sleep, and the Traveler (to be published by New Directions in April). PHILIP STEVICK teaches at Temple University and is the editor of a critical anthology, The Theory of the Novel (Free Press), and the Rinehart edition of Clarissa. His essay, "Scheherazade runs out of plots, goes on talking; the king, puzzled, listens," appeared in TriQuarterly 26. ALBERT J. GUERARD is a professor of English and Director of the Program for Modem Thought at Stanford. He is the author of six novels and two previous contributions to TriQuarterly. TONY TANNER's latest book, City of Words, is about his first-hand encounters with American fiction. He is now a don at Kings College, Cambridge.

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Commitment without empathy

Enter the frame

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Metaphors for the novel