The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society [Course Book ed.] 9781400855667

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THE IMAGINARY LIBRARY

TIHIJE TIMACGTINA~Y

IL TIlE ~A~Y AN

ESSAY

ON LITERATURE AND SOCIETY

ALVIN B. KERNAN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Linotron Sabon Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Designed by Laury A. Egan

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION: The Place of Poetry in the World

vii 3

CHAPTER I: The Actual and Imaginary Library: Literature as a Social Institution

12

CHAPTER II: Mighty Poets in Their Misery Dead: The Death of the Poet in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift

37

CHAPTER III: "Battering the Object": The Attack on the Literary Text in Malamud's The Tenants

66

CHAPTER IV: Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov's Pale Fire

89

CHAPTER V: The Taking of the Moon: The Struggle of the Poetic and Scientific Myths in Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon

130

CHAPTER VI: Finding the New Thing

162

WORKS CITED

176

INDEX

181

ACKN Ο WLED GMENTS

PERMISSION to quote from the following works is gratefully acknowledged: Humboldt's Gift: Copyright © 1973, 1974, 1975 by Saul Bellow. All Rights Reserved. First published in 1975 by The Viking Penguin Press, Inc., 625 Madison Avenue, New York,

N.Y. 10022. Of a Fire on the Moon: Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Nor­ man Mailer. The Tenants: Copyright © 1971 by Bernard Malamud. All Rights Reserved. First printing 1971 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Pale Fire: Excerpts reprinted by permission of G. P. Put­ nam's Sons from PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov. Copy­ right © 1962 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Leave and research funds which made possible the writing of this book have been the generous gift of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I should also like to thank Charles Cannon, Sam­ uel Hynes, Theodore Ziolkowski, and A. Walton Litz, who helped greatly, and Dorothy Westgate for her patient skills. In an attempt to improve the readability of what is more a speculative argument than a piece of systematic historical scholarship, bibliographical information on works cited is collected at the end of this book and referred to by page references in the text.

THE IMAGINARY LIBRARY

INTRODUCTION THE PLACE OF POETRY IN THE WORLD

THE PLACE of poetry and its function in the Renaissance world are idealized in Castiglione's The Courtier, where the courtier is expected in the service of his prince to be, among other things, an amateur poet who displays in his writing the same civility, manners, control, and perfection of the self which he also realizes in dancing, dress, horsemanship, relations with the other sex, soldiership, and counseling of the ruler. Poetry is assigned an important place in the ideal perfection toward which the courtly life strives—"Writing is simply a form of speaking which endures even after it is uttered, the image, as it were, or better, the soul of our words" (48)—but even as there is only one acknowledged poet, the occasional poet Bernardo Accolti, or, as he is called, Unico Aretino, present among the many courtiers at Urbino, so poetry is but one of the many arts seeking civilization through beauty, grace, clarity, harmony, and that studied nonchalance called sprezzatura. The court-centered role established in The Courtier for the poet and his poetry was acted out, with a few notable exceptions like Milton, by generations of gentlemen poets carefully maintaining their amateur status, even when they were in fact professionals, avoiding print in favor of manuscript circulation among a small circle of friends with similar tastes, using their poetry in an elaborate game of patronage, and conceiving of poetry as being in the service of the prince and the state. The courtly attitudes were also reflected in the major aesthetic principles of poetry: imitation of the ancients, obedience to the "rules," proper moral instruction, maintenance of decorum, the provision of pleasure, and the cultivation of an elaborate style. This courtly poetic linked poetry as directly to the

4

INTRODUCTION

aristocratic social ethos it served as its characteristic means of support, patronage, bound it economically to the court, the aristocracy, and the church. And as poetry at Urbino was but one of many civilizing arts, so in humanist education it was but one of many kinds of writing by which the orator and man of affairs was formed; in the general scheme of knowledge it was but one member of the broad category of humane letters which included all writing of merit. As Rene Wellek explains the situation, To speak sweepingly one can say, summarizing, that in antiquity and in the Renaissance, literature or letters were understood to include all writing of quality with any pretense to permanence. The view that there is an art of literature, which includes both poetry and prose insofar as it is imaginative fiction, and excludes information or even rhetorical persuasion, didactic argumentation or historical narration, emerged only slowly in the eighteenth century. (20) If in Urbino in 1528 we are somewhere near the beginning of the long tradition of literary art in the service of the court, we are close to its end in the royal library in the Queen's House in London in February, 1767, when George III leaves his own work and comes to visit the monarch of literature, Doctor Johnson, who was "in a profound study" in the king's library. Johnson is properly respectful of his king, even though he professes to be something of a Jacobite, but he rules in the palace of literature, the library, and the king asks deferentially to be instructed by him as the expert on such literary matters as the comparative size of the Oxford and Cambridge libraries, the state of Johnson's own writings, and the merits of various publications. "During the whole of this interview," Boswell tells us, Johnson talked to his Majesty with profound respect, but still in his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in the drawing room. After the King

T H E PLACE OF POETRY IN THE W O R L D

5

withdrew, Johnson shewed himself highly pleased with his Majesty's conversation and gracious behav­ iour. (384) The change in the relationship of the writer and the state enacted in Doctor Johnson's meeting with the king reflects a profound change beginning to take place by Johnson's time in the relationship of literary art to the social world. Johnson's dignity and independence before George III were based solidly on the growing dignity and independence of literature itself, which in turn rested not only on Johnson's great powers as a man and a writer but on a number of technological and social changes as well. Print, with the free literary marketplace and the public audience it created, made Johnson a Grub Street hack, but it also freed him and literature from courtly service, furnished the library in which the writer ruled, brought about the copyright laws of 1709 and 1774 vesting property rights in the author, and enabled Johnson to write the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield which announced the emancipation of the poet from courtly patronage. Johnson, of course, still drew a pension from the Crown and rendered services, and not always very attractive ones, for it. His complex relationship to patronage is characteristic of his general position as a writer for he was nearly always the defender of the old neo-classical formal literary values and at the same time the spokesman for a new social conception of literature which was developing at a time of change from a landed aristocratic society to an industrial, urban, democratic society. An unobstructed view of the place the new romantic literature eventually took in the modern world appears only when Wordsworth emerges from the clouds into the pure moonlight on Mount Snowdon, at the end of The Prelude, and looks at the scene of mountain, star, and moonlight, "the type Of a majestic intellect"; but the beginnings are there in Johnson's meeting with the king. In his independence are the foundations of the extraordinary development of literature over the next two centuries, the claims that would be made for its independence from the world and priority over other modes of knowledge, the body

6

INTRODUCTION

of complex interpretation and philosophical theory that would legitimate these views, the establishment of literature at the center of liberal education and as a bastion of culture. The O.E.D. does not record the term "literature" in something like the sense that we now use it—"writings esteemed for beauty of form or emotional effect"—before 1812, and even in 1933, the date of the shorter edition, can still add that this meaning is still used "less widely" than the older meaning of "polite letters." But during this time literature became a social institution in its own right. The two scenes in Urbino and London, two-and-a-half cen­ turies apart, illustrate what we all know, that the modes of thinking and writing we now call literature are neither uni­ versal nor eternal, neither psychological, linguistic, nor cul­ tural absolutes, but are the changing historical creations of particular societies in which literature is but one functioning part. We all know this, and everyday experience constantly calls it to our attention, but the dominant line of literary criticism over the last two centuries has resolutely ignored, and continues to ignore, the fact that literature, or poetry, or belles lettres, like any other category of privileged cultural texts, is conceived, shaped, and given a place in the world, though not, I will argue, strictly determined, by the leading values of that world. It is not simply the subject matter of literature—Sidney writing about courtly love and T. S. Eliot about the megalopolis—that is socially formed, but the very conception of literature, its distinction from other forms of writing, the canonical texts, the nature of the literary artist, the poetics or defining characteristics, and the literary func­ tions among men and in society. In short, its place in the world. It is the chief business of criticism to define the place of literature in the world, but, in a way that might at first seem paradoxical, it has been the task of the criticism which has grown up in the last two centuries around romantic and mod­ ern literature to locate the origins and shaping energies of literature in some place outside the world, in metaphysics, the creative imagination, the primal unconscious, the deep self,

T H E PLACE OF POETRY IN THE W O R L D

7

the myth-making faculty, or, more recently, the abstract struc­ tures of language and mind. By creating an image of literature existing in a timeless ideal world of its own where the poetic mind and its perfect texts remain essentially unchanged and untouched by the turmoil and disorder of human society, criticism has fulfilled its primary function by realizing the claims of romantic literature, making it a mode of knowledge superior to a world of much-disliked business and machines. That the romantic and modern conception of literature and its defining characteristics might be the creation of industrial, democratic society and reflect its values, in however complex, even reverse, a way, is an idea that has been from the beginning entirely unacceptable to literary people, and so criticism took up the work of establishing the independence of literature from the world. But there are times when the close ties of literature to society, its status as a social institution tightly bound to other institutions, become more obvious and there­ fore more insistent. We have looked briefly at scenes which illustrate two such moments in the history of literature: that in Urbino at the beginning of the sixteenth century when the Renaissance conception of poetry was being formed and its place in the world of the new strong central monarchies being assigned; and in London at the end of the eighteenth century when that old poetic and social order was passing and a new conception of literature was coming into being which ac­ corded with the changing social realities of printing press, marketplace economy, literate public audience, the growing dignity of the individual, and democratic politics. Many ex­ amples other than those I have used can be found, but these two scenes mark perhaps not the exact chronological moments but the major changes of modern literary history: the begin­ ning in Urbino of Renaissance courtly poetry in the service of the aristocratic order, and the transition in London from that courtly poetry in its last mode, neo-classicism, to the literature we have generally come to call romantic, the expression of the radically free individual. There may well have been another major literary transformation in the early twentieth century from romanticism to modernism, an event that Virginia Woolf

8

INTRODUCTION

dates, December, 1910, when "human character changed," and that is represented scenically in Dublin on June 16,1904, when Stephen Dedalus wanders under the weight of mean­ ingless things in search of a homeland through endless streets of the modern wasteland. Despite the recognition that a pro­ found literary shift took place at this time—similar, say, to the earlier Renaissance shift from the courtly to the meta­ physical style—the transition from high romantic to modern did not in my view, as well as that of many others, structurally alter the place of literature in the social world. The author of literature has remained in the modern as in the romantic pe­ riod an isolated individual, facing an alien society hostile to his values, and creating works of great, though unrecognized, value but no practical utility. For this reason it seems possible to use romanticism as I do in this essay, though with some continuing uneasiness with the term, as the name of the lit­ erary system which has been in place, with numerous stylistic or modal adjustments, in western society for approximately the last two hundred years. Chapter I undertakes a description of the social circumstances in which romanticism appeared and the ways in which its place in the world was subsequently objectified in what I call the Imaginary Library, "that great poem," as Shelley termed it, in A Defense of Poetry, "which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world." (Adams, 506) The place of romantic literature in the world has always been somewhat tenuous, but recently it has become even more uncertain under the pressure of various kinds of social change, to be discussed later, which have challenged by-now tradi­ tional romantic literary beliefs. To examine what is taking place and its relationship to social change, the body of this essay, Chapters II through V, examines in close detail a num­ ber of "scenes," more extensive but similar in kind to those brief scenes in Urbino and London, which dramatize this shift in the place of poetry and literature in the modern world. Where, however, those earlier scenes in a Renaissance court and a royal library, while glancing at an old poetic order which was ending, emphasize the new place a new kind of literature

THE PLACE OF POETRY IN THE WORLD

9

was beginning to occupy in the world, the scenes from the late twentieth century examined here place their emphasis on the failure of the central "realities" of romantic literature: the powers of the poet (Saul Bellow's, Humboldt's Gift, 1973), the validity of the literary text (Bernard Malamud's, The Ten­ ants, 1971), the ability of literature to affect readers and the world (Vladimir Nabokov's, Pale Fire, 1962), and the believability of the poetic as opposed to the scientific view of the world (Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon, 1969). The figure of the poet, the canonical literary texts, the com­ munications of literature with its readers, and the contrast between literature and science are all crucial points where literature has established its social reality and where, there­ fore, it interacts directly with other forces at work in the society. I have attempted in the introductory sections to each of these four chapters to assemble certain familiar facts and put them in a context which will at least suggest how we got to our traditional understandings of literature in each of these areas and why these understandings are being questioned at the present time. These four books constitute a very small (many will perhaps think too small and too American, if Nabokov may be called an American) sampling of the numerous social events, tech­ nological changes, and literary, critical, and polemical docu­ ments which reflect and contribute to the present confusion in the literary world. But they have the advantage of clarifying what is happening to literature at the present time, or at least of presenting the extreme case of what is in danger of hap­ pening and why it is likely. They treat only obliquely such contemporary critical issues as "the metaphysics of presence," the "problematics of narrative," or "readerly" as opposed to "writerly" texts, but all these novels are a kind of dramatized deconstruction, parables of the ultimacies of the old romantic conception of literature in our time. They all center on poets or novelists with very traditional conceptions of themselves and the nature of writing, and they thus offer fuller, more fleshed-out images of the familiar romantic values sketched out in Chapter I. But these artist-heroes are all uncertain about

10

INTRODUCTION

themselves and extremely self-conscious about the efficacy of their methods of working. Three are murdered, one dies in madness, and three are driven into exile; their writing is ac­ complished only with the greatest difficulty, has totally un­ expected results, disappears into the trash can, or trails off into silence. The deaths of these romantic poets and the fail­ ures of their writings dramatize the widespread feeling in our time that an old poetic order is passing, and in every case failure results from a confrontation of the writer with a social reality on which he can no longer impose his ways of feeling and working: Bellow's orphic poet is destroyed by modern materialistic demons of monstrous energy and power; Malamud's novelist tries to write about a love he cannot feel in a decaying tenement in the center of a hate-filled dying city; Nabokov's mad scholar edits a romantic quest-poem of which he understands, or cares to understand, scarcely a word; and Mailer's aging writer tries, unsuccessfully in my view, to im­ pose the romantic myth on NASA's conquest of the moon. Many of the great despairs of the twentieth century—the breakdown of our cities, the Faustian ironies of science, racial hatred, the efficiency of bureaucratic tyranny, doubts about the ability of mind to know or language to reflect reality— are concentrated in these images of the world which in these stories confront the romantic writer trying to play out the old roles and write in the old ways. Literature, these writers come to recognize, is not an absolute epistemology or mode of writ­ ing but only a literary way of seeing and ordering the world, finally dependent on what is happening in the remainder of society for its believability and continued functioning. By looking carefully at what the novels say about these matters it may be possible to get some understanding of what is really forcing change in our literary system at the present time, which direction it seems likely to take, and, by extension, the way in which cultural institutions generally relate and respond to the realities of the society in which they exist. It is this last matter, the complex connections of literature and society, which seems likely to be of most permanent interest, and the present book is offered as one example of how we

THE PLACE OF POETRY IN THE WORLD

11

might get away from the usual abstractions of literary criti­ cism, cultural history, and social theory to ground our study of this question on some solid evidence of just how literature is immediately affected by and responds to social change. This fascinating topic of "cultural poetics" is extremely complex for so short a book as this—so short, in fact, that I have called it an "essay" to acknowledge both its brevity and its tentative nature. But the brevity, I should add, is purposely chosen, for I believe that it is not possible to "prove" what I shall argue in the following pages, just as it is impossible to prove most critical arguments. The main line of the argument that liter­ ature is a social construct which changes in response to social change is therefore developed as clearly as possible from a few specific scenic descriptions of the place that literature, at least in the view of several American writers, presently oc­ cupies in the world. It may well be, of course, that traditional literary beliefs may not appear to be so shaky in Britain at the present time, or in South America where the traditional novel continues to flourish; or that in France and Germany romanticism may already seem to be totally gone. If, however, these American images of the literary scene are not entirely representative of the situation of all western literature, they still have the value of making clear what kinds of social events are pressuring radical literary change at this time and the ways in which that pressure is exerted and met.

I THE ACTUAL AND IMAGINARY LIBRARY: LITERATURE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

To THOSE INSIDE the academic institution, which is where most of the readers of this book will be, literature still seems, or at least has seemed until quite recently, "a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner anal­ ogous to the reality of the natural world ... given, unalterable and self-evident." (Berger, 1969, p. 59) For us, literature is as solid as the books shelved row on row in the literature section of the libraries, as real as the library catalogues which distin­ guish literature from other categories of knowledge such as history, philosophy, science, and, in some classification sys­ tems, popular fiction. Literature is there in the literary cur­ ricula of most of our universities and colleges, in the texts and anthologies used in them, in the examinations, set sequences of study, and the degrees given for proficiency in the subject. Literature is also objectively there in the publishing houses which devote a good deal of money and time to soliciting, editing, advertising, producing, and distributing the books that are the central fact of literature. Reviews, magazines de­ voted to literary studies, scrupulously edited texts, collected and selected editions, literary prizes, rare-book libraries, lit­ erary symposia and professional meetings, all are part of the vast and complex structure that states the values of literature and gives it objective status, making it solidly, really there. But literature is not only objects and events, it is also roles: poets, novelists, playwrights, critics, editors, literary histori­ ans, teachers, publishers, reviewers, library bibliographers, and students, all of whose deep involvement with literature gives it further substance. It is real too because the objective fact of literature has been reinforced, made denser and deeper,

LITERATURE AS A S O C I A L INSTITUTION

13

by a vast body of criticism which has over many centuries defined literature as a particular mode of writing, established a canon, arranged it in a chronology, linked its components in a history, interpreted individual literary works again and again, woven them together into various thematic structures, commented on and edited the texts with elaborate care, es­ tablished a literary way of reading texts, written the lives of the poets, compiled bibliographies and concordances, etc., etc. Despite its obviously crucial contributions to the deep objec­ tivity of literature, criticism in all its many aspects is usually thought of as a secondary activity of much less importance to literature than the primary work of the poets, the literary artists who created texts of such power that they lend credi­ bility to all the other critical, teaching, publishing, and library activities that surround them. Homer, Sophocles, Vergil, Hor­ ace, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Racine, Goethe, Wordsworth, Balzac, Flaubert, Doestoevsky, Joyce: this is the line, of both men and works, which seems to stretch out to the crack of doom, like the statues in the niches around many a nineteenth-century library, validating literature by making its artifacts as real as rocks and stones and trees. But, somewhat paradoxically, the ultimate reality of liter­ ature lies not so much finally in these tangible objects, persons, places, and events as it does in a conception of literature, a kind of "literary competence," comparable to "linguistic com­ petence," which is internalized in the minds of those who are a part of the institution. For us, and to a lesser degree for other members of western culture in which literature is but one minor institution, the idea of literature is something like a language, a system for organizing in a certain way a part of the written world, so completely internalized as to seem no longer learned but an exact image of an external reality which is there for all to see who will only look and reason rightly. In fact, however, the internalization of the idea of literature is considerably less absolute than that regularly achieved in the case of language, and more closely approximates the sit­ uation in religion. Although never equaling religion in its im­ portance to western culture, literature and religion resemble one another in many often-noted ways. Both institutions cen-

14

THE ACTUAL AND IMAGINARY LIBRARY

ter on a body of sacred texts, have established a canon of authorized works and an unauthoritative but always trouble­ some apocrypha, have built up a body of doctrinal interpre­ tation—theology in one case, criticism in the other—and have made strenuous and extensive efforts to define and fix ortho­ doxy. The great systematic theologians like Augustine, Aqui­ nas, or Tillich have, however, obviously been more successful in this regard than our metacritics like Aristotle, Scaliger, Coleridge, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Frye; and because literature has never been able to formulate an orthodox externalized literary world-view with the intricacy and comprehensiveness of Christian theology, it has always had more difficulty than religion—though religion has obviously not been entirely suc­ cessful in this regard—in fixing an internalized systematic con­ ception of literature as a given, necessary reality. There is nonetheless a commonly understood conception of literature which we have internalized and on which we have, at least until quite recently, loosely agreed. Phrased roughly, and very tentatively, it might run something like the following. Literature, the name we now give to an expanded version of what was earlier called belles lettres and poetry, is a body of texts distinguishable from other forms of writing, or of speaking in oral societies, such as science, history, and philosophy. A precise universal definition of literary, as dis­ tinguished from non-literary, texts has never quite been for­ mulated, despite many attempts, but literature is now gen­ erally thought to be identified by a group of leading characteristics such as fictionality, absolute structural coher­ ence, meticulous verbal craftsmanship, the meaningfulness of every part of the whole, metaphor, symbolism, etc. At times the literary text has been thought to have a particular subject matter: morals, love, universal truths, or, at the present, the feelings of the private self. A particular style: meter, rhyme, metaphor, complexity, clarity. A particular structure: begin­ ning, middle, and end, the unities, or organic development. Views on what constitutes the essence of a literary text have shifted from age to age and even from person to person so radically as to make it extremely difficult to say with any

LITERATURE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

15

precision just why one work can be defined as literature and another excluded from the category. But however vague the idea may be, it nonetheless subjectively seems to us very ob­ vious that literature is a special kind of text, and that its special status entitles it to such names as "myth," "the work of art," or the "literary artifact," all terms attributing objective reality to literature. The power of the literary texts derives, we believe, from their being the expression of certain innate psychological pow­ ers, variously called imagination, creativity, feeling, taste, or vision, a collective unconscious, or an aesthetic instinct. These psychological powers, however differently defined at various times, are thought to be primary powers of the mind, lying below and prior to the rational faculties, expressing our most essential humanity. Because these literature-making powers are thought to be always present in man, literature, despite local differences, appears, it is believed, wherever man does, and the poet, the generic and still most prestigious name for the creator of literature, can trace his lineage back, as older writers like Boccaccio and Sidney did, to Moses, to Orpheus, and to King David. Because literature is conceived of as truly universal, the western poet also finds his image in the anon­ ymous creators of works very different from his own, such as the Polynesian canoe songs, the tales of the oral singers of ancient epic, and the stories of the dreamtime told by the Australian aborigines. In this view of literature, the poet is a central figure, marked out in particular ways—most dramatically by blindness, mad­ ness, or sickness of particular kinds such as tuberculosis— which manifest his genius in physical terms. That genius lies, however, in the poet's peculiarly intense powers of imagina­ tion, creativity, or craft, and through him these powers find expression in the form and matter of literature. The poetic energies which originate in the poet and are embodied in the text are transmitted by this means to the reader or audience. Powerfully affected, we assume, by the especially potent language of the text, the reader is, in various formulations, purged of pity and fear, taught to shun vice and

16

THE ACTUAL AND IMAGINARY LIBRARY

follow virtue, made to know the best that has been thought and said, or psychically relieved by the controlled expression of forbidden desires. All else follows from these basic conceptions of literature. The historian collects from various places and times the works of literature already, independent of his judgment, there, wait­ ing to be identified and classified. The editor provides us with the true ideal texts, which exist prior to the corruptions in­ curred during the historical process of transmission. The critic explains and encourages appreciation of the given texts, while analyzing them to abstract and define the essential literary quality, even as the chemist analyzes lead and gold. The teacher teaches literature in such a way as to insure its effect upon a new generation of readers and to develop what is assumed to be their innate conception of literature, the literary competency that is there in the mind in potentia. To us, then, literature, in both its subjective conception and the objective forms which manifest the idea, appears and is a "given, unalterable, and self-evident" fact, a characteristi­ cally human way of thinking, feeling, speaking, and writing that appears wherever man does. It may and does change with time and place, we recognize; but only its outward forms, its accidentals, change, while it remains everywhere always the same in its essential nature. The degree to which it appears to us as an unquestionable fact of the human mind, of culture, of language, measures the success and strength of literature, for it is the mark of all functioning institutions that they obliterate any evidence that they have been socially con­ structed, and persuade us that they are inevitabilities of culture or nature. It becomes, in fact, possible to think of literature as a changing, man-made social institution rather than a nat­ ural or cultural given only at a point of time such as, I will argue, the present moment, when the fundamental beliefs and values of the institution are being questioned in so radical a fashion as to call attention to their inconsistencies, contra­ dictions and arbitrary nature—when the "facts," that is, cease to be entirely believable. For example, even in the minds of believers, severe doubts are being raised presently about the

LITERATURE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

17

consistency of the literary canon, which we have assumed to be unified by the presence in each literary work of some lit­ erary essence. But the canon, on closer inspection, of the kind it is getting now from critics like Frank Kermode, E. D. Hirsch, and Alastair Fowler, turns out to contain a wide variety of works, ranging from prose essays to oral epics, which seem to have been assembled historically in a somewhat random, at times even almost arbitrary, fashion. Furthermore, the canon appears to have changed more or less constantly, and no specific, generally agreed-upon definition of "literariness," the quality that makes it absolutely certain that a text belongs to literature rather than some other category of discourse, seems applicable to all the many diverse works in the canon: the probable rather than the possible? the sublime? a golden world replacing nature's brazen one? what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed? just representations of general nature? the unacknowledged legislation of the world? spon­ taneous overflows of powerful feelings? the best that has been thought and said? The multiplicity and the vagueness of these formulations of "literariness" coupled with the constant metamorphosis and the indeterminacy of the canon force us to face the pos­ sibility not that literature does not exist, for it clearly does subjectively in our minds and objectively in the culture, but that it may have no essence and no existence outside our mental formulations and social objectifications of it. That is, that it may be a classic instance of a man-made social insti­ tution rather than a necessary fact of nature or culture. But before considering further the recent events and questions which are forcing us presently to consider that literature may be a social institution, let us look briefly at what it means to think of it in this way, and at some of the evidence suggesting that the conception of literature was constructed in interaction with events in society. To consider literature as a social institution, similar to re­ ligion or the law, is scarcely revolutionary, since this has be­ come a characteristic modern way of analyzing all cultural activity, but it does require a considerable shift in deeply es-

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THE ACTUAL AND IMAGINARY LIBRARY

tablished ways of thinking about the arts in general. Instead of assuming, for example, that literature is a cultural universal, emerging everywhere out of the human psyche or some spirit of the language, an approach to literature as an institution requires that we think of it as a social construct, assembled over long periods of time, probably without any consistent master plan, by a great variety of people in a very complex interaction with one another, with the past, and with other social institutions. Man continuously makes literature, that is to say, even as he makes the rest of his social world, out of the bits and pieces—language, texts, politics, technology, rhetoric, morals—available in the culture for the process of assemblage. Each of these pieces is not inert, apparently, but itself exerts a shaping force and therefore affects the ultimate form and beliefs of the institution of which it is a part. The printed book has, for example, contributed in crucial ways to the development of literature, but the book, as McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change have recently demonstrated, has not been merely an inert tool used to objectify a pre-existent conception of literature but has itself certain qualities or tend­ encies such as "fixity" and an esprit de systeme which have in turn profoundly influenced the view of the nature of lit­ erature. The best concrete model I know of for this process of in­ stitutional assemblage in the arts appears not, unfortunately, in any social history of literature but in Andre Malraux's Les Voix du Silence where he shows us how the modern concep­ tion of the fine arts was constructed and objectified in the Renaissance and afterwards. The objects we now identify as art, Malraux argues, were originally parts of other institu­ tions. Pictures were aids to piety in churches, and portraits were monuments to the fame of great men and the visual genealogy of noble houses. Busts and images in stone stood in public squares as testimony to the greatness of cities and their political lineage. Art as we understand it was as yet unknown, says Malraux, for,

LITERATURE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

19

The Middle Ages were as unaware of what we mean by the word "art" as were Greece and Egypt, who had no word for it. For this concept to come into being, works of art needed to be isolated from their functions. What common link existed between a "Venus" which was Ve­ nus, a crucifix which was Christ crucified, and a bust? But three "statues" can be linked together. (53) From the beginning of the process of transforming portraits into paintings and gods into statues by removing them from their original contexts and placing them in museums, the way was open to collect and bring together within the museum and the category of art all objects which had the form, rarity, and workmanship now objectified as the distinguishing char­ acteristics of art. Stained glass, coins, candelabra, jeweled boxes, illuminations from old manuscripts, pottery, glass fig­ ures, mosaics, the alien images of ancient cultures such as Babylonia and Sumer, the cult masks of primitive tribes, all eventually joined one another in the museum as art objects stripped of historical provenance. Objects from many different institutions and many different cultures were thus removed from their original settings and institutions and recombined in the museum to give solid substance to the concept of art, which was now objectified by this process of assemblage as a universal way of thinking and making. And once the mu­ seum had reified the concept of art the artists then elaborated and further objectified it by creating to prescription the kind of objects which fulfilled the museum's definition of art. This is the actual museum, the place of art, of, in Malraux's evocative words, "golden plates on which no king any longer dines ... gods to whom no priest any longer prays." But what began as the actual museum, technology extended by means of the camera and the printing press into a vast musde imaginaire, a "museum without walls" in Stuart Gilbert's English translation. Not only did the camera make all potential works of art available in reproductions in printed collections, but at the same time it blew up to equal scale with major works the fine details of cylinder seals and scarabs, reached up to and

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pulled down the carvings from high on the cathedral wall, removed the frames from the pictures even as the museum had removed the objects from the civilizations they expressed, and photographed art objects from angles which emphasized stylistic distortions of "nature." In the musee imaginaire, that universal gallery of art, all relationship of works to reality or to a nurturing civilization of which they were the voice is dissolved to create a continuous world of art which finds its essence in style, the particular accent that the artist's vision gives its material. In the actual museum certain styles, Greek and Italian Renaissance, were at first favored over styles such as Gothic which were seen as clumsy failures to achieve a norm, but in the museum of the imagination no style is normative, and all styles are valued as the voices of silence, mute testimonies of man's ability to transcend time and shape reality. If art, the very idea of art itself, not just its objects, is the historical creation of a culture rather than the natural expres­ sion of a creative imagination or some aesthetic instinct, it follows that it must have been constructed, like other insti­ tutions, to fulfill psychological and social needs, to manifest and implement values, ways of looking at and ordering the world, that were thought to be desirable by the creating cul­ ture. For Malraux, art was created by the modern world to replace religion as a defense against the awesome emptiness of a world without God, soul, or purpose: Our Museum without Walls teaches us that the rule of destiny is threatened whenever a world of Man, whatever be the nature of that world, emerges from the world tout court. For every masterpiece, implicitly or openly, tells of a human victory over the blind force of destiny. The artist's voice owes its power to the fact that it arises from a pregnant solitude that conjures up the universe so as to impose on it a human accent; and what survives for us in the great arts of the past is the indefeasible inner voice of civilizations that have passed away. (630-31)

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In The Voices of Silence, Malraux gives us a concrete ex­ ample of the way in which a social institution of art is objec­ tified and interacts with its society, and we might think of the construction of the concept of first poetry and then literature over many centuries as the building of an Imaginary Library comparable in many ways to the musee imaginaire. There has never been any exact literary equivalent in bricks and mortar to the great art museum, for libraries have regularly contained many varieties of writing other than poetry. An actual literary library was realized only in the late nineteenth century when, to judge from printed catalogues, the classification systems of existing libraries distinguished literature from other types of books and began to shelve literary texts, criticism, biographies and histories, and the supporting bibliographies and indexes, in a separate portion of the library. While the Imaginary Li­ brary, the conception of literature, may lack the specific ob­ jective form that the great art museum gives to the fine arts, it seems nonetheless to have been "built," validated, objecti­ fied, and made believable in the same way as the other arts and other social institutions were. In the construction of the institution, print has been the primary building material. Print had many consequences for literature, but its most important effect was the objectification of the texts. A printed text not only became real property, as the English copyright laws of the eighteenth century recog­ nized, but the text itself, now fixed and stabilized by a printrun of several thousand identical copies, became a permanent, real thing, retaining its own form independent of writer and reader, and free of the constant process of "drift" character­ izing a manuscript tradition. But it was really the flood of books, which now began increasingly to be available, that by their number, as well as their bibliographic solidity, made the library of literature real. Not only did the size of actual li­ braries begin to increase enormously at this time, but the necessity of classifying these large numbers of books probably led to further refinement of the categories of writing, and certainly speeded up the process of establishing the central

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institution of literature, the literary canon. The "librarians" of literature, like the curators who assembled the collections of the art museum, continued the work begun in antiquity in the Alexandrian Library of pulling earlier writings from their original settings and constructing the canon of literature. Civic festivals like Greek drama, sacred writings like Job and the Song of Songs, political writings such as The Aeneid, enter­ tainment like Shakespeare's plays and Boccaccio's stories, philosophical musings like Montaigne's, instructions in tribal values like Homer's, and a vast body of earlier poetry and prose originally conceived of as primarily in the service of morality and society had already been slowly assembled to create the older conception of poetry. Now these works all became available in actual libraries by the power of print, and to them were added plays, novels, essays, selected histories, confessional autobiographies, and certain types of philosoph­ ical writings—all the many kinds of works which make up the diverse canon of literature. Not only were works of the past assembled in this way but contemporary works were, as they continue to be, constantly sifted and tested to establish which are canonical and which belong to apocrypha, to "popular literature" as we would now say. Print made possible an enormous expansion, a transition from the older "poetry" to a more universal "literature" in the eighteenth century, and the power of the press to make all works available eventually brought into the library, even as the camera did into the mu­ seum, the myths and stories of non-European societies as well: works culled from the writings of Islam, China, Japan, and India, primitive myths and folktales such as the American Indian stories of Coyote the Trickster, and the flyting contests of the Eskimo. The canon is only the most obvious institutional objectification of poetry and literature. Like other institutions, liter­ ature has developed its established roles or social identities, chiefly that of the poet, but increasingly in the eighteenth century and afterwards those of the critic, the scholar, the teacher, the reader, the man of letters, the publisher, the re­ viewer, etc., specifying particular characteristics and respon-

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sibilities for each. It has also built up, in something like the same way the canon was constructed, an elaborate body of criticism which tries to define and order literature, even as theology defines religion, thus making it more "real." Criti­ cism has also tried to confer ultimate reality on literature by linking it to the order of the universe, "cosmicizing" it in poetic mythologies like those of Blake, Shelley, Nietzsche, or Frye, writers of what we sometimes call metacriticism, which validates literature by linking it to the fundamental powers of the world, Dionysiac and Apollonian, or the four seasons of the year. Humbler forms of literary activity such as histories which give literature the order and solidity of historical con­ tinuity, carefully edited texts which establish literary works in an hypothesized ideal form, and even concordances and bibliographies whose care for the literary word in all its detail suggests the importance of the texts, all further validate and intensify the reality of literature. When literature is viewed as a social institution, the work of the scholar and critic becomes more important than it is in a view of literature as a natural or cultural given, for now the critic does not merely explain what the poet has written, but joins with the poet in constructing and objectifying the fact of literature. A glance at the table of contents of any collection of criticism will quickly reveal how little literary criticism there was in earlier periods. We go in these volumes very quickly from Aristotle's Poetics to the criticism of John Dryden, who may have been the first English poet to realize the necessity of supporting his poetry with a systematic view of the art. But after Dryden the amount of criticism and its complexity increase enormously, though all standard histories of criticism make criticism, like literature itself, as continuous and universal as possible by filling in the earlier years with selections from the writings of rhetoricians like Longinus, philosophers like Plotinus, theologians like Aquinas, and po­ litical theorists like Hobbes. Reconstructing the past to fit present needs is one of the chief functions criticism performs for literature, and it presumably came into being only when literature was becoming sufficiently institutionalized to re-

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quire criticism's services to define it in ways which assert its independence from other institutions and validate its impor­ tance. No theme has been quite so consistent in the literary criticism of the last two centuries as the strenuous insistence that literature is not like anything else, not even the world it was once thought to imitate, an assertion which from the institutional point of view can be seen as a continuing nec­ essary attempt to pull literature out of the mass of things and objectify it as quite different from anything else. Art, says Henry James in The Art of Fiction, "must take itself seriously for the public to take it so," and it is criticism that has given literature in general what James gave the novel, "a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself... of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison" which have made it "what the French call discutable." (Adams, 661) Finally, it is necessary to mention, even in so brief a list of legitimating and objectifying activities as this, the crucial func­ tion that education has played in realizing literature and its world-view. To speak of the literary establishment is by now to mean not much more than the literature departments of the colleges and universities, which largely control the serious discussion of literature, increasingly serve as the patrons of many creative writers, and, as the chief market for literary texts, exert a powerful influence on what is written. As Gore Vidal for one has stridently pointed out, literature has now become what can best be taught, i.e., what needs explication in the classroom or the critical book, and the crucial effects on literature of becoming a part of the educational curriculum will be discussed in Chapter IV. The actual library of literature—the canonical texts, the roles, literary criticism and history, the place of literature in education, and all the other many objective components of the institution—has historically been shaped by and exists to give objective form to an imaginary library, a conception of "literariness" or the essential quality which distinguishes lit­ erature from other forms of thinking, writing, organizing, and structuring the world. This literary world-view, or sense of how literature selects, arranges, and connects things, is, as I

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suggested earlier, more subjective than objective, a way of thinking about literature which has never been entirely stated and objectified. A number of masterworks—for instance, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, King Lear, Paradise Lost, The Prelude, Ulysses—seem to come very close to showing us the world as we believe poetry organizes it, which is why they are our masterworks. A number of major critical conceptions have also been extremely influential in stating and shaping our sense of what the imaginary library contains—such as, Coleridge's repetition in the finite mind of the infinite act of the Creator, Nietzsche's conflict of the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, or Frye's secular scripture, the great myths of concern. But the idea of literariness has never been quite objectified in poetic and critical texts to everyone's satisfaction, any more than the conception of justice has ever quite been codified in the legal code. Frye and other legitimating critics—Wordsworth in The Prelude is perhaps the most outstanding modern example— who have tried to ground literature on some absolute reality would have us believe that the difficulty arises from the fact that literature is an innate, transcendent Platonic idea which can never be fully or adequately reflected in its imitations. For Frye, for example, literature originates in a mysterious quality of mind itself, "some kind of force or power or will that is not ourselves, an otherness of spirit" (60) that links us to the sacred order of the universe. To consider literature as an ar­ tificial, changing social creation, responding and adjusting to such changes as the printing press, new forms of patronage, the growth of democratic societies, or the appearance of tel­ evision, would, though Frye is very knowledgeable about and sensitive to such matters, ultimately be unacceptable to him. As he puts it, "if there is no sense that [the imagination] is also something uncreated, something coming from elsewhere, man remains a Narcissus staring at his own reflection . . . unable to surpass himself." (61) That the imagination and the other central concepts of lit­ erature are created is just what the view of literature as a social institution posits, but without Frye's pessimistic view that this view condemns us to a perpetual narcissistic stasis.

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Instead, because we can never succeed in fully informing a central world-view of literature, never quite make the imag­ inary library actual, never quite achieve enough consensus to coordinate the many people, texts, interests, and structures which make up the institution, literature in both its objective and subjective forms is always in process. It is always en­ countering new people, ideas, situations, technologies, and always moving dialectically to adjust the perpetually threat­ ening newness it encounters to the history it carries along with it. The central values or world-view of literature as we have known it for about the last two hundred years seem to have been constructed in just such a give-and-take social process. Our essentially romantic conception of literature came into being in the late eighteenth century at a time of world-shaking social, political, and economic changes from an aristocratic to a democratic society, from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from an orientation to the past to a belief in progress in the future, and from a faith in religion to a belief in science. In these circumstances, which historians dramatize as the French and Industrial Revolutions, freed by the machinery of the new order from dependence on the old order, poets and literary critics responded in a rather remarkable way by build­ ing a new conception of poetry, which would gradually be­ come the more universal "literature," in a new more specific sense of the word, around an aesthetics of opposition. Ray­ mond Williams argues in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 that literature, along with the other arts, now became a way of defending "certain human values, capacities, energies, which the development of society towards an industrial civilization was felt to be threatening or even destroying." (36) Where the new industrial society was essentially urban, literature ideal­ ized nature and the countryside; where society valued change and progress, literature emphasized the old and the tradi­ tional; where society put its faith in reason and certainty, literature made a virtue of feeling, inspiration, imagination, ambiguity, mystery, and various types of "negative capabil­ ity"; and where society was oriented towards regularity, order,

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and mass-man, literature stressed individual genius, freedom, and the unique personality. Literature's opposition to industrial society is obvious in its continuously scornful treatment of modern bourgeois life, from Flaubert's Yonville to Lewis' Gopher Prairie, and of industrial cities from Blake's dark Satanic mills and Dickens' Coketown to Thomson's City of Dreadful Night and Eliot's urban wasteland. The industrial world's cities and its wealth were made by machines which became its chief image and the models of its thought and social organization, but the principal aesthetic values of literature became anti-mechanical: the nat­ ural, the organic, the intrinsic, the spontaneous, the human and humane. A machine invariably turns out quantities of identical mass-produced products, but a work of literature has been defined as the rare and absolutely unique product of unpredictable genius. The articles produced by the machine in the factory are valued solely by their utility measured by the price they command in the marketplace; literature has been defined as having no practical function, and its value determined, at least in theory, by its lack of popularity. The revolt of literature against the bourgeois world has been of an even more radical nature than its subject matter or the constant presence of its poets on one side or the other of the barricades in the service of radical causes—Byron in Greece, Baudelaire in Paris in 1848, Orwell in Spain, or Pound in Mussolini's Italy—might suggest. Whereas earlier poets had served society and acknowledged their subjection to the world by making mimesis in various modified forms the chief work of poetry, literature declared its independence of both society and the world by making poesis or fictionality one of its pri­ mary characteristics. "No artist tolerates reality," as Neitzsche puts it. Not all the books in the imaginary library are fiction, of course, for, like all social constructions, the canon is not entirely consistent. But fictionality comes closer than any other principle to being the literary sine qua non. Literature has consistently been defined as the pure product of the imagi­ nation, as the ideal world made by the creative powers of the poet, as the pure isolated object of beauty, as myth rather

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than literal truth. Art for art's sake is the most extreme expres­ sion of literature's freedom from the world, but it is only one of the many ways in which literature has tried to establish itself as the kind of writing in which man continues to assert his power to make up the world rather than merely under­ standing it as given. "I had a world about me—'twas my own; I made it" (Prelude, 3.144-45) is the characteristically simple way Wordsworth puts the idea behind the emphasis on literary fictionality and the independence from the world it asserts for literature. In other words, the institution of literature as it developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as we still know it in its most orthodox form, was built up not ex rtihilo, but in close interaction with certain profound social changes. The literary world-view and values—imagination, mystery, creativity, tradition, interaction of man and nature—and the canon, roles, history, criticism, and bibliography which ex­ plain and reify the world-view grew not purely out of the mind of man but out of a complex process of social adjustment in an attempt to assert and maintain an endangered way of thinking and feeling about man's nature and relationship to the world. The ways in which this happened are so manifold and complex that they can never be fully worked out, but the main lines of development seem clear enough by now to make it seem more than merely feasible to consider literature as a social institution made in society and made out of the inter­ action of inherited ways of feeling and social facts. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of literature, and the other arts, that the individual texts, even while maintaining that they are grounded in some absolute reality, reveal, as the texts of no other institution do, the process by which they, the larger institution of literature, and all other institutions are con­ structed. Every major work of literature is an exercise in world-making. Assembling many parts of other poems and pieces of the world, literature constructs fictitious worlds in order to realize some purely human aim such as pleasure, wonder, beauty, or meaning. Art thus openly enacts the char­ acteristic human gesture which underlies all institutions, mak-

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ing the world over into the shape that we desire. Potentially this overt world-making is a great strength of art, for it places it at the very center of human activity. But it may be its great weakness as well, since by failing to conceal its artificiality, art can never quite command that belief in its reality which seems to be a distinguishing mark of the strongest institutions. We make up our world, but it may not be entirely satisfactory to know that we do so. To speak of literature as an institution is to suggest a set of beliefs and arrangements manifesting those beliefs fixed in the status quo. But though institutions are conservative, and slowing and softening change seems to be one of their chief functions, they are also, it is generally agreed, constantly though gradually changing, adapting in a dialectic manner to an almost infinite number of shifts and changes in their nat­ ural, historical, and social environment. We live on the edge of chaos and we live in a state of change, sometimes cata­ strophic change, sometimes more gradual, and the history of every institution is ordinarily a continuing and unbelievably complex series of adjustments which attempt at once to as­ similate new events into old orders and accommodate the old order to the new events. According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the pattern, at least in sci­ ence, is not evolutionary but a gradual accumulation of con­ tradictions within the old paradigm which eventually become intolerable enough to force a radical shift to a new paradigm. But even in this revolutionary type of development, many of the larger institutional features remain in place, such as the assumption in science of the regularity of nature and the ac­ cepted methods of proof. We have come to take for granted social histories of great institutions such as the family, the law, systems of punishment, religion, and the state, and we need a similar history of lit­ erature. Such a history would ideally show the way in which the imaginary library of literature has been developed and changed in interaction with such great social changes as the shift from a manuscript culture to a print culture, or from an aristocratic to a democratic society, which have affected lit-

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erature directly and deeply. What I offer in the following chapters is not even the outline of such a history but what might be called a small-scale, localized case-study of the way in which literature and society are interacting at the present and the institution is responding to some very basic challenges. Although we normally tend to treat literature as one great continuous activity extending from Orpheus to the present, the evidence presented earlier would suggest that it undergoes radical reorganizations from time to time. The transformation we know the most about is that of the middle to late eighteenth century when "poetry" became "literature" and the orienta­ tion shifted from service to the established aristocratic order to a reaction against a newly dominant middle-class order. Although it had been developing for some time, the shift from neo-classical to romantic literature appears as a sharp revo­ lutionary change, but, if my understanding of what happened is accurate, the change occurred not so much because of in­ ternal contradictions in the system, such as Kuhn describes as causing revolutions in science, but because of radical changes in society outside the literary institution which called its fundamental values, its world-view, into question and forced the poets and critics to explain their art in different ways and develop a new explanation of the function of lit­ erature in society. Although it is much too early to say with any certainty that we are facing a crisis of similar proportions now in the late twentieth century, it is nonetheless undeniably obvious that we have arrived at a point where literature as we have understood it, with numerous modifications such as symbolism and modernism, for about two hundred years is being challenged in very fundamental ways, both externally and internally. This may be only a passing storm which can be absorbed and managed by minor adjustments within the literary institution, or it may be, as some contend, the begin­ ning of the deconstruction, in both the critical and social senses, of the actual and imaginary libraries which will require complete rebuilding in the future. The problems are most obvious in the schools, and this is crucial, for literature now exists primarily in the universities.

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In part this problem is a matter of plain bad luck, of a kind which could not have been anticipated. Demographic changes have created a situation in which decreasing numbers of stu­ dents will go to college, and in consequence many fewer and less attractive jobs teaching literature will be available to the students in graduate schools, which have become the center of professional literary study. Technology, which made the modern system of literature possible in the first place by means of print and the book, continues to evolve and has now pro­ duced various pictorial means of communication such as tel­ evision and film which have contributed to the "literacy crisis" and threaten to replace Gutenberg Man with generations un­ easy with and uncertain about the values of the printed page and the efficacy of the printed letter. At the same time, a turn to various kinds of practical training and social sciences like economics and politics has caused enrollments in literature classes to decline across the country and made it clear that students feel an increasing doubt about the power of literature to contribute to a meaningful or useful understanding of man and his world. What for some are only unfamiliarity with the printed lan­ guage and a doubt about the utility of literature have become for others a radical cause seeking "The Death of Literature" and the desacralization of its works because they are believed to serve a bankrupt culture. While, as Meredith Tax puts it, "Wallace Stevens chooses to write about arpeggios and pine­ apples" (16), and criticism has become only "commodity fet­ ishism" (23), "the extreme inhumanity of our civilization— its class system, its racism, its gross commercialism, its male chauvinism, its institutionalized violence, its imperialist wars" (25) is ignored by the writers and teachers of literature. Per­ haps one of the most poignant expressions of the social failure of literature in recent times came, however, from a different direction and from deep within the literary establishment when Lionel Trilling, whose professional life was based on the Arnoldian belief that the mind can be widened and the world improved by exposure to "the best that has been thought and said," expressed publicly his perception that

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modern literature carries a "bitter line of hostility to civili­ zation" (19) which has rigidified into "an idea, even an ide­ ology" (16) of fixed antagonism to the world. Literature, he came to see, "generates its own assumptions and preconcep­ tions, and contrives its own sanctions to protect them" (15), and his response to this discovery that literature is not truth but the institutionalization of a particular kind of truth speaks precisely for many who placed their ultimate trust in the values of literature: My sense of this difficulty leads me to approach a view which will seem disastrous to many readers and which, indeed, rather surprises me. This is the view that art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth and does not always point out the right way, that it can even generate falsehood and habituate us to it, and that, on frequent occasions, it might well be subject, in the inter­ ests of autonomy, to the scrutiny of the rational intel­ lect. (15) Literature is ceasing, these and many other signs indicate, to seem believable and useful to large and important groups in the society on whom it has depended for support, and its external problems are reflected within the institution where literary criticism is increasingly failing to carry out its tradi­ tional functions of interpreting the works and explaining their values in such a way as to justify them to new audiences and adjust them to changing social and psychological needs. In its conservative forms, criticism has become so repetitive, Alex­ andrian, and narrowly focused on minute questions that it has lost much of even its professional audience; at the same time it has lost its authority by offering endless rearrangements of the pieces of the paradigm and conflicting impressionistic interpretations of most of the texts. At its most advanced and aggressive level, criticism has reacted and taken for itself the apt name of "deconstruction," for it is systematically dis­ mantling the traditional conception of literature by analyzing its inconsistencies, contradictions, and "problematics." The attack has been disturbing, at least within critical circles, be-

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cause it has raised questions, not easily dismissed, about the central values and root concepts of literature: the truth of its claim to offer a privileged vision of reality, the genius and special imaginative powers of the poet, the autonomy and authority of the text, and the ability of literary language and the texts to communicate intended meanings to readers. These deconstructive views are strongly resisted by many able critics, but they do express in critical terms a number of the radical doubts about literature which are troubling us at present and which will have to be assimilated or accommodated to in some way before the institution stabilizes again. Our major writers have also found it increasingly difficult to maintain the old assumptions and to write in traditional ways. The pessimism of our poets and novelists may not al­ ways be as deep as Samuel Beckett's—"I have nothing to say, and I can only say to what extent I have nothing to say"— but many of our best writers seem to have lost the earlier certainty that literature is a "privileged" form of statement. And, in typical romantic fashion, they have continued to make their bafflement and concern the subjects of their own writing. This is a kind of negative triumph in which, as John Barth says in his essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," the "artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation. . . ." (78) But the "ultimacies" are indeed felt very strongly, and in work after work, like the four novels dealt with in detail later in this book, the writers portray the maker of fictions in extremis, laughing mockingly at the pretensions of his own art, or struggling desperately to perform the tradi­ tional high tasks of literature, to express the powers of the imagination, to create the World's legislation or myths, to construct texts of absolute perfection, and to encourage men to understand themselves and their world in what has con­ fidently been assumed to be a truly "human" way. The problems troubling literature (if I may continue so to personify it) sketched, in briefly above may well be, for all the passion with which they are argued by many, particularly in

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the universities, only the passing fads of a moment in an institution which always seems to feel socially marginal and always seems therefore to need crises to maintain its sense of vitality and usefulness. I myself take these changes more se­ riously, for reasons which will become clear during the course of this book, but however they are understood, the felt dif­ ficulties of the moment offer an unusual opportunity to ex­ plore at the time that it is happening the encounter of a wellestablished traditional set of institutional assumptions about literature with certain events and changes in the world which pose a direct challenge to the traditional views. These circum­ stances have the effect of suddenly raising, as they did for Trilling, the possibility that literature is not truth but an in­ stitutionalized way of looking at and ordering things, and perhaps even not the best way of doing just that. The view­ point once removed from within the literary institution to a point outside it, it becomes increasingly clear just what it is that literature has tried to do and the ways in which it has tried to do it. In the terms of the sociologist, "institutional analysis" then becomes possible, or as some modern critics would put it more forcefully, "demystification." However the process is described, the moment an institution is seriously challenged not only reveals its arbitrary nature and its char­ acteristic ways of achieving its ends, but also opens up what otherwise is closed to view, the ways in which institutional values are dependent on the larger society. My approach to this topic, which leaves me partly within literature even while I am looking at it from outside, is to examine in detail four modern American novels (if Nabokov is allowed to be an American and Mailer a novelist) that dramatize the encounter of some of the central institutional aspects of literature—its world-view, the poetic role, the nature of literary language and the stability of the text, its place in education, and its ability to communicate with its audience—with certain social forces such as the power of science and the destruction of community in our cities, which now seem, at least to the writers of these novels, to threaten the transformation or even

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death of traditional literary values. In my view these novels offer a clear analysis of the deep social causes for some of the more obvious disturbances in the literary establishment and at the same time reveal the nature of that establishment. Each of these novels has as its central figure a literary artist with conventional ideas about the poetic role, literary art, and the function of literature in relation to the world and to read­ ers. These fictional authors are all involved in a desperate attempt to write a traditional poem or novel. This is a familiar type of romantic literature, but in earlier instances of the Kunstlerroman the struggle to write usually ends in the kind of affirmation that Wordsworth manages at the end of The Prelude, or Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These contemporary novels, however, end with the discovery that certain facts about the poet, the world, language, other people, make it impossible to achieve the tra­ ditional triumph of art over life. As direct confrontations of the traditional expectations of literature with the actualities of the world as they have come to be perceived in the late twentieth century, these novels open up the possibility that literature may be not truth but only an elaborate way of constructing a certain kind of desired "truth," directly influ­ enced by and sensitive to the currents of change in society. Many contemporary writers do not feel any very profound sense of crisis about literature and continue successfully to write fairly conventional novels, and it may be that the four American novelists I have chosen have a peculiarly American sensitivity to the problem; but I believe that they are fairly representative of widespread feelings among western writers and that they do focus for us certain primary questions about the relationship of literature to society. I could have chosen many other novels, but I settled upon these four not only for their power and honesty but because each turns on the failure of one of the central values of literature. Pale Fire shows the inability of a poet in a university setting to use language to communicate with his reader or with anything outside himself, Humboldt's Gift focuses on the loss of belief in the imaginative

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powers of the poet, The Tenants records the breakdown of the craft tradition and the sanctity of the literary text, and Of a Fire on the Moon deals with the inability of a writer to force his own myths on the world of science, technology, and busi­ ness.

II MIGHTY POETS IN THEIR MISERY DEAD: THE DEATH OF THE POET IN SAUL BELLOW'S H u m b o l d t ' s G i f t

IF WE WERE to choose a single event to mark the beginning of poetry in the modern western world, it would have to be Petrarch's coronation with laurels in the Senate House on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday, 1341. The proces­ sion was headed

by twelve noble youths in scarlet, reciting poems com­ posed by Petrarch for the occasion. Then came six prin­ cipal citizens, in green and crowned with flowers. Then the Senator. . . . He wore a laurel wreath, as did his eminent attendants. ... The procession climbed the Capitoline Hill, the site of the Temple of Jupiter. It entered the twelfth-century Senatorial Palace and mounted to the audience chamber on the second floor. The officials took their places. Trumpets sounded, and the candidate for the laureatship was bidden to stand forth. He appeared, bareheaded, wearing King Robert's royal gown. He pro­ nounced his Coronation Oration, lasting about half an hour, and concluding with a request for the laurel crown of poetry. He then cried three times: "Long live the Ro­ man people and the Senator, and God maintain them in liberty!" He knelt before the Senator, who after a short speech asked the assembled citizens if they approved the award. They did so, weeping. The Senator took from his head the laurel crown and placed it on Petrarch's, saying: "This crown is the reward of merit." Petrarch recited a sonnet on the heroes of Rome. . . . The audience clapped

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and shouted: "Long live the Capitol and the Poet." (Bishop, 168) Although he presented it as a continuation of a long-interrupted Roman ritual, the ceremony was designed and carefully staged by Petrarch to create an image of the poet as hero, a resurrected Christ-figure reborn on Easter who out of his "genius given . . . from on high" would set forth "under the veil of fictions . . . truths physical, moral, and historical . . . in the stable and enduring style of a true man of letters." (Petrarch, 308) As Petrarch spoke these words, Rome lay be­ low him in ruins: the population had diminished to less than fifty thousand, the Papacy had moved to Avignon, the streets were the battleground of rival gangs of nobles, the surround­ ing countryside was an unwholesome marsh, and the roads into the city were controlled by bands of brigands. Rome in all its former greatness existed only as an idea in the mind of the poet, who took the text for his oration not from the Bible but from Vergil's Georgics (III, 291-92): "a sweet longing urges me upward over the lonely slopes of Parnassus" (per ardua dulcis / raptat amor). But here, in that place of former imperial glory, and on the day of Christ's resurrection, sur­ rounded and cheered by the people, crowned by the state, the poet claimed for himself the role of a poetic savior who by means of his "divinely given energy" and the power of his art would restore and combine both the Christian Eden and the pagan Golden Age. The laurel crown symbolized the claims being made for poetry, the evergreenness of the poet's fame, the adoration of beauty in the person of Laura, the continuation with the clas­ sical past through the god Apollo whose sacred tree the laurel was, the identification with Christian love through the tra­ dition that Christ's cross was made of laurel, and "foreknowl­ edge of the future" since laurel made dreams come true. But although Petrarch recited one of his own poems during the coronation on the Capitoline Hill, it is the poet who is at the center of the ceremony and is the principal image of the poetic values which are to transform the world. And in the centuries

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since Petrarch the figure of the poet has remained at least as central to literature as have the works of art, the texts, he creates. As we look back along the course of Western poetry and literature, we see a long succession of remarkable poets as much as we see a succession of poems, for the institution of literature and its values have been objectified as much by the poet as by his poems. Petrarch's coronation ceremony shows openly, in an extraordinary way, how the role of the poet, his public image, can be created and made real; in a sense that would perhaps have surprised Horace, the poet is regularly made, not born. The history of literature has been in part a continual process of making the poet. Such public ceremonial role-making as Petrarch's coronation is rare—the only modern equivalent, a much diminished one, may be the public reading—but the same function has been regularly per­ formed by the creation of poet and artist figures in literary works. At times, in a literary re-enactment of Petrarch's cor­ onation, writers create images of themselves in their own work—Milton in Paradise Lost or Wordsworth in The Prel­ ude—but more often the poet is imaged as another writer— Ennius in Petrarch's Africa, the poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Blake's Milton, Arnold's Empedocles. Although MacPherson failed to pass off his Ossian, and Chatterton his Rowley, as historically real, their attempts are revealing for they are only extreme, literal instances of what other writers, including Pe­ trarch, have tried to do more obliquely: to establish and make real, for both poets and public, a particular image of the poetic character. Sidney's Astrophil, Shakespeare's Prospero, Pope's Cibber (by way of negative example), Goethe's Tasso, Balzac's Louis Lambert, Browning's Sordello, and on to a host of mod­ ern artist-heroes such as Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach, and Sartre's "Saint Genet," all are prime instances of institutional role-making, the creation of a central reality of literature, the poet. In the complex relationship of individuals and institutions, roles function in the first instance to direct the actions of individuals and provide them with social identities, but as the role is absorbed and internalized, becoming a subjective real-

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ity, a self, for the individual, he adjusts it to his own particular circumstances and lives it out in his own particular way. The lives of the poets then become themselves definitions and re­ alizations of the role of the poet, and poetic biographies which record these lives become, like Boswell's Life of Johnson, where the writer and the biographer can be literally seen col­ laborating to create the image, a crucial feature of literature. Literature is for us not only a line of texts but Sidney's ex­ emplary death at Zutphen after giving his water to a wounded soldier who needed it more than he; Ben Jonson's swaggering, strutting public enactment, through many a violent quarrel, of the importance of a poet and his poetry to a society; Milton's close involvement with revolution and regicide, and his subsequent blindness and exile; Swift's great efforts to live a life of reason collapsing into the dreadful madness which overtook him at the end; and Dr. Johnson, a personality so titanic as nearly to overwhelm his writings, physically gro­ tesque, frequently nearly mad with depression, an impover­ ished hack most of his life, endlessly talking for victory and heroically facing the hard facts of human life. All these lives are as much a part of literature as the works which came out of them, not only because we associate the lives with the works, but because the lives themselves manifest and make real the complex of values lying at the base of literature. Indeed, the poet has been so central to literature that when we find poems but no poet, we sense an intolerable mystery. A case in point is Shakespeare, who had a real genius for anonymity and left his texts to speak alone, or to remain silent; unable to accept this void, folk-tradition and criticism have combined either to create a satisfactory myth of Shake­ speare the schoolmaster-deerslayer and London bon-vivant, or to fill the unacceptable biographical absence with the aris­ tocratic reality of Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. Every writer plays the poet in his own particular fashion, but he also works within the boundaries of a dominant type, and in our tradition since Petrarch there have been two major forms of the poetic role. Before Petrarch was crowned on the Capitoline Hill, he had

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been examined, at his insistence, for his learning and wor­ thiness of the laurels by King Robert of Sicily, whose gown the poet wore during the ceremony. He was crowned by a Roman senator, and after the coronation he crossed the river to St. Peter's and laid his laurels on the altar there. The great power being claimed for the poet was thus dramatically sit­ uated within an enclosing social framework of the state and the church, supporting society and supported by it in turn. The place Petrarch thus defined for the poet and poetry within the dominant social order remained, with some rare excep­ tions like the playwrights of the English public theater, and Milton, the norm for nearly four hundred years. During this time, with notable stresses and strains, the image of the poet, in life and in art, was that of a servant of the established social order who was finally of less importance than his poetic serv­ ices, which celebrated the fame of great men, gave pleasure to others, imitated the social world, and taught established moral doctrine. "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme," as Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 55, making the poetic monument into the thing which matters, not for itself, but because its chiseled perfection gives its subject the lapidary quality needed to outlast "slut­ tish" time. Once, however, poetic values shifted in the late eighteenth century from the neo-classical to the romantic emphasis, which is to say from the poetic thing made in the service of society to the poetic act of making, from rules to imagination, from the mirror, in Abrams' terms, to the lamp, then the poet assumed a new importance and the role was modified ac­ cordingly. Poetry now came entirely out of the poet's creative imagination and received its form not from the world or from patterns set by rules derived from the poetry of the past, but from the esemplastic psychological powers of the poet. In these circumstances, the poet almost entirely overwhelmed the poem, and in some extreme cases the writings came to seem only an adjunct to or part of the scenery for a "poetic life," particularly in the case of minor writers such as Huysmans, D'Annunzio, or Artaud. The definitions of the imaginative

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poetic power giving primacy to poets have ranged far: Blake's vision, Coleridge's exploration of the nature of creative imag­ ination, Wordsworth's backtracking the growth of a poet's mind to the mighty forms with which it communicates, the symbolists' and surrealists' search for mind-created images of supernatural luminosity, Yeats' concern with automatic writ­ ing and magic, Freud's exploration of the power of the id, Jung's collective unconscious, Joyce's epiphanies, Richard's balance of appetencies, and the continued interest in dream states and drug-induced trances, the older opium or the newer LSD. Conservative critics have called this psychic power which generates literature "feeling," or "sensitivity," or "taste," and have tied it closely to the rational faculties in the production of literature; but more radical critics have called it "pure imagination," "the power of vision," "the primal uncon­ scious," or "the myth-making faculty" and have attributed to it the power to create its own language and its own organic form without regard for the patterns of logic. But whatever it may have been called, it has been constantly posited as the source of the essential energy in literature, making lovelier and truer things than the rational mind can ever discover in its laboratories or derive from its computers, whose "bits" of information are only "sands upon the Red sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright." Once literature was thought to derive and take its shape from the creative imagination, the literary artist as the source and bearer of that mighty power became the primary objective manifestation of it. The result was a new role, the romantic literary artist—Rilke's "bees of the invisible"—men of genius and talent, possessed of rare powers and extraordinary ex­ pressive forces, capable of seeing through the visible world to or creating out of the mind the wholeness, harmony, and radiance society so signally lacks. The great mythic or para­ digmatic presentation of the romantic poetic role is Words­ worth's Prelude, subtitled the "Growth of a Poet's Mind," tracing from the vantage point of later years the process by which during childhood and early manhood the poet was confirmed in his vocation by becoming aware, at first through

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the mediation of nature, of his mind's knowledge of beneficent spiritual powers that exist prior to this life and manifest them­ selves in it, speaking to men through nature and through elected poetic minds. The later dominant version of this myth of the poet and his powers is James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Stephen Dedalus, submerged in the urban, nationalist society from which Wordsworth had fled to the Lake Country, renounces family, church, and coun­ try to go into exile to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Individual versions of the myth or role of the romantic poet vary over time, but all tell essentially the same story of an extraordinary individual of a particularly sensitive and imag­ inative cast of mind. He is always engaged in a desperate battle with some form of the modern urban, industrial world and the materialistic, logical ways of thinking which create it. In this struggle he attempts to use his powers of emotion, creativity, and a sense of the irrational mystery and wonder of the universe to create the unity which only love and poetry can make of the random fragmented surface of the modern world. Romantic literature has been a defense of the private individual, of the profound irrational depths of mind, of na­ ture, and imagination against the city, logic, science, industry, machinery, bureaucracy, and tyranny, and its values have been expressed not only in its texts but through the role of the isolated, rebellious, imaginative poet engaged in creating the better world of poetry. Because the poet is so central to our conception of literature, one of its primary objectifications, a guarantee in his role and person of the special nature and value of literature, any at­ tempt to demystify the role or the person who occupies it by calling his powers into question endangers the status of lit­ erature itself. Perhaps because of the marginal situation of literature and its writers in the modern world—and by modern I continue to mean western society since about 1750—the special vocation of the poet or literary artist has been contin­ uously questioned, and the writers, themselves more than a little uneasy about their own powers, have responded by mak-

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ing the poet and his art a central literary subject. By taking poets and poetry as their subject writers have continued the great work of defining and making the poet real by construct­ ing heroic images of themselves, and at the same time have met and explored the major doubts about the value of the role and its powers. Wordsworth's Prelude, the epic expres­ sion of the romantic poetic role, was written by a poet trying to determine if indeed he did have poetic powers by seeking their sources in a careful re-examination of the experiences of his early life. And the doubt which is the occasion for the poem recurs throughout in deep depressions and long flat stretches of tedium and wandering in which the poet becomes a mere observer of a world of objects which close around him and in which he can no longer feel any communication with transcendental realities. But he also keeps finding moments, the famous "spots of time," in which he can discover at least intimations of immortality which reaffirm his own special election as poet and his identity with the awesome powers which lie behind and shape the world. And so the poem can end on a high affirmative note of the mission of poets as prophets of the ability of the human mind to shape reality: A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which 'mid all revolutions in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine. But Wordsworth's high hopes for the poet and his poetry— "Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth"—have been maintained only with great difficulty and in diminished form by his suc­ cessors. In this century the writer has increasingly portrayed himself in ever more desperate circumstances, wandering like

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Dedalus through a nightmare world of Dublin nearly over­ whelmed with the trivia of reality, totally isolated like Hesse's Steppenwolf, degraded like Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach, imprisoned and accursed like Sartre's Jean Genet, telling his stories in the heart of darkness like Conrad's Marlow. Ihab Hassan has described in detail this increasing despair and "dialogue of silence" (x.) in The Dismemberment of Orpheus, and the deconstruction of the poet has proceeded relentlessly through Beckett's long confessions that he has nothing to say and Sartre's renunciation of the traditional role of the writer in Les Mots, to the actual willed disappearance from any public existence of writers like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. This inability of writers to maintain the traditional poetic role established by the great romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth has been picked up and extended by literary critics, first by the new critics who exiled the writer from literature in order to exalt the text, and more recently by structuralist and deconstructionist critics who have begun to speak of "La Mort de l'auteur"—the title of an essay by Ro­ land Barthes. According to Barthes, who sums up many tend­ encies to deconstruct the poet in modern criticism, the poet is "a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person.' " (142-43) In the place of the author, or, as we have been calling him, the poet, Barthes substitutes the impersonal "scriptor" who does not create in his "texts" a personal meaning expressing his own particular observations and feelings but merely inscribes "a tissue of signs" which derive not from the poetic mind but from the structures of language and the various semiotic systems which furnish the scriptor with the only conceptions of reality he can have. "Language writes, not the man," is the way Hei­ degger puts it. It is against this disappearance of the poet into a mere grammatical subject which is nothing more than "the instance writing," that Harold Bloom has opposed his "anx-

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iety of influence," which attempts to save the romantic con­ ception of the imaginative, creative, or "strong" poet by turning him into an Oedipal rebel trying to overthrow his predecessors and create himself out of himself alone. But Bloom too believes that this struggle takes place in the modern world in the context of "battles against the death of poetry" (12) and a situation in which the modern "belated" poet strug­ gles against "the exhaustion of being a latecomer." Bloom sees the desperation of the poet as rooted in the bafflement of a Freudian energy that demands freedom and self-authentication but is blocked by belatedness, by writing in a time when the weight of the predecessor poets makes it nearly impossible to create a new voice and poetic self. Seen from long-range philosophical and historical views of criticism, our writers' present difficulty in maintaining their images as poets, or living out the traditional role may well be something like the impossibility of escaping the infinity of intertextuality Barthes describes, or freeing themselves of what W. J. Bate calls The Burden of the Past and Bloom The Anxiety of Influence, the debilitating feeling of the great work as al­ ready having been done and of a life lived in the shadow of the poetic dead. In one of the novels that will be examined in detail later, Nabokov's Pale Fire, these problems do play a large part in the difficulties of the fictional poet John Shade, but most of the many contemporary novels and poems about writers trying to write show their fictional poets struggling to survive and write in the face of a hostile and changing world which no longer has any place for them. In other words, the poets in these works are dismembered and demystified not in the first instance by philosophic or psychological anxieties, but by historical and social events generating those anxieties. As a social institution, literature and its component roles are subject for their continued validity to the situation in the larger society. Certainly this is the case in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, where the death of one poet and the silencing of another writer offer insights into the nature of the social changes which are unmaking that grand image of the poet and his powers that Petrarch constructed in Rome so long ago.

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Poets have always, says Charles Citrine, the narrative voice and center of consciousness of Humboldt's Gift, had a difficult time of it in America: Edgar Allen Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and tech­ nological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. (118) Humboldt's Gift is the story of two more American writers who are overpowered by the country in different ways. The first is the romantic poet Von Humboldt Fleisher—named after a statue his mother saw in the park, born on the IRT, and modeled closely on Delmore Schwartz, whose combina­ tion of extraordinary talent and failure bid fair to make him the representative poet of the 40's and 50's. The second is Humboldt's younger friend and admirer, Charles Citrine—a name suggesting a semi-precious stone?—a successful writer of many kinds of work: a play, movie scripts, essays, com­ missioned biographies, and historical studies. When Hum­ boldt "made it big" in the late 1930's with the publication of his slim volume of poems Harlequin Ballads (Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities), Citrine, then a student in love with literature at the University of Wisconsin, took the bus to Greenwich Village to sit at the feet of this poetic idol, the last remnant of the heroic age of pure visionary poetry— Wordsworth, Keats, Verlaine, and Whitman are the figures iftost frequently mentioned—living in a leaden age of prose and realism. But whatever the diminishment, both the older poet and the younger writer are deeply committed to a pure romantic conception of the nature and social value of poetry and art. Romanticism has always been in large part negatively de­ termined, and Humboldt and Citrine characteristically find the materialistic society of the twentieth century completely

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unsatisfactory, an "awful tangle," "stale dirt," a "world of categories devoid of spirit" waiting "for life to return," (17) a place where "three-fourths of life ... are obviously missing." (340) In this wasteland, the poet's divine mission as Humboldt conceives it is "to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers," (119) by means of the "strength and sweetness of visionary words" (340) enabling the soul to flow "out into the universe and [look] back on the complete scene of earthly suffering." (303) Beyond this alien world we live in there is a "home-world," and poetry is to be "the merciful Ellis Island where a host of aliens began their naturalization." (24) The poet is the instrument for "ransom­ ing the commonplace" and draping "the world in radiance." His instruments are the usual orphic powers of imagination, love, the sentient soul, enchantment, dream, madness, Platonic idealism, Blakeian excess, Wordsworthian nature. The sacred words, always capitalized, are "Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious ... Manic and Depressive. . . ." (6) Poetry through the visionary powers of the poet will transform the world, showing the way to making the ugly beautiful, the imperfect complete, the dark radiant, the microcosmic macrocosmic, the commonplace wonderful, and the alien corn the world of home. Citrine's poetic values are somewhat less grandiosely expressed than Humboldt's, though at much greater length, but he too dreams of works which will bring spirit into the world of flesh, explain mind and substance to one another, bind past to present and future, and do some great good to the suffering, confused world. For all its other-worldliness and the vagueness of its ter­ minology, romanticism has usually had the social aim of transforming the immediate given world into a new Jerusalem rather than escaping into a world of pure beauty or perfect form. But, usually avoiding politics or social action, its pri­ mary means of affecting the world have been the work of art itself and the personality of the poet, both of which can, it has been hoped, ultimately bring about the desired changes by giving concrete expression, real substance, to poetic values

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and thereby making these values exist objectively. Von Hum­ boldt Fleisher attempts poetic transformation by means more of his personality than of his work, for he publishes only the few poems of Harlequin Ballads early in his career, and then writes no more, except for one brief poem on a postcard to Citrine, Mice hide when hawks are high; Hawks shy from airplanes; Planes dread the ack-ack-ack; Each one fears somebody. Only the heedless lions Under the Booloo tree Snooze in each other's arms After their lunch of blood— I call that living good! (Ill) But this is all, "Unwritten poems were killing him," (25) and after his first success he spent his energy not in writing but in living out the role of a poet. And he has all the needed gifts to do so: a romantic family background, great personal at­ tractiveness, a noble nature, immense learning and splendid abilities in conversation, a voracious capacity for reading, and moments of high manic inspiration. He is, as Citrine says again and again, essentially a noble person, a man of spirit and great unused powers, but all the invention that "should have gone into his poetry" (371), all that genius, went into his "personal arrangements," that is, to living out the tradi­ tional role of the romantic poet. After the success of Harlequin Ballads he becomes a personage in American letters. He writes critical essays for the Partisan Review and the Southern Re­ view, he is praised by Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, and, even, Yvor Winters; he is picked up and supported as an editorial consultant by Hildebrand, a wealthy playboy publisher and patron of the avant-garde; he teaches for a year at Princeton and nearly succeeds in conning a chair out of that university and the Belisha Foundation, headed by that mastermind of higher culture in America, Wilmore Longstaff, a thinly dis­ guised version of Robert Hutchins; he marries and moves to

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a rural retreat in New Jersey, drives big cars, drinks heavily, takes pills, and chases girls. He is, as he himself memorably puts it, "the first poet in America with power brakes," (20) and the reputation and money he acquires both brake and break his poetic powers. But the period of success is short-lived. Always a manicdepressive with paranoid tendencies intensified, as they were in Schwartz's life, by pills and alcohol, Humboldt finds evil and enemies everywhere, breaks with and abominably mal­ treats his old friends, and, believing that his wife's father had sold her for a year to a Rockefeller, accuses her of infidelity with almost anyone she knows, beats her and tries to run her down with his four-hole Buick. When she leaves him out of fear for her life, he goes mad, tries to kill an imagined rival, and is at last carried off screaming and fighting to Bellevue in a straightjacket, fouling himself in his impotent fury on the way. Released by the effort of friends, he drinks and gets into further trouble, becoming particularly obnoxious about the success of a Broadway play, based partly on his character, by his old admirer Citrine. Through all this he maintains a certain high outrageous style—picketing Citrine's play, cashing a check on Citrine and buying a powerful Oldsmobile with the money, gathering a circle of acquaintances around him at the bar and amusing them with wicked stories about his former friends. But gradually he becomes what he most fears, a "far­ cical martyr," an artist who "by wishing to play a great role in the fate of mankind . . . becomes a bum and a joke." (345) He lives his dreadful reality out to the end, growing old, fat, gray, and sodden in a cheap hotel, still reading and drinking. At last he dies of a heart attack in the elevator while taking his garbage out and is carried off to the morgue where he lies unidentified for days, until someone at the Belisha Foundation, which had reneged on funding his Princeton chair, pays for the maimed rites provided by an isolated New Jersey cemetery where the corpse is cramped into a grave without enough room for its knees to be straightened. This is deconstruction of the poet at the most fundamental level. Although Bellow has rearranged the details, Humboldt is

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an extraordinarily accurate portrait of Delmore Schwartz as he appears in James Atlas' fine biography, Delmore Schwartz, The Life of an American Poet (1977), which remarks that Bellow in part wrote his novel to clear himself of persistent charges that he had used and betrayed Schwartz. Humboldt's life is energized by the romantic desire to be "authentic," to recover mankind's imaginative powers, to ex­ press "living thought and real being," no longer to "accept these insults to the soul." But unable to live this life he is forced into a stereotypical role, that of "The Bohemian Artist," compounded of Coleridge's drugs, Pound's incarceration in an asylum, and Byron's non-conformity, which closely resem­ bles such memorable Hollywood portrayals of the artist as John Garfield giving up his violin for the boxing ring, or Jose Ferrer drinking Toulouse-Lautrec to death at the Moulin Rouge. "Instead of being a poet he was merely the figure of a poet. He was enacting 'The Agony of the American Artist.' And it was not Humboldt, it was the USA that was making its point: 'Fellow Americans, listen. If you abandon materi­ alism and the normal pursuits of life you wind up at Bellevue like this poor kook.' " (156) Each of the stock components of the role of the romantic artist, alienation, poverty, turbulent mental activity, love, is transmuted from its original functions and made to serve as signs of weakness rather than vision and strength: The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, "If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies." (118)

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Humboldt has allowed himself to become merely a negative example in the American success story because his imagination has been overwhelmed by the enormous powers of the modern world. As the "first Americans were surrounded by thick for­ ests," so modern man is "surrounded by things attainable," (341) and the poet too desires these things and wants to be­ come rich and famous. But when he does so his inspiration falters and he is unable "to fill up all the vacancy he felt around him" (371) not simply because of his own greed but because as he becomes involved with the world he comes to know and ceases to be able to resist its awesome powers and a material reality too dense in its vulgarity to be successfully struggled with. "Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn't have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well." (107) The poet once believed he had the power to affect the material world, to shape it and bend it to his ideas, but now that world has too much mass and power for him: it sends men to the moon, calculates the stars in heaven, covers the earth with factories, confers long life and endless goods on men, distributes a cornucopia of money, pleasure, benefits. And against this what can the poet, the man of spirit and ideas, oppose? Humboldt at least can offer nothing, and so he takes up the role the world has assigned him as "hero of wretchedness." "He consented to the monopoly of power and interest held by money, politics, law, rationality, technology because he couldn't find the next thing, the new thing, the necessary thing for poets to do. Instead he did a former thing. He got himself a pistol, like Verlaine. . . ." (155) America has tested "the pretensions of the esthetic by ap­ plying the dollar measure," (388) and as a result the poet has dwindled into the clownish role created for him by society and manipulated for its own materialistic ends. Before he dies, however, Humboldt struggles back into a brief sanity, and his last Wordsworthian words to his friend Citrine, "remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings," (347) assert the old values of the high romantic tradition. From these words Citrine extracts the comforting belief that despite

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his complete failure to affect the world with his almost non­ existent art, Humboldt was indeed "noble." He is the sad last of a line of titans, the great romantic poets who "wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything·, . . . to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and bless humankind." (119) But Citrine is a poet too, Humboldt's pupil and successor, and after Humboldt's death he is left to try to find the nec­ essary new thing that poets can be and do. He has always been quieter, less frenetic, less demonic, than Humboldt, as fits his "belatedness," but he too has the poetic vocation and all those marks by which the romantic tradition identified its poetic saints. He is the typical hero of Bellow's novels, in­ nocent, sweet-natured, greatly desiring to do good and be helpful, cheerful, filled with a deep love for family and for the past. But he also has a "big time mental life," Wordsworthian intimations that he was singled out for some great work in the world and that his election will enable him and others to know "higher worlds" and to separate "consciousness from its biological foundation." (427) As a child he had tubercu­ losis, that most poetic of diseases, and the isolation and aware­ ness of death which his stay in the sanitorium gave him awak­ ened his mind and sense of separateness from the objective world. As a child he also had his "own little Lake Country, the [Chicago] park where I wandered with my Modern Library Plato, Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Un Cceur Simple." (76) These experiences all combine to convince him that he had business on behalf of the entire human race—a re­ sponsibility not only to fulfill my own destiny but to carry on for certain failed friends like Von Humboldt Fleisher who had never been able to struggle through into higher wakefulness. My very fingertips rehearsed how they would work the keys of the trumpet, imagination's trum­ pet, when I got ready to blow it at last. The peals of that brass would be heard beyond the earth, out in space itself. When that Messiah, that savior faculty the imagination

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was roused, finally we could look again with open eyes upon the whole shining earth. (396) But despite these high aspirations and noble words, Citrine's imagination has been subdued to the world, for as a writer he is always more a historian than a creative poet. He dreams of a great philosophical work, on the scale of Balzac's Comedie Humaine, on the "Intellectual Comedy of the mod­ ern mind," (73) though he never quite manages to explain the nature of this work in any detail to himself or to others. He has written a successful Broadway play, Von Trenck, about the swashbuckling adventures of a hero somewhat like Hum­ boldt. Though the play was a great hit and later became a movie which made Citrine a lot of money, it was really put together by the director, not the author. Citrine says of it, wryly, "I had the attention of the public for nearly a year, and I taught it nothing." (15) Most of Citrine's writing, which has made him wealthy, has been, however, historical and political writing in which the facts, not the imagination, control the work: a book on Wilson and Tumulty which won a Pulitzer prize, a biography of Harry Hopkins, and a social history entitled Some Americans, The Sense of Being in the USA. He now proposes to write Volume II of this work, to the despair of his publishers, who offer to forgive a twenty-thousand dol­ lar advance if he will forget the whole matter. He seems also to have ghosted biographies, perhaps for the Kennedys, and is planning a work on "Great Bores of the Modern World." This is not the oeuvre of a poet or any great imaginative writer, but the marketplace-determined writing of a man who gives the world what it wants and will buy. The world of fact has reduced his writing to history and biography of the most workaday kind, and this same world is at work on a more basic level in destroying his poetic vo­ cation and absorbing him into itself in a way somewhat dif­ ferent from that in which it absorbed and changed Humboldt. Citrine is, as poets go—at least as romantic poets go—already a diminished thing, quiet, agreeable, willing to go along, aware of his own deficiencies, modest about his accomplishments,

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but still stubbornly nursing and protecting a conviction of his calling to make known to the world the reality of spirit and mind. He has deliberately chosen to try to preserve and nour­ ish this spirit in the mythic center of American materialism, Chicago, where his mind and culture are a "Fort Dearborn deep in Indian (Materialistic) Territory." (291) The Indians of materialism whom Citrine encounters in Chicago are a most energetic and vital tribe. Bellow has always had a remarkable gift as a story-teller of the kind that flour­ ishes in the bazaar or around the campfire, capable like Shahrazad of staying alive by telling stories for a thousand nights and a night. The essence of this kind of story-teller's art is the ability to make every object and person so powerful that it glows with its own force and shines with meaning. The knife is always the sharpest blade in the world passed on for many generations from noble fathers to brave sons, the gold paid as the bride price is heavier and yellower than any other that man has found deep in the earth, the villain glows with cruel energies violent beyond belief, the mother is more loving, the heroine more beautiful, and the hero more brave than man has ever seen. Citrine finds this same intensity of being in the bagels in the delicatessen around the corner, the softness of his Persian carpets, the speed and beauty of his Mercedes 280SL coupe, the rich feminine smell given off by his mistress, or the demonic delight of his gangsters in their strength and riches. The elemental charge is particularly powerful in Hum­ boldt's Gift, where everything, from the flavor of the chicken soup in the immigrant's home to the smoothness of Citrine's Sea Island cotton underwear, is brought to full sensuous life. But it is the people who are truly extraordinary. All are comically, unbelievably dreadful from a moral point of view, but each radiates his own particular demonic energy, each is the best of his kind: the flashy hoodlum Rinaldo Cantabile who destroys Citrine's Mercedes and forces him publicly to humiliate himself over a gambling debt; Citrine's estranged wife, Denise, the granddaughter of an old police grafter, who is out to break Citrine by raising the ante each time a divorce settlement is proposed; the lawyers, who actually seem to

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become the sharks they are; the endlessly malevolent judge, Urbanovich; the utterly charming and unscrupulous aesthete Thaxter, who shamelessly uses Citrine to finance his cultural institution and its proposed art publication, The Ark·, and Citrine's unbelievably lush and sexy mistress, Renata, who, with her greedy old crone of a mother, the Senora, tries to force Citrine into a January-May marriage. All these people are dreadful, a real world of thieves, whores, and gangsters. But they are so wonderfully dreadful, unbelievably self-confident, radiant with their own energies, violently active, that they transcend moral categories and take on that kind of being we have come to call archetypal or mythic. There are mythic structures at the center of Humboldt's Gift, as in all Bellow novels. When Rinaldo Cantabile wants to humiliate and frighten Citrine, he takes him first into a modern version of the Vergilian and Miltonic underworld, a fearsome underground public toilet where Citrine is forced to enter a foul booth and stand there while Cantabile relieves himself and fills the air with fecal stench. He is next taken to the heights and shown the kingdoms of the world from the girders, fifty stories up, of a skyscraper under construction, where in a freezing wind Cantabile makes paper airplanes of Citrine's fifty-dollar bills and sails them off into the gathering darkness. We are in the world of Petronius and Rabelais when Citrine visits his older brother Julius, about to have a heart operation, and finds him enormously fat, gorging his Gar­ gantuan appetite on all the food, all the land, all the money, and all the other things his overwhelming orality can inter­ nalize: "The fish had been eaten. We sat with him under a tree sucking at the breast-sized flame-colored fruit. The juice spurted over his sport shirt, and . . . he wiped his fingers on it as well. His eyes had shrunk, and moved back and forth rapidly in his head. He was not, just then, with us." (397) The story of Orpheus is the essential romantic myth of the poet, and it is this tale, alluded to several times in the narrative, of the Thracian poet who could charm even the animals and trees with his wondrous songs but could not rescue his wife nor save himself from death, which provides the deep structure

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for Humboldt's Gift. Although Citrine the modern writer, insecure in his powers and scarcely able to charm any audi­ ence, is only a pale reflection of Orpheus, his beloved, Demmie Vonghel, a teacher of Latin (a clue to her Ovidian status?), is taken from him by death in a plane crash in South America, and Citrine roams the jungles in search of her body, but is never able to bring her back. The Eurydice motif occurs again in connection with a later mistress, the unbelievably sexual and pneumatic Renata Koffritz, who abandons Citrine in fa­ vor of an undertaker, Flonzaly, who is said to have a "Plu­ tonian" point of view, as well as enormous riches accumulated from the inevitability of death. After Orpheus fails to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, he returns to earth to sing his beautiful songs, but is at last torn to pieces by a group of frenzied women, and Citrine after the loss of Demmie Vonghel becomes rich and famous from his writings, but as he says, "When you get money you go through a metamorphosis. And you have to contend with terrific powers inside and out." (375) These "terrific powers" are the maddened people he now encounters—the most de­ monic of them are frenzied women—all of whom rip him apart, figuratively at least, in order to have their will and take his money. The furious ex-wife Denise, the gangster Cantabile, the shark-toothed lawyers and judge, the gluttonous brother Julius, the sinister and implacable Senora with her Circean daughter Renata mad for marriage, the faun-like Thaxter, the Harvard Ph.D.-candidate wife of Cantabile, and even the in­ sane romantic poet Humboldt, all want, as the modern idiom has it, to rip off a piece of Citrine. They are maddened by the smell of money, sex, power, like a school of sharks aroused by blood; they batter his car to pieces, threaten his life, forge checks on him, impound his money, steal from him, bully and insult him, and in general use him for their purposes. These are the demons, the Thracian women, of a completely ma­ terialistic world who tear the modern poet apart, and they are filled with an energy and power deriving from their absolute conviction that the only things that are real are those which can be experienced by the senses, be used to achieve desires,

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or be the means to make things happen. Renata, after she has married her "sure thing," the undertaker Flonzaly, speaks perfectly for all this world of the here and now which has no place for the poet nor any conception of his role: I don't want to get involved in all this spiritual, intellec­ tual, universal stuff. As a beautiful woman and still young, I prefer to take things as billions of people have done throughout history. You work, you get bread, you lose a leg, kiss some fellows, have a baby, you live to be eighty and bug hell out of everybody, or you get hung or drowned. But you don't spend years trying to dope your way out of the human condition. To me that's bor­ ing. (430) These are mythic characters not because they merely cor­ respond to the figures in the old story of Orpheus but because they are radiant with that energy, that remarkable power of being, which in Bellow is the true mark of the mythic rather than merely factual. Their excess, even their excess of cruelty, insensitivity, and selfishness, makes them wildly attractive in their awfulness. By so portraying them, Bellow gives full due to the materialistic world of get and take he is questioning and makes clear just why it is so difficult to believe that it is an illusion, or to continue to think that there is, or needs to be, anything else. And if there is no world of spirit, then there can be no poet. Citrine, the writer-philosopher, the latter-day Orpheus of intellect and ideas, has few defenses of his art and his person. He believes tenaciously in, feels deep in himself, those values known only to thought and feeling which are, though totally undemonstrable and totally impractical in the world of fact and power, the roots of poetry and literature. He knows that his own vocation is to write some great work which will manifest the reality of mind and spirit, the awesome power of love, the pathos of things lost in the past, the continuity of human history and of families, the unity of body and soul, the existence of "higher worlds," and the real power of the poetic imagination. He has, in short, all the romantic Words-

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worthian instincts, but his protection from the world which denies these values, and therefore denies any real value to poets and literature, are only the ludicrously weak defenses of the modern intellectual. Searching for reassurance, he reads occult works such as those of Rudolf Steiner, finds a guru, plays with anthroposophy, takes up yoga, dabbles in high culture, collects rare things, visits art museums and worships the paintings, backs a little intellectual magazine, The Ark, and as often as possible travels in Europe, that home-world of the soul for intellectual Americans. But his doubts are deeper than his defenses, for he can read "Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They're all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or has true strength or speaks straight to the soul." (390) His intellectual doubts about "this passing of highbrow currency" are only the signs, however, of deeper disturbances for, resist it as he may, he is in thrall to that merciless materialistic world he is trying to transcend. He loves its things—the cars, the rugs, the clothes, the food, the luxurious hotels and dark bars—and he is fascinated by the beautiful energy and lovely contentment in self of the sharks who tear away his flesh. Most of all he loves that flesh itself, his own aging but carefully bathed, clothed, and exercised body, but most particularly the warm, soft, generous flesh and rich smells of women. His most soar­ ing passages celebrate the cicada-like rubbing together of the silken knees of his beloved Demmie, and the shining hair and teeth, the large breasts, and the happy gaiety of the blissful Renata. Since Humboldt's Gift is told entirely in the first person voice of the narrator, Charles Citrine, the style of the book is his style, and Bellow's marvelous ability to make the material world glow reveals Citrine's own fascination with the potency of material existence. The way he writes about the world constantly shows, that is, his own deep involvement in it and love of it as far more fundamental and consistent parts of his sentience than transcendental ideas. His style, as it were, overwhelms his thoughts, and reveals his helplessness. This thralldom to the flesh finally betrays Citrine, to death. Because he loves the flesh so dearly, with equal intensity he

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fears the death which overtakes it, and is benumbed by terrible thoughts of the depth and coldness of the grave, the heaviness of the earth on the rotting body, and the absolute emptiness of death forever. Unable like Orpheus to go into the under­ world and face death, he flees from it as he runs from a mugger who grabs him in a dark alley. He exercises furiously, has numerous affairs with young women to try to prove that he is not growing old, and on a terrible hot day in a New York smelling of mortality when he sees the death-marked Hum­ boldt on the street, dirty, mad, decayed, he avoids him and takes the plane back to Chicago at once. Even when his last Eurydice, the divine Renata, is gathered to the arms of the Plutonian undertaker—"the course of nature itself was behind him. Cancers and aneurysms, coronaries and hemorrhages stood behind his wealth and guaranteed him bliss" (417)— Citrine cannot bring himself to go into the underworld after her, but lingers in a Spanish pension, feeling sorry for himself and taking care of Renata's child by an earlier marriage. Because of these deep ties to and fears of the world, the modern poet, Citrine, cannot bear witness to the values of poetry by enacting some flamboyant romantic poetic role, a Byron, a Baudelaire, or even a Humboldt. Caught between the powers of material existence and his own slight intima­ tions of immortality—the contradiction is perfectly rendered by making him a rich writer, and a poet who writes history— Citrine takes for his model not a poet but the magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, who was born in the same town as Citrine, Appleton, Wisconsin. Houdini escapes all the traps in which the world locks him: hanged in chains upside down from a flagpole, caged in the most secure prison, even buried in the grave, he somehow pops up again alive, free, and smil­ ing. Citrine tries to achieve the same freedom by becoming a mental and social escape artist. Everyone lays traps for him, always using the same bait—"You can always make money, piles of it. Especially if you team up with me" (349)—and always he escapes them by flying off in a jet, by smiling and paying off, by going to sleep for long periods, or by simply removing himself from the difficult and dangerous situation

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into his own reveries of higher things. But in the end, just as death finally does catch Houdini—an experimental punch in the belly by a medical student which causes peritonitis—so Citrine is unable to escape any longer. The sharks at last strip him of all his money, Renata leaves him for her undertaker, and he is left in a shabby Spanish pension, unable to break his ties to the world, dreadfully missing Renata's soft flesh, and forced to face his own failures and old age. The last poet, however cunningly disguised and however clever at escapes and evasions, seems finally to have been caught by the world and utterly destroyed. But it is at this moment that Humboldt's gift is bestowed. Gifts are rare and startling in this world of taking everything and giving nothing, and the gift from Humboldt is both unexpected and of an unusual kind. Humboldt, in a period of lucidity and despair over his own lost genius, before he dies writes a letter to Citrine explaining and apologizing for his earlier anger, and leaving him as a final gesture a script for a movie or play, as well as a few words of good advice concluding with the words "remember: we are not natural beings but supernatural beings." (347) In one way the letter itself, with its forgiveness and admission of past wrongs, is the gift of the poet, an act of noble generosity and concern in an otherwise selfish world, which greatly encourages the latter-day poet, Citrine, in his desperate but seemingly doomed efforts to continue to believe that men do have some supernatural quality. What Humboldt had never been able to achieve with his art or his life he now manages, in however attenuated form, by a generous act. But the gift is also a gift in the more practical sense that the world would understand, for Citrine is able to sell the script to a movie producer for a great deal of money and bail himself out of his financial difficulties, as well as being able to help Humboldt's indigent uncle Waldemar to re-inter Humboldt in a more fitting manner beside his mad mother. The gift has a more basic meaning, however. Citrine has continuously pondered the question of why the gifts of the artist seem never to achieve their promised end in America: "I meant to interpret the good and evil of Humboldt, under-

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stand his ruin, translate the sadness of his life, find out why such gifts produced negligible results, and so forth." (370) The overhasty "and so forth," suggests Citrine's lack of desire or inability to get to the bottom of Humboldt's failure, but Humboldt's literal gift, the movie script, provides the answer. It is another parable of the artist—a comic Kiinstlerroman within a Kunstlerroman in this multiple perspective of artistic selfconsciousness—which tells of a writer, Corcoran, loosely modeled on Citrine, who experiences ecstasy and fulfillment of soul on a trip to a magical tropical island with his mistress, Laverne. "The sensors open. Life is renewed. Dross and im­ purities evaporate." (344) Upon his return he writes a novel about these experiences but cannot publish it because his wife, Hepzibah, would read it and realize that he has played her false. His agent, Zane Bigoulis, foreseeing a huge commission, proposes that the writer Corcoran take Hepzibah on exactly the same trip, on which the agent will precede them, bribing the natives to recreate exactly the same experiences that Cor­ coran had earlier enjoyed with Laverne. Corcoran is under­ standably reluctant, but he cannot bear not to publish the book, so he goes through the same experience again, but this time it has no magic, and every event is a parody and mockery of what had been. The book is published and is a huge success. Corcoran is inundated with money, but his wife leaves him when she realizes that she could not be "the heroine of these tender scenes," and Laverne abandons him too when she learns that he has re-enacted those sacred experiences with another woman. The parable reveals that there is more than a little of the ridiculous in art, but it also wryly suggests that the inspiration of the artist and the source of his art are erotic, illicit, pas­ sionate, sensual, exotic, and profoundly personal. But the modern writer, like Citrine, in his anxiety for the public fame which comes from publication and his desire for social ac­ ceptance and respectability, the marriage to Hepzibah, covers up the original experience, and in so doing makes a clown out of himself, "a bum and a joke," by trying to live over and legitimize the earlier visions. In the end he becomes rich and

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famous, but both his muses abandon him, the one that guides his experience of the forbidden dream world of romanticism, and the other that displaces the original eroticism and makes it respectable. The burlesque tone of the story makes it clear that the poet has become a joke in modern America, even though society pays him lavishly and makes movies seen by millions out of his ideas. Not only is the story of Corcoran bought by a film company, but they also pay handsomely for the rights to a movie they have already pirated from an earlier script collaborated on as a joke by Humboldt and Citrine while at Princeton. "Caldofreddo" tells the story of Nobile, an Italian arctic explorer, who tries to reach the North Pole by dirigible but crashes on the ice. The Norwegian explorer Amundsen starts to his rescue, though he despises Nobile, but his plane crashes on takeoff, and the survivors from the wreck of the dirigible turn to cannibalism before they are finally rescued. One of the survivors, Caldofreddo, returns home to become a gelati vendor in a small Italian town, where he is years later exposed as a cannibal but forgiven by the towns­ people, who are moved by his story of the terrible effects of starvation and cold on a living creature. The fact that both stories become the basis for movies, as the play Von Trenck earlier had, suggests that the primary function of the poet in modern society, for which he is amply rewarded, has become one of supplying the films with sen­ sational plots. But both stories also tell of the extraordinary pressures that the material world exerts on men, and partic­ ularly on poets, wrecking their high enterprises and turning them into clowns and cannibals. The solution cannot be a return to the old romantic postures of Wordsworth tracing the growth of his poetic mind, or of Stephen Dedalus flying the broken world of Ireland to create the conscience of his race. The world has already transformed those attitudes and their gestures into a stock role bearing testimony to the power of the material world itself. Rebellion has become a demon­ stration of its opposite, and Humboldt, who had thought to be "the great American poet of the century," has lived out the role and found that he ultimately doesn't have the strength

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to impose his values on the world, "My gears are stripped. . . . The original fresh self isn't there any more." (340) If poets and poetry are not to die forever, then, Citrine sees, something new must be found, and for Humboldt that new thing is to be found not by trying to transcend the world and flaunting your own power as "a supernatural being," but by accepting the world in all its power: When the artist-agonist has learned to be sunk and ship­ wrecked, to embrace defeat and assert nothing, to subdue his will and accept his assignment to the hell of modern truth perhaps his Orphic powers will be restored, the stones will dance again when he plays. Then heaven and earth will be reunited. After long divorce. With what joy on both sides, Charlie! What joy! (346) The old romantic figure of the poet disappears into the grave with Humboldt, and Charles Citrine, the poet of the next generation, at last accepts that disappearance forever when he reburies Humboldt in a decent place, appropriately enough using the money the movie plot has earned. The machinery of the modern world, bulldozer and crane, bury the poet deep beneath "brown clay and lumps and pebbles," first placing a concrete slab on top of the concrete case for the casket. "But then," asks Citrine, the Houdini of poets, "how did one get out?" Then he fully realizes the answer, "One didn't, didn't! You stayed, you stayed!" (487) The acceptance of the material world in its most potent and inescapable form of death is the ultimate admission of defeat for the great tradition of Petrarch, for poets who lived to tell us in their lives and poetry of realms of gold not subject to decay and death. Hum­ boldt's Gift implies that in some other place and time, after the poet has learned again to live deep in the world and accept his thralldom to material fact, that the stones will dance once more with joy when the poet plays. But this is only a hope, and in the present the poet who had planned to drape America in radiance is gone. His successor Citrine, already only a pale

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image of his predecessors, though he triumphs in facing death in the most absolute of its many forms in the novel, cannot bring anyone back with him, and he settles in Europe to, he rather ambiguously tells us, "take up a different kind of life."

(483)

II "BATTERING THE OBJECT": THE ATTACK ON THE LITERARY TEXT IN MALAMUD'S The Tenants

LITERATURE, unlike the family, but somewhat more like the Christian religion and the law, is a text-centered institution. It is, however, even more dependent on its texts for its reality than religion or the law, much more dependent than a state like our own, which has a few texts—the Declaration of In­ dependence and the Constitution—at its center, because it lacks the rituals and established hierarchies which objectify and define these other institutions by dramatizing and putting their values into action. But for literature, the canon, the body of official texts, is the substantial literary fact, the reality of the actual library and the principal building material of the Imaginary Library. The art-for-art's-sake movement and its later development, the New Criticism, formalized the centrality of the literary texts by stripping the historical setting, the author, and the reader from the work, leaving it standing alone, or in the company only of other works, as the literary reality. "The existing monuments," says T. S. Eliot in "Tra­ dition and the Individual Talent," visualizing perfectly the Imaginary Library, "form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them," but "which abandons nothing en route," superannuating not "Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen." (Adams,

784-85) Because the canon is primarily responsible for such crucial institutional functions as objectifying literature, validating it by the power of the major texts, and defining by what is

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included the nature of the works judged literary, the com­ position of the canon—boundary definition—is a matter of great importance for literature. But here we encounter a dif­ ficulty. The texts are, taken one by one, real enough, and members of the institution of literature share a common enough subjective conception of what is canonical that in most cases we agree on which texts are properly literary and which are not, though there is considerable confusion out toward the edges, where we come to older works like Augustine's Confessions and Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or to newer works like the novels of Kurt Vonnegut or Gore Vidal. Difficulties arise at the boundaries, as they do to some degree in all in­ stitutions where texts are important, because we have no ab­ solutely agreed-upon principles by which to separate canon­ ical and apocryphal writings, and because we have no fixed objective form of the canon, such as that established by the Christian Bible or the legal codes, to turn to, to help us limit and control argument. The Norton Anthology, along with other collections like The Golden Treasury or The Oxford Book of English Verse, comes, I suppose, as close to objec­ tifying the canon, at least in schematic form, as we are likely to get, or probably want to get. A full-scale objectification of the literary canon would take some monstrous form, resem­ bling Borges' "Library of Babel," such as a compendium of all the works taught in all university literature courses, or a computer printout of all the works classified in the literary categories of some great research library such as the Library of Congress or the British Library. The obvious uselessness of such a document—though who would not like to see it?—serves to remind us that literature is never made but, like other social institutions, is always in the process of being made. And, indeed, we can observe the process of canon formation, not in its totality, but only in snapshots, brief views that the past has left us of the momen­ tary assemblages of various writings into something like a literary canon. In antiquity we glimpse some kind of literary proto-canon in, for example, the Nine Muses, five of whom— lyric, comedy, tragedy, epic, love poetry—were literary in our

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sense of the term; in Aristotle's discussion of tragedy along with comedy and epic in The Poetics·, and in the collection and ordering of a number of major literary texts in the third century B.C. in the Alexandrian Library. We can watch the process still continuing in the modern period: Yvor Winters arguing that Jones Very is a more important poet than Emer­ son (the argument didn't succeed); Eliot and others using "dissociation of sensibility" to depress Milton below the meta­ physical poets in the canon; and Leavis in The Great Tradition pronouncing with prophetic religious zeal that "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad." Canon-making never stops, and it can be considered the major business of all writing about litera­ ture, from the review which tries to get some author or work into or out of the canon, to the general theoretical statements about literature which by defining it in a particular way dis­ tinguish the "strong" from the "weak" poets, to use the terms of a recent critic with a decided flair for canon-making. State­ ments of this type offer us a model of how canon-making proceeds, but literature has never had any of the great synods which have defined the canonical religious texts in conformity with certain large governing principles. We can, however, see the same authoritative tendencies at work in Boswell's Life of Johnson where the great Cham of Literature presided over a kind of poetic synod in the Literary Club and spent much of his time shaping the canon by pronouncing in conversation on such questions as whether Pope was a true poet, The Beg­ gar's Opera harmed morals, and Tristram Shandy would last. Johnson's great good sense was never more evident than in his simple hundred-year test of canonicity. But though the literary canon may be always in process and therefore always somewhat amorphous, more an imaginary than an actual library, if literature is to seem and to be real, it is necessary that the texts making up the library have a solid, objective existence. This textual objectivity was largely conferred on literature by print, and it is no accident, I believe, that the concept of universal literature as a distinct kind of writing found in all places and times began to replace the

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older idea of poetry during the eighteenth century, when the printing press finally began to realize its potentiality by making available large numbers of literary, as well as other, works from many times and cultures. Rene Wellek, in Chapter 4, "The Study of English Literature," in his Rise of English Literary History, provides a remarkable catalogue of the enormous amount of collecting, editing, and printing in eighteenth-century England of almost all earlier English literature, including a good deal of Old English—though not Beowulf— of Romance literatures, including Dante and the troubadors, as well as a good deal of Icelandic, Norse, Welsh, German, and even some Persian, Indian, and Chinese poetry. During this time a number of small-scale literary canons were assem­ bled from all these books in collections such as Dodsley's Select Edition of Old Plays (1744), Mrs. Cooper's Muses' Library (1737), Percy's Reliques (1765), and even perhaps in Johnson's Dictionary (1755), which, in ways W.B.C. Watkins details in his Johnson and English Poetry Before 1660, uses a great deal of the older English poetry for its illustrative definitions. In the eighteenth century, as Wellek says, "man­ kind and its poetry was surveyed quite literally" from China to Peru. "The main materials for a history of English literature were assembled, the wide backgrounds of the poetic activities of other nations were sketched in, and all awaited only the shaping hand of the genuine historian." (132) While it was filling the shelves of the actual library, print also intensified the reality of each of those books by literally giving them immutability and form to a degree not realizable earlier. In an oral tradition a poem cannot be said to have any absolute existence, for it changes each time it is recited, and the story told and retold lives only in a process of constant change as each singer of tales, as Albert Lord calls the oral poet, adapts the material to his own interests, abilities, and audience. Even a manuscript tradition, though it stabilizes the text of a poem somewhat, does not finally provide the monumentality that print gives, for each manuscript, as a result of inevitable scribal errors, differs from all other manuscripts of the "same" poem, and the fairly small number of manu-

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scripts of a given text does not confer that solid, permanent existence as a thing in and of itself on a work that is provided by a printing-press run of several hundred or thousand identi­ cal copies. But once a work is printed and becomes a book, it acquires a fixed existence in its own right. It is literally, solidly there, independent of author and reader, ontological, fixed in visible form. When different versions of the same printed text exist, as is usually the case, then the bibliographers and textual editors, conditioned by the fact of the book to believe that a literary work exists absolutely in its own right, establish the one true Platonic text, as the author conceived it, that they posit as existing behind the variations of the individual texts. The word "literature" reflects the dependence of the kind of writing it defines on "the letter," on the objectivity and stability conferred by the printing press. But the printed book added further to the reality of literature by foregrounding certain craft qualities which had already in the age of the manuscript made it possible to think of the poem as a wellmade thing, a work, opus, ceuvre, well-wrought urn, or verbal icon. The tradition of the poet as maker as much as seer, made not born, the artificer of verbal works of art is very old. Dedalus, rather than Orpheus, is the mythic hero of this an­ cient craft-tradition, and Vergil has been its model, the Vergil who, according to the myth, filed his verses so carefully that he completed only a single line a day and commanded on his deathbed that The Aeneid be destroyed because not every line had been perfected. Once fixed in the immobility of print, the literary work can be studied at leisure with the certainty that it will not change, and in this state of arrest the way in which it is assembled, that is, the craft values, inevitably come into greater prominence. The choice of every word can be pondered and the many possible ambiguities of meaning taken into ac­ count, the build of the individual pieces—images, tropes, char­ acters, events—into patterns can be worked out, the gradual enlargement of meaning created by patterns of association and conflict can be developed, and the existence of an overall structure can be posited. The presence of these qualities, crafts-

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manship, structure, form, contributes a great deal to our sense of a poem or novel as real, as an object, work, or well-made thing. Print made the literary text real in various ways and to a degree never possible in earlier times, and it is one of the great ironies of the history of literature that this enabling technology has been so resolutely ignored or treated as "the stigma of print" in the Renaissance, the chief instrument of Dulness in The Dunciad, the demonic destroyer of all civilized values in Balzac's Lost Illusions, and as the source of all modern ills in Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy. But even while scorning the printing press as a part of the anti-poetic world of business and technology, the romantic writers took full advantage of the potentiality of the printed book to objectify style. Once print had foregrounded style, its value could be and was intensified in ways which made the literary text even more real. Style was no longer derived, as it had been for older writers, from the practice of rhetoric, imitation, and obedience to certain governing rules of composition. The same verbal figures may be and are used by the romantics, but they are now given increased power as the mysterious manifestations of genius and inspiration which seek in words to realize the truths that imagination knows. Metaphor binds the disparate elements of the world into a community; symbol illuminates in a flash the meaning of things; irony preserves the mystery of interacting opposites; and organic form manifests the com­ plex nature of a vital energy endlessly expressing itself through the flux of things. Creation replaced mere making, and style, not mere craft, became the realization of primary powers of mind. Earlier writers in the strong craft tradition, such as Petrarch, Shakespeare, Sidney, Milton, Pope, conceived of their skills as in the service of morality and imitation, the means whereby the poet achieved his larger ends of making virtue attractive and accurately picturing the world. For them the reality of the literary text was still dependent on the world outside itself. But for the great romantic writers and their modernist fol­ lowers, style having become its own truth and its own reality,

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the literary work of art could become transcendently real in and of itself. Keats' Grecian urn, Yeats' golden bird of By­ zantium, and Pater's gemlike focus of the flux of existence iconize the intense reality of a poetry no longer a reflection or imitation of anything outside itself but in itself an instance of an ultimate, imagined reality. Shelley in A Defense of Poetry describes this new reality of the literary text in language which enacts what it describes: "All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight . . . the source of an unforeseen and unconceived delight." (Adams, 509)

The literary work of art now stands alone in its perfection as it does in the "art-for-art's-sake" movement and the cult of "Le Mot Juste," it is idealized as symbolism and surrealism, it is stripped of its historical provenance and separated from its creator and its audience in the type of criticism now be­ coming generally known as "formalism," and it is hypothe­ sized as the true or absolute text which editors and bibliog­ raphers spend infinite pains to disentangle from the complex process of transmission and restore down to the last comma as it was realized in pure form by the creator. No matter how the literary work is defined, whether as large as "the mythopoeic world of Balzac" or as small as the quick flash of being created by the Imagists, the literary work of art is an intensely real world, a harmonious and ordered microcosm, complete unto itself. "What I should like to write," said Flaubert, sum­ marizing this belief in the absolute reality of the work itself, 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, de­ pends 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 pos­ sible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer

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language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. (127) Joyce's Finnegans Wake probably comes as close as any work of literature to realizing Flaubert's dream. For some critics in this tradition, literature remained close to craft, still dependent, as for William Morris, on good work­ manship, functionalism, and honest materials. But for others in the line of Flaubert, Joyce, James, and Mann, style and writing became a religion which burned everything else away and left only the text behind. Wordsworth goes to the Lake Country, Flaubert to Croisset, Proust to his cork-lined room, and Joyce into European exile, to escape a no-longer relevant world and create the texts, those great testimonies of reality, in the silence of the imagination. For Faulkner, even the great figure of the romantic artist disappears while the books alone remain: I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents. It is my ambition to be, as a private individ­ ual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago and, like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died. (Letter to Malcom Cowley, 11 Feb., 1949) Literature paradoxically achieved absolute reality for its texts by cutting them off from the world and the print in which they had found their necessary objectivity, but there have been persistent severe doubts about the absolute value of beauty, style, and the isolated work of literary art. Realists like Dostoevsky deliberately sought an anti-style. Freud, who defined literature as the expression of various psychic energies and struggles, saw style as only "aesthetic foreplay" or a dis­ guise needed to smuggle illicit impusles past the censor. For the many Marxists who want to define literature as an out-

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moded bourgeois expression of economic interests, style is only a decadent aesthetic overlay for the class apologetics beneath it. Even within the literary establishment doubts have arisen, and in recent years a number of writers have increas­ ingly begun to question openly whether cutting literary art off so severely from the world and emphasizing its independence through style are any longer possible, or make much sense for either art or the society of which it is inescapably a part. Hermann Broch, that follower of Joyce, and writer of twoand three-page sentences, reveals in The Death of Vergil the kind of uneasiness the pure stylist is beginning to feel. In Broch's book the poet who has been the model for the craft tradition agrees in a deathbed conversation with Augustus Caesar not to burn The Aeneid,, not because it is artistically perfect, and not because of the emperor's social argument that the world needs a record of Roman achievements, but because the poem no longer matters very much, since it fails to foresee the new Christian era coming into being. These kinds of doubts about the importance of style and workman­ ship in literature appear even more definitely in Camus' The Plague, written just after the Second World War. Here the writer, Grand, is tested along with other types, the doctor, the journalist, the gangster, the priest, the administrator, by a mysterious and terrible plague in an African city, an image of the recent German occupation of France and all the mys­ terious disasters which man must simply endure. Despite his name, Grand is only a petty clerk, but he longs to be a great writer in the tradition of Flaubert and Proust, and he has spent years trying to perfect a single sentence: "One fine morn­ ing in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flow­ ery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne." (96) Entire days are spent on each detail of this trite sentence trying to give "the words . . . the exact tempo of this ride—the horse is trotting, one-two-three, one-two-three." But despite changes of "ele­ gant" to "slim," then eliminating sibilants, then making the sorrel a black horse, the sentence is never finished. When Grand, seemingly dying of the plague, makes the required

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Vergilian gesture of asking the doctor to burn his imperfect manuscript, the doctor discovers that its fifty pages are covered only with different versions of the same sentence. Camus has created an utterly savage image of the meaninglessness of the aesthetic tradition in the face of suffering and death. Insofar as Grand is useful in the plague, it is not by his utterly irrel­ evant art but by his simple work in caring for the sick and the dying, in sharing in the great human effort of trying to find a way of dealing with life's great antagonist, death. The very practical concerns of such writers as Broch and Camus about the value of thinking of literature as an inde­ pendent artifice, a verbal icon or well-wrought urn, have been reflected, as social concerns about literature usually are, in recent criticism which has turned away from formalism and its "coldly spatialized objective mediations into which Platonists and New Critics, formalists all, would harden poems." (Wimsatt, 68) This anti-formalistic critical movement, whose major activity Wimsatt aptly summarizes as "Battering the Object," operates today under many different names such as phenomenology, structuralism, deconstruction, and reader response, but, as Wimsatt very clearly saw, all have as their end the breaking down of the traditionally firm outlines of the literary text in a much vaster, even an infinite, context of other texts, of language, of the psychology of readers, and of the structure-building tendency of the mind. All these critical movements are an assault on the integrity and reality of the literary text, and therefore ultimately on the fact of literature itself as it has been understood since the eighteenth century. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the texts are the central fact of literature, and their importance has increased steadily from the late nineteenth century onward—particularly in the period of modernism—when the claims of the romantic artist and the creative imagination have been partly abandoned in favor of an emphasis on the texts, the library, the long line of monuments which are the objective reality of literature. "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is," says Eliot modestly, "a laudable aim." (Adams, 787) Any attack on the texts—from literal book-pulping to deconstructive criticism—

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contains potentially the most dangerous consequences for lit­ erature as a whole, and literature seems to have made itself vulnerable to such attacks by a kind of institutional overdetermination. As a new institution, literature needed objective form to become real and meaningful in the world, and this objectification was in part the gift of the printing press. But the potential of the press for objectification, in number of books and in their fixed form, was almost unlimited, and in conjunction with the romantic desire to claim complete in­ dependence for literature from a disliked society, and absolute priority for the literary art, it led to claims for the perfection of the text which have proven impossible to sustain. It was inevitable that these claims would be challenged by critics who confronted the texts with uncomfortable facts about their dependence on other texts, about the nature of writing, and about the peculiarities of readers. It was equally inevitable— as the decline of the power of and interest in literature at the present makes us know—that society would challenge the texts' claim to absolute reality as they drifted farther away from and squared less and less with social realities and with what was believed by the majority of men to be true and knowable. This confrontation of text and society is the subject of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants (1971), which portrays very clearly the nature of traditional romantic beliefs about the reality of the literary text and the breakdown of these beliefs when they are confronted by social realities which di­ rectly contradict and confront them with an aggressive ur­ gency and power born out of suffering and a need for help from all institutions, including art. I would not argue that The Tenants is one of the greatest of modern novels, but it is extraordinarily powerful and compelling in its realization of the view that is central to the conception of literature as a social institution: that literature and the arts are inescapably a part of society, and that the central literary values, though they are not totally socially determined, do respond in a di­ alectical manner to what takes place and is believed in that society. Bernard Malamud, a writer with a strong investment in the

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craft tradition and the literary work as object, has dramatized the deconstruction of the literary text in a way which makes clear why it is becoming impossible for the writer any longer to believe that literature can remain independent of the world. Malamud begins with an image of what he considers the pres­ ent situation of the writer. The Imaginary Library built by print, the House of Fiction built by Flaubert and Henry James, has degenerated in The Tenants into a squalid New York City tenement inhabited as the story begins by a solitary writer. Once there had been a small garden on the roof where the writer often sat after a day's work, looked at the sky and the clouds, "and thought of Wm. Wordsworth." (11) But those recollections in tranquility have passed, along with Words­ worth's belief that poets make the world in their poetry, and now the garden is sterile, and unvisited. Below the garden, the building is untenanted except for a solitary person, the latterday writer Harry Lesser, who lives, with many locks on his door, as high up in the building as he can, but without a view. The landlord Levenspiel has found the old-style tene­ ment unprofitable and, in order to tear the building down and replace it with a more economical structure of modest size with stores on the bottom floor, has evicted all the tenants except Lesser, who refuses to go. But he is prevented from carrying out his practical plans by Lesser's refusal, protected by various laws on tenants' rights, to vacate. The House of Fiction has been invaded by the world and has degenerated into a fearsome place of decay and terror. Windows are smashed and doors broken down by vandals, the plumbing and lighting fixtures ripped out and sold by scavengers; the floors and walls are sour-smelling, covered with stains, debris, and mold. Stray animals and homeless men creep through the empty hallways to shelter in the icy rooms at night, leaving behind them odd garbage, the sticks of small fires, and piles of ordure on the floor or in the remaining tubs and toilets. In one room night-visitors have drawn a remarkable mural on the walls: "huge mysterious trees, white-trunked rising from thick folds,... dense ferny underbrush, grasses sharp as razor blades, giant hairy thistles, dwarf palms with saw-toothed

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rotting leaves, dry thick-corded vines entangling thorny gi­ gantic cactus exuding pus; eye-blinding orchidaceous flow­ ers—plum, red, gold—eating alive a bewildered goat as a go­ rilla with hand-held penis erectus, and two interested snakes, look on." (11-12) On the wall of another room there is "a crayon cartoon of A. Hitler wearing two sets of sexual organs, malefemale." (11) The apartments had once been homes lived in by neat and kindly people with such warming names as Holzheimer, but now the only light in the empty building comes from a few dim bulbs, regularly smashed, on the stairs; the water runs in thin brown trickles from the few working taps; and the ancient furnace sends up only the faintest trace of heat. Rats scurry through the dark damp cellars, the wind howls over the frozen black snow outside where battered ashcans are filled with rotting garbage. The Tenants is a carefully constructed parable in which every detail has meaning on at least two levels, and the tenament is not only a realistic depiction of the desperate state of much of New York City, particularly such areas as the South Bronx, but of the wasteland of modern western society and the incursion of this reality into literature toward the end of a terrifying century. The battered fragments of an older, better-ordered society, it is now foul, barely functioning, its corridors filled with darkness and terror, the temporary shelter of wounded, homeless, indistinguishable men and animals, haunted by nightmare visions such as the hermaphroditic Hitler and the scapegoat-eating flower. Responsibility for this invasion is divided between the profit-seeking capitalist land­ lord with his dream of wealth and the artist who by refusing to leave when the capitalist landlord tries to empty the old building for the wrecker, keeps it standing and therefore sub­ ject to the forces which reduce it to a grotesque chamber of horrors. Perhaps, The Tenants suggests, it might be better for the artist to move on and let the old culture and the old art end rather than to try to keep them standing in a world in which art has no function and against which it therefore no longer has any real defenses. Levenspiel's new world, his build­ ing in which the apartments above rest on the shops below,

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both architecturally and economically, might be preferable to the monstrosity that has resulted from the artist's stubbornly trying to work amid the ruins. The artist, however, supported by the tangled laws of the old liberal society which ignore economic realities to protect the tenant from the owner, keeps the old building standing, trying to maintain the old literary values in the midst of the wasteland world. Lesser the novelist "squats"—Malamud's world is an intensified realistic version of Eliot's wasteland and frequently refers to it—in a few gray and cold rooms on the top floor which contain the minimal necessary furnishings of the old culture, the bookshelves with the patiently assem­ bled library of cherished books, the hi-fi equipment and a few jazz and classical records, the desk, the typewriter, and the notes and files. The arrangements for eating, sleeping, and washing are rudimentary, but these matters of the flesh are not of much concern to the artist Lesser. He goes seldom outside, running quickly through the dangerous halls of his building to buy a few groceries or to telephone the rent control board to complain about the lack of heat. Occasionally trou­ bled by rustlings or ominous sounds outside his door, he presses an eye to the keyhole, or, arming himself, opens the door briefly to stare into the darkness beyond. Behind the many locks on his door, he lives out the ultimacies of the totally dedicated romantic artist in a hostile world, a parody of Flaubert at Croisset or Proust in his cork-lined room of silence exploring his memories, of Joyce in his exile of silence and cunning creating a great work in the smithy of his soul. Lesser reasons that he must stay on in the old building, despite the dangers and discomforts, because it is here that he began the book he is presently working on, and it is there­ fore here that he must finish it, if it is to be finished at all. He has written two earlier books, the first a succes d'estime which pleased him despite its small sales, and the second, in his opinion a poor book which nevertheless did well and was bought by the movies, providing him with enough money to live, very frugally, for a number of years while working on his third novel. (The movies are as regularly the deus ex ma-

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china which keeps authors alive in the modern Kiinstlerroman as Wordsworth is the progenitor poet.) Lesser is now deep into this third book which will, he hopes, prove to himself and to the world that he is a true writer; but he has been at it, like the Greeks before Troy, for over nine years, and the book is in deep trouble, for he cannot find the necessary ending for the already-written beginning and middle. Levenspiel can­ not understand, of course, either why the book should take so long—"What are you writing, the Holy Bible?" which is what a craftsman-artist like Lesser thinks he is writing—or why it cannot be written in another, more comfortable place just as well. But Lesser knows that it must be finished here where it was begun because, on the surface level, only here can he find that complete isolation needed for the intense effort of completing the book. On the allegorical level the meaning would seem to be that only in this particular romantic stance of isolation from and antagonism towards a broken and ugly world is the concentrated, introspective, priestly work of the Dedalian artificer possible. His art is not possible in a setting, or condition of being, other than that which the scene of The Tenants realizes, for another setting would ne­ cessitate a different kind of art. He needs the ugliness of the world as a foil against which to create the beauty of the perfectly articulated work. For Lesser art is "glory," a "sacred cathedral... with lilting bonging iron bell," (50) and he is its high priest or rabbi, whose service is a willing servitude. He is a professional writer, a workman who lives for his work. He rises in the morning eager to begin writing, and he falls asleep each night planning the work of the next day. When he leaves the building he rushes back in order to get on with his work, and he is mis­ erable and mentally upset when he leaves it for a time or when the work is not going well. Each day's production is put in a safety deposit box in the vault of a bank, as other men safeguard their jewels and money. "I've got to do the kind of job I have to as an artist," (88) he says, and he does the job like the careful workman he is, "a man of habit, order, steady disciplined work. Habit and order fill the pages one by one.

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Inspiration is habit, order; ideas growing, formulated, formed." (183) The ashcans outside the tenement are filled with thou­ sands of crumpled pages of yellow paper covered with words which did not meet the standards of this exacting stylist. Lesser not only has the compulsive work-ethic his art re­ quires, but he has the technical skills and tools of the verbal craftsman as well. Words, language, grammar, rhetoric are his tools, and he can "no longer see or feel except in language." (107) A thing can be true, real, convincing, alive for him only if it takes shape in the right words. He prefers a sharp, precise, sparse, clear style, the exact style of Flaubert, Ie mot juste, and he finds that writing flawed which contains irrelevancies, repetitions, or underdeveloped possibilities. He avoids the blurred image or the "shifting effect," and finds meaning in sharp focus, careful arrangement of the parts, in proportion and orderly development. He describes his method of writing as "moving along his lonely sentences," (90) "stalking an idea that had appeared like a crack in night pouring out daylight." (78) For Lesser, art is finally "a matter of stating the truth in unimpeachable form" (18), but the truth is always determined by language and form, not by any reference to the world. His key critical passage comes from Coleridge, "Nothing can per­ manently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise." (106) Thus Lesser turns inward away from the world, living his solipsistic priestly life, ignoring the devastation around him, and trying to meet the merciless formal demands of a book which asks him by its own structure to "say more than he knew." "Form sometimes offers so many possibilities it takes a while before you can determine which it's insisting on," (21) and so the writing goes on for nine long years. But then Coleridge had said that he "should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an Epic Poem," (23) and though Lesser does not exactly think of himself as an epic poet, or Moses, he does see himself as "King David with his six-string harp, except the notes are words and the psalms fiction . . . writing a small masterpiece though not too small." (49)

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The Tenants opens with Lesser waking to work on his book and "catching sight of himself in his lonely glass," and the book he is writing is another mirror, for its subject is a writer created in almost the exact image of Harry Lesser, who is in turn writing a novel about love, hoping that the book will create the love he cannot find in or feel for people. Art seems to stretch out to infinity, pre-empting reality by simply du­ plicating itself, a perfect realization of the claim of the ro­ mantic literary text to depend on nothing but itself. Malamud's novel about a writer trying to write a novel about a writer trying to write a novel is a wilderness of mirrors, a completely enclosed and infinite world of formalistic art. The title of Lesser's novel, The Promised End, seems to praise this triumph of isolated formal perfection, but the words taken from King Lear also remind us of the remainder of Shake­ speare's line, "Or image of that horror?" and of its context, the death of love in the person of Cordelia, which makes life seem an unbearable mockery to the survivors. The title of Malamud's novel, The Tenants, suggests that Lesser is but a temporary resident in, not the owner of, the House of Fiction, and reminds us as well that there is more than one resident. The other tenant is a new arrival, the Black, Willie Spearmint—an obvious and not very happy reference to Shakespeare—who represents in the novel a view of writing which is the antithesis of Lesser's formalistic tradition of art for art's sake. Willie's life recapitulates the primitive phases of the development of the poet as romanticism hypothesizes it. His "election" takes place in prison where, suffering primal fear and bewilderment, he first begins to sing the blues and then finds in the song both comfort and his own identity as lyric singer: "he listens and hears, 'Willie Spearmint sings this song.' " He then begins to read and gradually begins to feel that he too can write. At first the writing is mere imitation of other writers he has read, but then he begins to record his own experiences, and then to create fictitious characters and scenes, and in doing so he finds freedom and escape from prison, "I am out of it as much as I am in. I am in my imagination." (63) Once out of prison Willie continues to

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write, and his stories, in contrast to Lesser's involuted and isolated self-reflecting novel about a writer trying to write a novel, are almost unbearably painful reflections of the most terribly immediate aspects of life in Harlem, of wretched jobs and beaten children, of drugs and whores, of men cornered and shot in alleys and women who in despair drink lye and hurl themselves off buildings, and above all of the hatred and violence between black and white, a violence which culminates in the story "No Heart," in which a Black has a hunger to murder a white and taste a piece of his heart. It is simply a strong thirst or hunger. He tricks a drunken white down into a tenement cellar and kills him. He cuts into the dead man but can't find the heart. He cuts into his stomach, bowel, and scrotum, and is still cutting when the story ends. (65) Willie writes directly out of his own experience and himself: "You want to know what's really art? I am art. Willie Spear­ mint, black man. My form is myself." (75) His writings di­ rectly reflect his own feelings, his self-disgust, his hatred for whites, his fears and furies; and their ends are as primal as their origins, self expression, advancing the cause of black revolution, and a desire to make a lot of money and use it to enjoy a lot of sex. But Willie Spearmint's writing is in trouble too, for all the power that drives it. He cannot find the form which adequately expresses his experiences and feelings, and so he too comes to the isolated tenement to find the distance from himself and the world his writing also requires. If Lesser's work lacks reality and energy, Willie's suffers from the absence of what Lesser has too much of, art and form. Willie's manuscript is a conglomerate of several chapters of autobiography and sev­ eral short stories, that minimal fictional form, but the auto­ biography is fiction and the stories are autobiographical, and taken together they are, despite their power, finally ineffective because they are not well enough written to express the mean­ ing latent in them. In Malamud's romantic view, art is the work of the outsider,

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in this case the Jewish writer and the black writer, and these marginal men need one another, for each has what the other lacks. At first, despite fear and suspicion on both sides, there is some feeling of brotherhood, both as men and as writers, and Lesser helps Willie to set up shop in the building, rec­ ognizing a fellow man and a fellow writer; Willie on his side invites Lesser to his parties, introduces him to his life, and saves him from a beating when he sleeps with a black woman. If Willie introduces Lesser to some of the vitality and passion his life and work lack, Lesser in turn introduces Willie to the concept of literary craft, reads and criticizes his manuscript, gives him a dictionary and a handbook of grammar. Perhaps his most effective lesson is delivered through his own books, which Willie gets from the library and reads with admiration, though as a "natural" writer he is able to distinguish the superiority of the first over the second. At first the results of the relationship seem ideal, for Willie begins his story again as a novel, moves into the tenement, and sweats the necessary long hard hours over his writing. But the attempt to become a craftsman destroys his writing, for he begins to overwrite in a florid, rhetorical style, employing a pressured stream-ofconsciousness technique with elaborate mechanical connec­ tions between its various parts. This grotesque "arty" style conflicts directly with the "tensile spareness" of Willie's "sen­ sibility" and the raw facts of a tale of a black mother trying to kill her son with a breadknife before drinking lye and "throwing herself out of the bedroom window, screaming in pain, rage, futility." (162) Under the weight of Willie's rhet­ oric, the characters turn into zombies, and the language be­ comes "a compound of ashes and glue." When Lesser is forced by his own honesty and craft responsibility to tell Willie these truths about his work, Willie is nearly destroyed and vows to quit writing forever, turning to direct action to relieve his frustrated feelings and further his revolutionary cause. Without art or self-conscious literary technique, The Ten­ ants shows, literature lacks meaning and effect, remaining Only a crude unmediated egoistic cry of rage and the satis­ faction of hatreds, but craft, when applied, seems to desiccate

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all that it touches, destroying the artist and making it impos­ sible for him to complete the work. In Malamud's view, Flaubert is wrong: a book cannot be written "about nothing," form cannot complete itself, for writing is in the long run dependent upon the world in which it exists. Western poetry has traditionally expressed this in­ teraction of life and art by marrying the craft of the poet to the love story, for love expresses in physical terms the beauty, completeness, and harmony of being which the craft of the poet also creates in his art. The physical loveliness of the beloved directly expresses those qualities the artist takes to be the essence of the beautiful, and the act of loving seeks in action that union of opposites and harmony of being, on the levels of both body and soul, which have been the central qualities of our conception of artistic beauty. The love story the poet tells, and the skill he uses to tell it have traditionally been but two aspects of the same desire for the beautiful which art seeks to create as an ideal in an ugly and fragmented world. But earthly physical beauty, which Irene Bell (nee Belinsky), represents in name and person, and the beauty of artistic form, which Lesser pursues, are separated in the grotesque world of The Tenants. At the beginning of the novel, Lesser lives a loveless existence, unmarried, without family relations. Seiz­ ing rare opportunities for occasional, and usually unsatisfac­ tory, sex, he pursues an abstract Flaubertian beauty exclu­ sively. Irene Bell belongs to Willie Spearmint, who frees her from her middle-class life and teaches her the power and pleas­ ure of sexual love. But he finds that he cannot write near Irene, near the actuality of beauty, and so in order to complete his story he begins to work in the House of Fiction. At first he spends only weekdays there, but as his involvement with his craft becomes more intense he moves out of Irene's apart­ ment and spends longer and longer periods in the tenement, forgoing all the physical pleasures of life, food, warmth, and love. But the farther he drifts away from physical love and its embodiment of beauty, the more difficult and less effective his writing becomes. At the same time, Lesser, who has gotten to know Irene through Willie, begins to love her and find

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comfort with her, and as he does so, his writing improves and moves easily and powerfully towards the promised end. The point could not be made more clearly: the beauty of art depends upon the real beauty of flesh and the world, even as art rests inevitably upon an experienced reality. To write about nothing is not only cruel indifference but an impossi­ bility. The "knot intrinsicate" of the form of art and the act of human love is drawn even tighter by the involvement of the two writers who need one another. Willie Spearmint has all the primal energy, the ego, the moral passion, and the deep involvement with the world which Lesser's writing lacks; Lesser has all the dedication, concentration, and formal skills Willie's writing lacks. They need each other as writers, even as in their circumstances as Black and Jew they need each other as men. But despite early uneasy movements toward brotherhood, to the apparent benefit of both men and both books, the relationship breaks down because of an insur­ mountable antagonism. Lesser steals Irene from Willie, who has already more or less abandoned her, and Lesser's attempts to improve Willie's writing destroy it. In fury at the knowledge that he has been cheated in both senses, Willie tries to kill Lesser, beats Irene, and in a culminating act which explains all the others, he breaks into Lesser's apartment and burns all his manuscripts. Since Lesser, close to the promised end, has removed the copy of his book from the safe deposit box for corrections, this means that his book is destroyed, even as Willie's has been, and both writers must either abandon their work or start over again. The mixture of art and life is, ap­ parently, an ideal no longer available to the modern writer as it was to his predecessors. Art and life have become separate and the literary text cannot be written any longer, or if it is it is destroyed. Abandoning art and returning to the world seems to be the only answer, and Willie storms off proclaiming "Revolution is the Real Art," while Lesser considers marrying Irene and going with her to San Francisco to begin a new life. But the power of writing over the writer is absolute, and both men drift back to the tenement. Lesser returns first, in even more straitened circumstances, burying himself even more

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deeply in the attempt to reconstruct his novel. He works even harder and longer and begins to feel that he is improving on the earlier lost work, but he also drifts away from Irene, and she disappears, scarcely mourned, and barely sorrowing, into a world with no forwarding address. Inevitably, Lesser's shadow, his doppelganger, Willie, finds his way back to the tenement as well, and the ghostly sound of his typewriter can again be heard in the corridors at night. The writers seldom meet, but each avidly reads the scraps of writing the other discards in the ashcans, each hoping that the other will both fail and succeed. But the writing of both degenerates in hatred of the other. Having rejected form, at least outwardly—though he still endlessly rewrites and constantly changes subjects— Willie's writing grows more incoherent, and its formlessness is reflected in its themes, self-loathing and obsessed hatred of all whites, particularly all Jews. He writes of cannibal feasts in dark cellars where Blacks eat their Jewish landlord, and he creates fictional pogroms, lovingly dwelling on the horrifying details and describing again and again the destruction of the entire Jewish race. In the end, his writing, unable to become anything more than his own raw feelings and his own actual experiences, reduces itself to pages of paper which begin with two opposing words, BLACK-WHITE, and gradually elimi­ nates WHITE, letter by letter, until only the single word BLACK appears over and over again. As Willie's writing re­ alizes the tendency of a number of modern writings, such as Beckett's plays, to disappear into the vortex of a single word endlessly repeated, Lesser's skill gradually dies and he, the man of words, becomes "nauseated when he wrote, by the words, by the thought of them." (229) He is still capable of dreaming of a promised end to both his life and his book in which he is married to a beautiful black girl by an African chief, while Willie is married to Irene Bell by a rabbi. But in reality, as their books are drawn down into silence, Lesser and Willie are consumed by their hatred for each other. Overcome by fury for his lost manuscript, Lesser takes an axe to Willie's typewriter. The two then meet in an apocalyptic scene, part dream, part reality, in the hallway where each

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attacks the other at his most vulnerable point: Willie castrates Lesser, and Lesser sinks his axe deep into Willie's brain. Levenspiel, the owner of the house, is the appropriate per­ son to put the question that society from Plato to the present has asked of poetry: "What's a make-believe novel, Lesser, against all the woes and miseries that I have explained to you?" To which the craftsman-artist had once answered proudly with Nietzsche, "No artist tolerates reality," or had pointed to Joyce's "luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleas­ ure" as the true reality redeeming a fallen world. But Malamud speaks for a later generation of authors. Art depends upon the world, and its values must be lived out in the world. It cannot generate its own conclusion but must find that conclusion in actual experience; that experience, however, is not satisfactory by itself, and if it is to live and have meaning it must take the shape and form that only art can give, transforming particular facts into believable and effective truths. Malamud cannot find any way of bringing these seeming opposites together to a promised end. Instead, art and experience seek their ex­ tremes, and in this extremity love dies and the art which seeks love's end through skill and form expires into silence or a single obsessive word sounded over and over again. Having failed to reconcile its artist protagonists, Malamud's own novel cannot reach the promised end but dies away with an­ other word repeated hopelessly, "Mercy, mercy, mercy." Art no longer has the power to bind together a world of racial and class hatred, of decayed cities, individual isolation, of endless war and the broken forms of a former civilization. Nor can it any longer create, as the romantics believed they could, an abstract image of perfect beauty in words which will outlast the world. As its texts lose their power, unable to overcome any longer the destructive forces represented by the tenement and the racial hatred it contains, they lose their reality and become only unfinished manuscripts, a single word endlessly repeated, scraps of yellow paper in the garbage can.

IV READING ZEMBLAN: THE AUDIENCE DISAPPEARS IN NABOKOV'S Pale Fire

THE PLACE of literature in the world is established not only by its poets and its texts but by its end as well, the particular kinds of social work it sets for itself and is perceived as doing. In the Renaissance and the neo-classical periods the close de­ pendence of poetry on the dominant social order dictated a purpose of supporting that order. This service was performed directly by praising kings and their courts, great men and their houses, and indirectly by enacting the courtly interests and ethos in poetic subject matter and style. Most importantly and consistently, however, poetry fulfilled its role of supporting aristocratic society by making its primary social purpose teaching its audience to know and honor right conduct and to identify and avoid the wrong. What was right and wrong was, of course, the official morality established by custom and the rulers of society. Justifying the ways of God to man is the high heroic statement of this great didactic principle which remained the central explanation of the value of poetry until the coming of romanticism, and has not entirely disappeared to this day, although Samuel Johnson and F. R. Leavis do not entirely agree on just what kind of morality poetry teaches. Romanticism, with its emphasis on the creative imagination of the poet and its resolute opposition to the new dominant social order of industrialism, redefined literature's function. The poet remained what he was for Wordsworth, a man speaking to men, but what he spoke of could no longer be the orthodox ways and values of a society which it was now the chief business of literature to criticize. Nor could the poet

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any longer teach, for teaching suggests a mechanical, author­ itative, limited mode of communication. Instead, the romantic poet stimulated the imaginations and feelings of readers, like the wind playing the yEolian harp, in order to perform some great function such as providing, in Shelley's imperial terms, the unacknowledged legislation of the world. For Matthew Arnold, whose views on this matter were little more humble than those of the great romantic poets, the function of liter­ ature as a central part of culture was "to make reason and the will of God prevail" by encouraging variety of thought, examination of prejudices, consideration of the full range of human possibilities, and the choice of the truly moral actions to which Arnold assumed the free play of imagination would lead men. "More and more," he says in "The Study of Poetry," mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. (Adams, 596) Since utilitarianism had become the leading ethical value of industrial-democratic society, romantic literature was forced by its stance of opposition to that society to deny itself any immediately practical function such as the older ends of providing amusement and instruction. The term "utility" is immediately suspect to Shelley, who defines it as merely "that which banishes the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dis­ persing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the concil­ iating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage." (Adams, 509) Later writers and critics went still further than Shelley and the early romantics in denying utility to art, and Oscar Wilde could argue that, The only beautiful things . . . are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or pleasure,

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or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. (Adams, 677) But then Wilde himself tried to live up to his blue china, the portrait of Dorian Gray silently tells the moral truth about a man which life conceals, and in "The Decay of Lying," a few lines after those quoted above, we hear of life as imitating "art far more than art imitates life" (680) and of great artists inventing types that life tries "to reproduce in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher." (681) No matter how intense and ingenious the attempts to re­ move literature from a utilitarian world and deny that it teaches or does any sweaty social work, literature has been able to claim a place for itself in the world only by insisting that its texts do something of great social value by changing ways of thinking and feeling in a desirable fashion. It may not instruct any longer, but the Imaginary Library has remained open to all who cared to read its books and be reassured that, despite an increasingly chilly scientific view of the nature of the cosmos, man through his art remains unique, possesses transcendental powers of mind, can create reality in his own image, and retains vital unbroken connections with the origins of being, with his own human nature and with nature itself. "Today," as Sartre says, summarizing this great purpose at what he believes to be its end, "God is dead, even in the heart of the believer, and art becomes an anthropodicy; it makes man believe that man created the world; it presents his work to him and justifies his having made it. (535) To provide the legislation of the world, make reason and the will of God prevail, create an anthropodicy, or perform any of the other great humanizing tasks that have been claimed for it, literature must work through its readers, not the limited circle of kindred spirits who read the old courtly poetry cir­ culated in manuscript, but a universal audience of mankind bound together by a shared imagination. But, despite the pop­ ular success of a few writers like Balzac, Dickens, and Brown­ ing, literature has in actuality had few readers, and its words

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have scarcely been the "flaming stars that have shot from the heavens to burn palaces and illuminate hovels" (251) that the revolutionary Heine predicted they would be. The reality and the defense against it are combined in the standard myth of the artist as an unrecognized genius like Humboldt, for whom popularity is fatal. The reality, and the hope which has pro­ vided the necessary escape into the future, are prefectly stated in Culture and Anarchy: We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the mod­ ern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the fu­ ture. (62) At the point, however, when it seemed that only the future offered literature the audience needed to make reason and the will of God prevail, a new contemporary audience was found in, ironically, the schools and universities. The older humanist system of education was grounded in the study of classical texts, including a good deal of what we now call literature, but these texts were not, at least in theory, the primary objects of study but the instruments of other ends: the training of memory, the inculcation of morals, and the development of grammatical, rhetorical, logical, and oratorical skills. Litera­ ture in the vernacular, and in the sense that we understand the subject, entered English higher education only compara­ tively recently and at first on the fringe of the establishment, in the Scottish universities and in the dissenting academies in England in the late eighteenth century, and then in the nine­ teenth century in the mechanics' institutes and the extension programs run by Oxford and Cambridge for workers and women. It appeared in the curriculum at the University of London in the 1820s and '30s, and somewhat later in the American and the new English red-brick universities, but can­ not be thought of as fully established as a university subject until the honors school of English was created at Oxford in

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1894, and at Cambridge in 1917. Religious dissent, utilitar­ ianism of the London University variety, women's rights, and the desire for social mobility were all identified with the ap­ pearance of English literature in the academic curriculum; and these were joined, as Erich Heller remarks, to the even more potent force of nationalism: the pedagogical discipline of Modern Languages together with the history of their literatures—a very late arrival in our higher education—is of Romantic origin, and in­ separably linked to that cultural nationalism which, from the end of the 19th century onwards, all but superseded the humanistic ideal of an intellectual education grounded in the reading of the Classics and common to the whole of the West. (1103) The nineteenth-century belief that one of the marks of a great nation is a great literature in the national language had its roots in Renaissance attempts to match the classics, and it continues still in the efforts made by emerging countries, as well as by the United States and the British Commonwealth nations, to define and teach a national literature. The con­ struction of American, Canadian, Australian, and, most re­ cently and interestingly, black literature provides remarkably instructive models of how and why the Imaginary Library was itself built, and in every case the definition of the national literature has been achieved and instrumented by creating a place for it in the educational curriculum, thus objectifying it, asserting its importance in the social scheme, and inter­ nalizing it as a reality in the minds of the educated, and there­ fore ultimately influential, members of the younger genera­ tion. Probably all these and the many other complex forces at work would not have succeeded in making literature a university subject if the universities had not themselves at this time been in the process of a radical change from the old classics-and-mathematics college pattern to the professional and scholarly pattern of the modern university, which fostered the creation of a number of new academic subjects such as history, science, modern languages, and political economy. In

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this transition from the old college to the new university and the consequent opening up of the curriculum, literature found its great opportunity to objectify itself as a true mode of knowledge and to influence a society that had been otherwise largely indifferent to its claim of importance in the social scheme of things. There was, as I remarked earlier, a great irony built into literature's finding its primary audience in the university, for in doing so it was forced, as if society were forcing its realities on romanticism, to acknowledge overtly that it could claim a place in the world only by being taught, by teaching. As early as 1862 Mallarme, who wanted art to remain an aris­ tocratic mystery, knew that there was something "fantastic, preposterous" about teaching literature: Poetry, like all things of perfect beauty, is perforce admired. But the admiration is distant, vague—a stupid admiration since it is the mob's. Then, because of this general reaction, a fantastic, preposterous idea occurs to these minds: namely, that poetry must be taught in school·, and so, like anything else that is taught to the many, poetry is inevitably reduced to the level of a sci­ ence. It is explained to all alike, democratically. For it is difficult to tell in advance which tousled head contains the white sibylline star. (206) And as late as 1932, when literature was fully established as a staple of education, T. S. Eliot could still in his cautious way ask at the end of his introductory Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, "whether the attempt to teach students to ap­ preciate English literature should be made at all; and with what restrictions the teaching of English literature can rightly be included in any academic curriculum, if at all." (36) A tool, once invented by men, Peter Berger tells us in The Sacred Canopy, "has a being of its own that cannot be readily changed by those who employ it. Indeed the tool (say an agricultural implement) may even enforce the logic of its being upon its users, sometimes in a way that may not be particularly agreeable to them." (9) We have seen, briefly at least, how the

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printing press was used by literature and at the same time enforced its logic of fixity and systematization on literature; the same kind of dialectic relationship has existed between literature and the university, for the university too has its logic. That logic appears in the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the honors school in English at Oxford. The thing was tried twice, and on the earlier occasion in 1887 was rejected by the professors because its proponents, who simply wanted to teach literature as the great romantics had made it, could not define precisely what the subject was, what would or needed to be taught, and how examinations could be set. In other words, literature could not meet the prime academic requirement of being teachable, and E. A. Freeman, a profes­ sor of history, expressed the doubts of many of his colleagues, before and since, when he commented acidly that he could not understand "what was meant by distinguishing literature from language, if by literature was intended the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley." (Palmer, 96) Those who supported literature learned their lesson well after the defeat of 1887, and when they returned in 1894 the pro­ posal was passed because they had tied literature to the phil­ ological studies which had become so important on the con­ tinent, particularly in Germany. Literature became, and to some extent still remains at Oxford, primarily the study of the language in which it was written, and of other related lan­ guages, particularly the older languages such as Old German, Norse, Icelandic, French, etc. Here, indeed, is a subject which, like the older classical literature, meets university require­ ments: the material is not generally known, its mastery re­ quires instruction and is capable of being taught, and knowl­ edge of it can be examined and graded. The history of literary studies in the university during this century has largely been a struggle between the linguistic ap­ proach established at Oxford and an evangelistic Arnoldian emphasis, which triumphed at Cambridge where English be­ came an examination subject in 1917, on the value of liter­ ature as a thing distinct and complete in itself, which teaches values and molds minds in unique and important ways. The

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figures in the battle have appeared in many different forms— philologist versus critic, historical scholar versus new critic, and, more recently, structural linguist or semiotician versus humanist—but the internal struggles in the literary establish­ ment between reductive and holistic approaches to the subject should not obscure the crucial fact revealed by the events at Oxford, that the university imposes the structure of its basic logic on literature, making it a set of "teacherly" texts. The history of literary study in the universities makes instantly clear the broad outlines of what this has meant. First of all, a large system of classification had to be developed to provide an overall structure of study, and the dominant system has been, and remains, a history of styles: Renaissance, Neo-classical, Romantic, Symbolist, Modern, Post-modern, with nu­ merous sub-divisions. Next, the texts had to be fixed if they were to be studied, and a large bibliographical industry has grown up in the universities to pull literary works out of their history of change and establish both the meanings of the words by annotation and the exact true text in monumental, absolute form. Beyond this, the teacherly text had to be intricate enough to need explanation by an instructor, and a vast body of criticism grew up to establish the ambiguities, ironies, and historical complexities of the work of literature. Finally, at least in a quick survey such as this, there had to be a method of reading literary texts which could be taught to and used by the student to arrive at a correct meaning. Perhaps only the New Criticism can be said so far to have provided anything like a systematic, teachable interpretive method, which may account for its continued durability in the classroom, despite continuing challenges by historical approaches and recent ef­ forts by structuralism to claim the field. The definition of literature in accordance with academic needs has proceeded on the social as well as on the theoretical and curricular levels. By now serious literary activity, as well as most of the audience for literature, is concentrated in the universities. Courses in literature provide almost the only markets for literary works, old and new; university presses, and a few small art presses, are the primary publishers of

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literary history and criticism, poetry, and perhaps soon, it seems likely, of "serious" novels. The writers of literature have increasingly found that academic appointments, a new form of patronage, are their principal means of support, and with the great increase in creative writing programs the uni­ versity has become the place where writers are trained. Critical discussions of literature have by now almost entirely passed from the hands of public critics and men of letters to the scholars who teach in universities. Economic control has inev­ itably conferred control of the literary canon as well on the academies, and the staffs of literature departments now really decide through criticism and textbook selection which works are to be considered literature, or only a part of "popular culture"—that vast bin of literary apocrypha. They are thus able also to influence the nature of the literature that will be written. The result of this power has been novels, poems, and plays which need to be taught, writing not at all concerned with the world's affairs, poetry unintelligible to all but a few cognoscenti, novels, as the public-marketplace writer Gore Vidal bitterly but not inaccurately puts it, "suitable only for classroom biopsy." (98) The intricacy, difficulty, and privacy of much modern literature may not be entirely traceable to the logic of the university and its primary rationale of teaching, but there seems little question that the kind of literature we now have has been greatly encouraged, and in no way hin­ dered, by the removal of the Imaginary Library from the world to the universities. Literature gained its audience in the modern world, it seems fair to say, at the price of allowing the logic of the university to shape in many ways the definition of what literature is and does. To many this seemed, and continues to seem, a reason­ able exchange of at least some degree of romantic autonomy and freedom for a place in the world which enabled literature to prosper and to make reason and the will of God prevail, at least in the minds of the younger generation. But now that audience is disappearing. It is actually disappearing from the classroom as enrollments in literature courses across America continue to drop sharply, and as the "literacy crisis" gives us

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students who are unfamiliar and uneasy with literature's cen­ tral means of communication with its readers, the printed word. At the same time the audience is also disappearing on the philosophical and psychological levels as well. Critical pluralism, an increasing body of widely different readings of the same text, interpretation based on misprision, and various types of subjective or reader-response theories all deconstruct the old assumed literary audience into a number of random, individual consciousnesses. The disappearance of the univer­ sity audience on all these different levels is the subject of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Nabokov sets his novel of the failure of literary commu­ nication in a university, and his major characters are college teachers, resident poets, and scholars. Wordsmith Univer­ sity—a thinly disguised version of Cornell, where Nabokov himself taught—is a fictional representation of the essential elements of the academic world where the traditional as­ sumptions about the fixed meaning of the text, its ability to communicate with readers, and its positive effect on them have been most thoroughly institutionalized. The entire lit­ erary teaching enterprise is the primary objectification of the extension of Arnoldian principles that what literature has to say has great value in the formation of civilized minds, that there are demonstrably right and wrong ways of reading a text, that a correct methodology of interpretation can be de­ veloped and taught, and that a true understanding of the canonical works will eventually improve society. Pale Fire realizes the importance of the academy in maintaining these central literary tenets, dramatizes their gradual decay, and extends the process to a reductio ad absurdum in which a very precise and pedantic scholar, probably mad, sits in an isolated cabin and edits a long poem written by one of his colleagues, using the opportunity the notes provide to tell the story, probably fictional, of his own life. On the most im­ mediate level in this fable of the radical failure of the university to enable poetry to communicate, misprision results from all the petty jealousies, the distorting pedantry, the academic van­ ity which imposes its own readings on texts, the lack of ac-

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curate knowledge, the sloppy workmanship, and the depart­ mental rivalries which plague, as Nabokov well knew, all teaching and scholarly institutions. These are the ordinary human and professional failings which make it difficult, im­ possible, or even undesired for one man to read and under­ stand what another has written, and they raise very real doubts about the possibility of communication. But below this surface of academic small-mindedness, Nabokov opens up more pro­ found depths of misunderstanding which focus most of the critical, philosophical, linguistic, and existential doubts of our century about the possibility of full communication or com­ prehension. Our growing fears of solipsism, the inability to validate our interpretations in events outside themselves, the endless ambiguity of language, the desperate necessity of im­ posing our own self-justifying systems of meaning on the other—these are for Nabokov, as they are for our time, the problems undermining the old confident beliefs which are the foundation of the teaching of literature in universities: that the poet can know something, can embody that knowledge in a perfectly wrought poem, and can, along with the teacher, through this medium transmit an exact meaning to a reader. The difficulties of literature in the university at the present time are not, in the Nabokovian view, mere academic critical squabbles or the swirlings of departmental politics, but are ultimately the expression of the severe epistemological ques­ tions of our age. Pale Fire consists of an autobiographical poem in heroic couplets, "Pale Fire," in four cantos and 999 lines, by the distinguished American poet John Shade, with an introduction and notes to the poem, many times as long as the poem itself, by the scholar-teacher Charles Kinbote. Although Kinbote recommends reading his notes before the poem in order to get the context the poem needs to make it meaningful, let us, in good Zemblan fashion, reverse the process and look at the poem first of all. During the course of his poem, Shade men­ tions a TV program on "The Cause of Poetry," in which his name "Was mentioned twice, as usual just behind (one oozy footstep) Frost" (425-26), and the Frostian tone dominates

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"Pale Fire": regular metrical system, rhyme, a plain, almost folksy note, a mixture of everyday trivia with sudden terrors lying below the surface, and a search for metaphysical mean­ ings in the ordinary. Nabokov does not, however, entirely suppress his own signature, and the Frostian tone is compli­ cated by a good deal of light mockery, burlesque, and ironic self awareness. But Nabokov's is not the only other poetic voice we hear, for though Frost's style dominates, Shade's style and subject matter are a literary conglomerate contain­ ing, among many other poetic echoes, the mock-epic tones and heroic couplets of Pope, Wordsworthian spots of time and a sense of identity with nature, the lyricism of Goethe, the sonambulistic sounds of Poe, touches of Browning's mon­ ologues, the linguistic dandyism of Stevens, the rhythms of Yeats, and Eliot's sinister sounding banalities of ordinary speech, such as, "If you're not sleeping, let's turn on the light. I hate that wind! Let's play some chess." "All right." (655-56) The elaborate intertextuality of the poem allows Nabokov to concentrate in it a history of poetry and the literary canon. Shade is almost a parody version of what Harold Bloom has called the "weak" poet, the belated writer who has no au­ thentic voice of his own but merely echoes earlier stronger writers, and "Pale Fire" can be read as an extended and amusing spoof on romantic and modern poetry, particularly on Frost. Certainly there are many points in the poem where the pat rhymes, jingling rhythms, and the mixture of high style and ordinary subject matter drop the poem into bathos: Jane's fiance Would then take all of them in his new car A score of miles to a Hawaiian bar. (386-88) Both the poet and the poem have been completely absorbed into the isolated world of university literary studies where the poet has become a quiet English professor, who writes criti­ cism as well as poetry, and the poem has become a pastiche

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of the meters, styles, verse forms, and motifs of other poems. "Pale Fire" is a university poem made to be taught, as it frequently is, by teachers who can demonstrate for admiring students its enormous range of literary echoes; its cunning reference to other poems such as Paradise Lost where line 999—the number of lines in "Pale Fire"—of Book IX is the point of the fall; its use of poetic lore like Housman's defi­ nition of poetry—"Over the skin a triple ripple send Making the little hairs all stand on end" (919-20)—its employment of poetic myths of Dedalus and the Cumaean Sibyl; its symbols of mountain and fountain; and its dense weave of bird and butterfly imagery. The teacher can also point out that "Pale Fire" is that most characteristic type of romantic poem, the autobiographical quest, and demonstrate in great detail the ways in which it corresponds to the archetypical poem of that genre, The Prelude, where Wordsworth, in the face of a toobusy world, also seeks some certainty of his poetic election and knowledge of metaphysical certainties which will legiti­ mate his poetry. Shade's quest is motivated by his desire to escape from solipsism, of being from birth, as he puts it, "most artistically caged." (114) His parents died when he was very young, and though he frequently tries to evoke them, "Sadly they Dis­ solve in their own virtues and recede," (74-75) diminishing at last to a pair of medical terms, "bad heart" and "cancer of the pancreas." As a child, he was "asthmatic, lame, and fat," and therefore cut off, except in dreams, from play with other children. Appropriately enough for one so emotionally isolated from others, he was raised by an Aunt Maud, a poet and painter who reflects her own alienation from the world in paintings of "realistic objects interlaced With grotesque growths and images of doom." (88-89) But Shade's family and social isolation only prefigure a deeper exile, a sense of metaphysical immuration in which nature surrounds him with opaque objects, and the sounds of the world form an enclosing wall. All books and people seem to conspire to keep some great truth hidden from him:

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Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time, A singing in the ears. In this hive I'm Locked up. (215-17) These intimations of mortality, of life as a prison house in which the self lives in perpetual solitary confinement, are oc­ casionally broken open for Shade by visions, Wordsworthian spots of time, which provide him with brief glimpses of the possibility of a life beyond the present one and of some mean­ ing in and Orderer of the universe. In childhood, while playing with a wind-up tin wheelbarrow pushed by a mechanical boy, he had an epileptic fit in which he escaped enclosure and achieved his intimation of immortality in the form of the oceanic sense: There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. (146-52) Much later in life, while lecturing at Wordsmith University, where he teaches, to the Crashaw Club, named after another mystic poet who also had visions, Shade has a heart attack, and feels that he has actually died. As blackness overwhelms him, he sees playing distinctly against the darkness "a tall white fountain." (707) While he is unable to interpret the symbol, it nonetheless "reeked the truth," and seemed to him to have an absolute reality which promised some form of existence beyond the immediate sensory world. Shade, the good gray poet, old, dumpy, disheveled, a teacher of literature, uxorious, more than a little dull and ordinary, is, in that surprising American way of Emerson and Thoreau, also a mystic and a visionary, irreligious but persuaded that beyond this seen world there is another unseen, and that life here is but a step on the way to a transcendental beyond. But despite his firmly believed intimations of immortality he re-

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mains trapped through most of his life in the triviality of daily things and in the prison house of the self. Deeply attached to an only daughter, he is unable to communicate with her or find any way to ease the heavy pain of life for an ugly, lumpish, unpopular child. While the girl walks out on the ice of a nearby lake to drown herself after a crushing humiliation on a date in the Hawaiian bar, Shade, unaware of what is hap­ pening, turns the TV dial from one awful banality to another. Aunt Maud dies in the isolation of a sanitarium, sitting in the sun, a fly upon her wrist, unable to control her brain well enough to put together a coherent sentence which can com­ municate her thoughts to Shade. Despite Shade's deep and powerful love for his wife Sibyl, and her warm concern for him, their life together is difficult, and she always retains the mysterious distance of another self from him, the indecipherability suggested by her name. In an effort to break out of the self, to communicate with the other, to verify the farther reality, Shade becomes involved in such ludicrous activities as I.P.H., the Institute of the Prep­ aration for the Hereafter, where men are taught how to coast into death gradually, how to deal with transmigrations of the soul into such undesirable forms as a toad, and how to manage the awkwardness that is likely to arise when one meets after death the ghosts of two, or more, former wives. A more serious and hopeful attempt to break the walls of the self and know with certainty of the hereafter comes when Shade visits a woman who has died and been brought back to life by a surgeon kneading her heart. In a ghost-written article describ­ ing what she experienced in what she tritely calls the "Land Beyond the Veil," Shade reads that she too has seen "a tall white fountain." Believing that here at last is the ultimate verification of the reality of his own transcendental symbol, he drives many miles to see her, only to find that they really have nothing to talk about, and that the word "fountain" in the article was a misprint for "mountain." "Pale Fire" opens with an image of a small bird which has been deceived by the reflection of the sky in the picture window of Shade's house and has died flying into the hard barrier of the image which

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promises freedom but only reflects the world it is already in. This ultimate image of solipsism prefigures Shade's fate, and he acknowledges in the opening lines of the poem his identity with this Dedalian waxwing bird: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. Kinbote, the editor of the poem, argues that the first line was intended also to be the last line of the poem, and that if Shade had lived he would have used it to round off the 999 lines to 1000 lines. There is no evidence for this editorial dictum, which would end the poem where it began, but Kinbote's suggested emendation is in keeping with the circular patterns of "Pale Fire" as a whole in which every attempt to break out of the self into some identification with and knowl­ edge of something beyond the self ends in failure and death. Baffled in every attempt to communicate with the other and thus validate the self, Shade turns at last, even as poetry itself has, to his poetic art and text as at least a possible guarantee of an order in the universe corresponding to an order of the poetic mind and its language: I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art, In terms of combinational delight; And if my private universe scans right, So does the verse of galaxies divine, Which I suspect is an iambic line. (970-76) But this "suspicion" is immediately undercut by his own sud­ den accidental death shortly after the poem is finished, and the poem itself falls into the hands of an editor-reader to whom it communicates almost nothing. "Pale Fire" realizes the failure to communicate with the other which had haunted romantic poetry from its beginnings. Shade's failure, like Humboldt and Lesser's, is an exemplary

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instance of the inability of the modern poet any longer to believe in the face of the world's evidence to the contrary in the power of his imagination and his art to create the images of desire and make them true. And in this failure Wordsmith University, though it cannot be considered the cause, plays a part, for by removing the poet and his poetry from the world into an academic setting where the context of every poem becomes only the rest of poetry, the university has encouraged the solipsism which has been the chief fear of the poets and the social problem of poetry. In Nabokov's novel this crisis of belief extends beyond poet and poem to include the critic and reader in their uncertainty and inability to communicate with the other. Criticism did not originate in the universities, but it is there that it has flourished in the last century and grown to such prodigious size as to threaten to overwhelm the literature it was designed to interpret and validate. It is this movement toward critical excess and independence from the poetic text that Nabokov satirizes in Pale Fire, and Wordsmith University includes, inevitably, not only the poet John Shade but that remarkable scholar-critic, the lecturer in Zemblan, Charles Kinbote, whose extensive commentary on Shade's poem, many times longer than the poem itself, makes up the rest of Nabokov's novel; and makes of it a latter-day version of Pope's Variorum Dunciad. Kinbote is an academic politician of the nastier variety, skillful at infighting with his peers, sycophantic to his superiors, sensitive to the nuances of departmental hierarchies, and, above all, aware that the improvement of his tenuous, not tenured, appointment lies in "owning" a poet. To this end he attaches himself to John Shade, moving in next door to him and trying to move into his life, holding long conversations with him, trying to feed him the subject of the poem "Pale Fire," and in general making himself into the "Shade expert." Invidious comparisons to Boswell and Johnson are frequently made. When Shade is killed, providentially on Kinbote's doorstep, Kinbote gathers up the manuscript of the poem—written on notecards—ex­ tracts permission to edit from a momentarily distraught widow, contracts for publication, and departs to an isolated

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cabin in a western state where he produces the edition of the poem which is the novel Pale Fire. The professors of the Wordsmith English department and the now recovered and thoroughly alarmed widow, Sibyl, try unsuccessfully to find Kinbote and block what they have reason to fear will be a catastrophically unsatisfactory edition of a great poet's last work. As an editor Kinbote combines all the worst qualities of pedant and metacritic, and the edition he produces is some­ thing like a mixture of The Variorum Shakespeare and The Birth of Tragedy. His primary critical stance, however, is that of the scrupulous scholar and scientific bibliographer, and parading his scholarship, he provides the reader with a fore­ word, lengthy explanatory notes to individual passages and words, commentary on possible variant readings, and an index to poem and notes. Kinbote's precise, scholarly, haughtily pedantic manner—in tone not unlike Nabokov's in his edition of Eugene Onegin—is, however, only a Scriblerian cover for fundamental carelessness, sloppiness in detail, failure to check and quote original sources, simple error of fact, difficulties with translation and idiomatic English, and various kinds of howlers. When, for example, Shade says that as a child he "never bounced a ball or swung a bat," (130) the Zemblan commentator, thinking to establish full identification with his author, remarks that he too "never excelled in soccer and cricket." (N.130) So untrustworthy is Kinbote as a scholar that when he refers, as he frequently does, to canceled variant readings of different lines, there is a strong suspicion that these may be simply his own invention. But the real joke, and the real point, of Kinbote's deficiencies as a scholar, come in the long interpretive critical notes he supplies to Shade's poem. There are those in New Wye, where Wordsmith College is located and Shade teaches English and Kinbote is a visiting lecturer in Zemblan, who believe that Kinbote is insane. We shall return to this question in a moment, but for now let us say simply that he is a melodramatic figure who insists that he is the deposed king of Zembla, who after ruling his re­ markable fairy-tale kingdom for more than twenty years was

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overthrown by a socialist revolution and forced to flee for his life, and is now in hiding disguised as a bearded teacher in this obscure American college town. The extremist party of Zembla is, however, determined to track him down and mur­ der him, and he lives in constant terror of the day when the assassin will arrive in New Wye. In his final notes on Shade's poem, Kinbote tells us that the murderer did arrive, just as he and Shade were about to celebrate the conclusion of the writing of the poem "Pale Fire," but that the murderer missed the king and killed poor Shade instead, despite Kinbote's ef­ forts to intervene. Kinbote reads Shade's poem entirely out of his own radical differences from Shade, and as a result gives us in his com­ mentary not so much a misreading of "Pale Fire" as a new poem or novel which has, at least immediately, very little resemblance to Shade's poem as a more conventional reader is likely to interpret it. During his short time in New Wye, the second term of the college year and part of the summer, Kinbote has carefully fed Shade the melodramatic story of his kingship and deposition with the firm hope that the poet will make it the subject of his next poem. But immediately he sees the completed poem Shade has written between July 1 and July 21, 1959, Kinbote knows that it is not the Zemblan epic which "would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain" (N.42), and realizes that the poem "in its pale and diaphanous final phase, cannot be regarded as a direct echo of my narrative. . . ." He reaffirms his awareness that "Nothing of it was there" in his note to the non-existent line number 1,000 and states that what is there is "An autobio­ graphical, eminently Appalachian, rather old-fashioned nar­ rative in a neo-Popian prosodic style—beautifully written of course—. . . but void of my magic, of that special rich streak of magical madness which I was sure would run through it and make it transcend its time." Nevertheless, Kinbote con­ tinues to believe that the "sunset glow" of his Zemblan story "acted as a catalytic agent upon the very process of the sus­ tained creative effervescence that enabled Shade to produce a 1000-line poem in three weeks," (N.42) and that more of

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the original story still resides in the cancelled variants, some of which he reprints in the notes with, he says, great care, and in the "echoes and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints" in the text proper which retain "subliminal debts" to the tale of old Zembla. Acting on the belief that his story ultimately underlies Shade's poem he produces in his extensive commentary not a literal interpretation of Shade's text, but the very thing he denies that he wishes to do: "I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel." (47-48) The gap which opens between poem and reader-critic as a result of inattention, carelessness, and linguistic and social differences widens into an abyss because of the reader-critic's intense subjectivity, his obsessive interest in his own psychic life and his own Zemblan iconography. A single word in Shade's poem such as "often" will provide Kinbote with an opening to talk about his own life: "Often, almost nightly, throughout the spring of 1959, I had feared for my life." (N.62) Shade's reference to his father provides the springboard for Kinbote to launch into several pages on his own father, the aviator king of Zembla, Alfin the Vague (1873-1918). Shade's reference to games leads to a remembrance of the toys of the editor's own royal childhood and the way they led him to a secret underground passage between the Zemblan palace and the National Theater. A word of considerable conse­ quence in the poem, "mountain," sets off a long detailed de­ scription in the commentary of how the deposed king of Zem­ bla escaped from the revolutionary government over Mount Glitterntin to the Gulf of Surprise. The notes provide almost a handbook of the patterns of association by which the human mind gets from one thing to another, but all the roads ulti­ mately lead from the other to the self, and the image we are finally left with is a commentator as completely locked in his own private consciousness as the poet Shade felt himself to be locked into the world. Nabokov has constructed, at least at this level of reading, a grotesque, ingenious, and hilarious satire on the situation of literature in the university. The university poet is only a

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shade of his great romantic predecessors; his poem, in both theme and form, completely cut off from the mainstream of life, turned inward, and composed only of fragments of other poems and poetic styles; the imagination blocked and ruefully aware that its own desires are doomed to failure and bathos. There is a considerable poignancy in all this—it is so close to where we have actually arrived, an ironic poem about the impossibility of poetry—but the editor-critic, and the aca­ demic criticism he is a parody of, elicit little sympathy. His arrogance, pettiness, and pedantry are revealed as mere forms of professional aggression and academic one-upmanship. Worse still, his reading of the poetic text in his notes is so far­ fetched as to be insane, has nothing to do with what the poet desperately tried to say, and everything to do with what the critic wants to say about himself. Criticism, in this view, is not only parasitic on poetry in the usual sense, it now goes beyond this kind of piggybacking to use the poem to tell its own idiotic story, which could not get a hearing unless it were attached to the poem and concealed as interpretation. This is Nabokov's utterly savage portrayal of literature and its attendant criticism in the university, a type of criticism totally at odds, it should be added, with the responsible read­ ings of his own recently published lectures on the modern European novel. Although the university is the setting for this comedy of misprision and therefore responsible to some de­ gree for the solipsism of the poetry and the excesses of the criticism written there, its tendency to isolate literature from the world only intensifies to the point of satiric visibility a far more extensive and profound social breakdown in commu­ nication. It has, of course, been long recognized that the literary mode of communication is neither simple nor direct in most cases, that literary language is oblique and complex, appealing to emotions as well as logic, making its point by subjunctive fictions rather than indicative statements, and revealing the complexity of things rather than merely driving home some reductive simplicity. As a result, critics and writers have been properly uneasy about paraphrasing the statement made by

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a particular literary work and reducing it to some plain mean­ ing. It has also been recognized for some time that literature may contain an even more radical problem of communication in that what the author says in a work may not always be clearly known to him or agreed upon by his readers. Sterne's Tristram Shandy makes explicit, for example, just how dif­ ficult it is for an author himself to know or say what he wants to say, and famous cases like Goethe's Sorrows of Young Wertber and Brecht's Mother Courage demonstrate that an audience can interpret a work in a manner exactly opposite to the author's stated intentions. Noted cruces of interpreta­ tion, like the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, Moliere's Misanthrope, Don Quixote, and the place of Satan in Paradise Lost have also made it equally obvious that literature may be understood in a variety of radically different ways, none provably right or wrong, by different audiences bringing different attitudes to a work. But it was not until the twentieth century that the full pos­ sibility appeared that the old assumed communication model of an author who inscribes his meaning in a text which trans­ mits it to the reader may not accurately reflect what actually takes place, particularly in the literary situation. The Freudian conception of art as a message transmitted by a garbled code which disguises and displaces the main points of information, sent by a sender unconscious of his message and received by an auditor unconscious of what he is receiving, pushes the possibility of communication to the edge. Saussure's structural linguistics shrinks the truth-content of language in a radical manner by positing that language systems are arbitrary im­ positions of meaning on the outer world, and that their words have meaning, not in history or in correspondence to some absolute reality, but only in their relationships to one another within the arbitrary system. The language will be shared by all competent readers, but each individual will also have his own particular "parole" or private system of meanings as well and will therefore understand every utterance in a unique fashion. The felt meaning of the disappearance of language into silence, to modify the title of George Steiner's summary

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book, Language and Silence, on the breakdown in this century of faith in the power of art and language to communicate, has been realized in such literary works as the plays of Chekov where no one hears anyone outside himself, no matter how powerful the plea the other may make; the writings of Pi­ randello where you are right if you think you are and everyone manufactures his own desperately needed linguistic reality; the strange allegories of Beckett where the human voice is mere repetitious noise boring both speaker and auditor; and in the numerous other modern writings where language is sound and fury signifying nothing. The total solipsism implicit in a belief in the failure of language to communicate is no longer struggled against but is taken for granted in a "shuffle novel" like Saporta's Composition no. 1, a novel, which con­ sists of unbound pages the reader reorganizes randomly and reads in any order in which they may fall. Recent literary criticism has begun to reflect the increasingly felt difficulties or impossibility of literary communication, and I. A. Richard's announcement in Practical Criticism about fifty years ago that all his students read the same poem in very different ways—a situation he thought lamentable and corrigeable by careful reading of the "real" text—is now taken by many critics as the basic fact literary theory must account for. These views have found restrained expression in various "reader response" theories, such as those of Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, which try to preserve in some form the possibility of a common or author-intended meaning still available in the text, while still accepting that "misreading" rather than "reading" is the given. Norman Holland in his Dynamics of Literafy Response works out this same concep­ tion of miscommunication in psychoanalytic terms. A more radical use of misprision as the basic fact in all attempts to communicate has been developed by Harold Bloom, who views the willful misunderstanding of one poet by his succes­ sors as the primary energy of literary life and the mark of a strong poet, who in order to develop his own distinctive voice must misread his predecessor, and be misread in turn by his strong successors. Only the weak understand what another

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is saying. In its most extreme form, the criticism rooted in an awareness of linguistic solipsism and its consequences for art has found expression in the works of such deconstructionists as DeMan, Barthes, and most radically, Derrida, where world, poet, text, and audience as constructed by an earlier more confident age vanish into nothingness. It is this increasing doubt about the possibility of com­ munication and therefore of an established meaning of a text which underlies the ghastly literary events in Wordsmith University, and Nabokov dramatizes the impermeable barrier between the one who writes and the one who reads by making the editor and commentator, Charles Kinbote, in almost every way imaginable the exact opposite of the poet Shade. Where Shade is short and rotund, Kinbote is unusually tall and mus­ cular; where Shade is an uxorious heterosexual, Kinbote is a solitary homosexual; where Shade is careless and ordinary of dress, Kinbote loves such finery as velvet jackets and bright lilac slacks. The differences mount steadily as the book pro­ ceeds, and we learn that Kinbote differs radically from the "fireside poet" in his reactionary politics, social snobbery, outre gestures, self-dramatization, vegetarianism, and pious orthodoxy in religious matters. All these differences are summed up in the fact that Kinbote is, or at least thinks or says he is, an alien, a native of the vaguely middle-European Graustarkian country of Zembla, a word whose root meaning in Zemblan is "mirror." These sharp differences between poet and critic reflect what our century has learned about human difference and the isolation of the individual in the lonely crowd, but they are only the surface of far more profound psychological differences, which gradually deepen in Pale Fire into an awesome and frightening—all the more frightening because so ludicrous—display of the total lack of communi­ cation between man and man. Even a poem, that most care­ fully structured attempt to convey precisely the most intense experiences, fails to penetrate the barrier between individuals, leaving Kinbote sitting, spinning out his own story, utterly deaf to Shade's expressions of his most private fears and

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hopes, his love for his wife, his agony over the death of his daughter, his mystic experiences, his shattering disappoint­ ment when "fountain" turns to "mountain." Kinbote's story continues to evolve like a butterfly, and as the commentary grows it gradually acquires an interest of its own, as Kinbote constructs in the notes the incredibly detailed fictional world of Zembla, complete with history, topography, religion, social structure, economy, art, language, and political system. He is himself, of course, the hero of this fascinating little world, the last of its royal kings, sophisticated and in­ telligent, forced from the throne by thuggish revolutionaries, separated from his beautiful queen, by his sexual tastes as well as by events, saved in a melodramatic way by fiercely loyal subjects, parachuting into the United States, and at last hiding out in disguise in an Appalachian college town. The story, though it is told in fragments and in a chronologically dis­ ordered fashion, finally has all the intricacy of detail and the internal coherence—it is, as we say, "airtight"—of such fic­ tional microcosms as Yoknapatawpha County, or the cathe­ dral close of Barchester, or the world of the Hobbits. It also has the completeness and absolute mad logic of such great insanities as that of Freud's psychotic Doctor Schreber. Much of the criticism of Pale Fire has approached it as a detective story in which the object of the game is to judge whether Kinbote is mad or sane. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the story he tells of Zembla is simply a delusory fiction constructed to justify his own megalomania, explain his paranoid fears, and give concrete form to his schiz­ ophrenic personality in the characters of King Charles of Zem­ bla and Charles Kinbote, despised and mocked academic lec­ turer. Peeping through his commentary are a number of incidents, duly reported by Kinbote but interpreted in his own way, which suggest to the outside eye an entirely different reading of the story he tells about himself. In this version of events, which seems to be shared by almost everyone in New Wye except, just possibly, Shade himself, Kinbote is not only a remarkably malicious, snobbish busybody and a most ag-

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gressive and indiscreet homosexual, but is insane as well, a classic paranoid-schizophrenic with delusions of former gran­ deur and present persecution. The remarkable world of Zembla is, according to this version of affairs, entirely Kinbote's invention, which he has the misfortune, or impudence, to believe, while the death of poor Shade, far from being an attempt to assassinate a former king, is a dreadful case of mistaken identity in which a man who had been sentenced to an asylum escapes, returns to New Wye and shoots Shade, thinking he is the judge who sentenced him to prison. In this version Kinbote, who has rented the judge's house, is only an innocent, and perhaps a cowardly, bystander. But, on the other hand, the fantastic story could be simply though improbably true. Zembla certainly hangs together well, providing a possible if not a probable explanation for all that happens, and there is a good deal of internal evidence which tends to validate Zembla, such as Kinbote's apparently real ignorance of certain American customs and idiom. The people of New Wye, however, continue to regard Kinbote as mad and his story, insofar as they know it, merely a selfjustifying delusion; and everything that happens can be as well explained in their terms as in Kinbote's. Indeed, the story of Zembla is so fantastic, and Kinbote so clearly neurotic, at the least, that the tendency of any ordinary reader is to accept his madness as a fact, and then to pursue the many clues the novel offers for evidence of inconsistency, statements contrary to facts as established by other statements, and distortion of events on the narrator's part. There is plenty of evidence of this kind, and Kinbote regularly seems to misread events, seeing kindness and affection where there would seem to be dislike and even hatred, finding social triumph where he has achieved only in making himself ludicrous, and translating chance events into well-laid plots. Once Kinbote's madness is posited, the detective-critic will follow the Sherlockian clues that wind through the narrative, discovering that the events of the story have their source not in Zemblan reality but in some happening or object of everyday life which Kinbote's imagination has elaborated and fitted into his fantasy. Moving

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in this direction, to take a small example, the Browning au­ tomatic pistol with which Kinbote says, with his usual spec­ ificity, Shade was killed by the assassin Gradus, can be traced back to Shade's use in his poem of the Browningesque form of the dramatic monologue, and to Shade's reference to Browning's "My Last Duchess" ("Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse") in the title of his book of critical essays, The Untamed Seahorse. For those who like more elaborate trails of clues, it is possible to trace a long series of unpleasant associations with the color "green"—the revolutionaries who pursue King Charles often wear green coats, while his friends aid his escape by wearing red—to a young instructor at Wordsmith named Gerald Emerald, who gives Kinbote a good deal of trouble, and whom he dislikes intensely. It is Emerald who, according to Kinbote, finally drives the murderer to Kinbote's door, thus enabling him to kill Shade. But though literary and psychoanalytic detectives will fol­ low these trails for years to come, they ultimately are circular and lead the reader back only to the image of his own values and assumptions. The name Zembla is, after all, a form "of Semberland, a land of reflections, of 'resemblers,' " (N.894) and Nabokov has so contrived it that everything in the story of Zembla can be read in at least two ways. If Kinbote dressed his fictional villains in green because he disliked Gerald Em­ erald, then it could be equally true that he disliked Emerald because the revolutionists of Zembla at whose hands he had suffered so much had favored green coats. The decision about which way the trail leads will always in this novel depend on your presuppositions, your own private views, for the trail itself is like the tracks of the pheasant in the snow described in Shade's poem, A dot, an arrow pointing back; repeat: Dot, arrow pointing back. . . A pheasant's feet!

(23-24)

Or the tracks of the great detective who put his shoes on backward as he walked in "The Final Problem" away from the Reichenbach Falls and his encounter with Professor Moriarity:

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Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?

(27-28)

In trying to decide the truth about Kinbote and Zembla even the more objective reader-critic, like the people of New Wye, like Shade and Kinbote, finds at last only the isolation of his own subjectivity, for the evidence is infinitely ambig­ uous, even though it constantly teases us with the possibility of absolute meanings if only we could follow and assemble the myriad of resemblances which look like clues to an ab­ solute meaning. Each effort to reach absolute reality, to find the truth of things and discover whether Kinbote is sane or insane, is an effort to confirm our own reading of the evidence by relating it to or showing it to be in conformity with some truth outside the circle of our own subjectivity, even as Shade tried to verify his intimations of an afterlife by linking the image of the white fountain he had seen in the unconscious darkness after his heart attack with the independent evidence of the similar vision of the woman whose heart had been massaged back to life by the surgeon. But just as there had been finally no corroborating evidence, only a white mountain seen by a rather ordinary woman, so in our reading of the novel each attempt to reach a validated truth by getting out­ side our own responses ends in failure. The dense Nabokovian weave of coincidences, themes, images, recurrences, and de­ veloping patterns in which one thing shifts into another and another, teases us with the constant possibility of a grand and absolute scheme, the truth most books try to deliver, but here we always are left at the end of the track with the puzzled knowledge that it could have gone the other way, that, in the largest terms, Kinbote might as well be sane as insane. Thus, the reader recreates in himself the feeling of the possibility of meaning but the baffled inability to pin it down, which is Shade's experience of life itself as summed up in some of those suspect canceled lines of his poem: There are events, strange happenings, that strike The mind as emblematic. They are like Lost similies adrift without a string, Attached to nothing. (N.70)

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And so the solipsistic circle comes to seem complete: as Shade cannot communicate with those he loves most dearly or with the other world, so Kinbote cannot understand Shade, the people of New Wye cannot understand him, and we the read­ ers cannot really understand their stories. "Life is a message scribbled in the dark," (235) says Shade's poem, and the novel offers an image of an absurd life with each of us listening to the tales of others, their attempt to make sense of their lives, but translating the story into our own terms which are as grotesque a travesty of the original as Conmal's Zemblan translations of Shakespeare, or Kinbote's translation of Shade into Zemblan. The romantics and moderns posited that the poetic text, like Keats' Grecian urn or Malraux's voices of silence, could stand free of the world, permanently unverified by any hu­ man context, telling men all they need to know on earth of truth and beauty. But Nabokov reveals the contemporary real­ ity of poetry, of a text endlessly ambiguous in itself and in­ volved in an endlessly complex and bizarre context of con­ tingencies. "Pale Fire" falls into the hands of Kinbote and is interpreted according to his necessities, and Pale Fire falls into our hands and our necessities. Understanding of the kind on which the Imaginary Library has depended would seem to be totally blocked; but neither Shade, nor Kinbote, nor we the readers, nor perhaps, though I am not sure, Nabokov, can quite accept total solipsism. When Shade returns from visiting the woman who seemed also to have seen the fountain playing in the darkness of death, he decides that though exact knowledge of something outside the self, in this case an afterlife, is not to be had, nonetheless its existence and its outlines, if not its exact nature, its "tex­ ture" if not its "text," can be confidently inferred: Life Everlasting—based on a misprint! I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint, And stop investigating my abyss? But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream

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But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense, Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game, Plexed artistry, and something of the same Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (803-15) There are other instances in the novel in which a message however misunderstood in its details, its text, nonetheless con­ veys a "web of sense" to the receiver, some "correlated pat­ tern" of the original. The translations of Shakespeare made by Conmal, Kinbote's Zemblan uncle, who learned English only from the lexicon and could not understand the spoken language, nevertheless still give off some pale reflected fire of the original when retranslated into English by Kinbote; and Sibyl Shade's translations of Andrew Marvell into French get something of the tone. But the most remarkable, and amusing, case of a garbled message which nonetheless makes sense comes when the assassin Gradus calls his headquarters in Zembla: Under the assumption that it would attract less attention than a BIC language, the conspirators conducted tele­ phone conversations in English—broken English, to be exact, with one tense, no articles, and two pronuncia­ tions, both wrong. Furthermore, by their following the crafty system (invented in the chief BIC country) of using two different sets of code words—headquarters, for in­ stance, saying "bureau" for "king," and Gradus saying "letter," they enormously increased the difficulty of com­ munication. Each side, finally, had forgotten the meaning of certain phrases pertaining to the other's vocabulary so that in result, their tangled and expensive talk combined charades with an obstacle race in the dark. Headquarters thought it understood that letters from the King divulging his whereabouts could be obtained by breaking into Villa Disa and rifling the Queen's bureau; Gradus, who had said nothing of the sort, but had merely tried to convey

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the results of his Lex visit, was chagrined to learn that instead of looking for the King in Nice he was expected to wait for a consignment of canned salmon in Ge­ neva. (N.469) But when the people from headquarters break into the Queen's house they find an envelope which gives them the needed information about the King's whereabouts in New Wye. If we follow these tracks, they take us to the possibility that Kinbote's Zemblan interpretation of Shade's poem—whether it be the hallucinations of a madman or the history of an unfortunate royal refugee ceases to matter—though it misses the exact text, may somehow get the context right. On the face of it this at first seems impossible, not only because the Zemblan romance is so radically different from Shade's ironic and somewhat matter-of-fact autobiographical poem, but also because Shade, while aware that Kinbote wants him to write a Zemblan epic, specifically rejects the idea, though again in one of the cancelled variants. There are, of course, topsyturvical coincidences between "Pale Fire" and Kinbote's ro­ mance, and Kinbote makes as much as he can out of these points of crossing. The word "Zembla" occurs at line 937 of the poem, but only as a metaphor taken from Pope's Essay on Man for Shade's gray beard. A reference to "killing a Balkan king," (822) and the description of the brave death of a king at the hands of "some uniformed baboon" (600) raise Kinbote's hopes that at least portions of the matter of Zembla he fed to Shade are still present in the text. At other times he shows extraordinary ingenuity in finding it encoded in the text, as when the words "Tanagra dust," (N.596) yield him "Gradus," the name of the assassin who kills Shade. But press as he will, Kinbote and his Zembla are as literally excluded from Shade's poem as completely as the subject matter of the poem is excluded from Kinbote's story. But the poem and the commentary, the autobiography and the romance, do finally reverberate in sympathy with one another at a deeper level than the surface of the text. The similarity perhaps first becomes apparent—at least to this

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reader's ear—in a counterpoint between Shade's sense of the isolation of the self in nature and mortality, and Kinbote's equally radical and fearful sense of danger and alienation from the world. Whatever kind of delusions Kinbote may have, he genuinely sweats with terror at the thought of the thugs who are coming to kill him, groans with excruciating migraine headaches, feels that the dark evenings are destroying his brain, prays for forgiveness for burrowing "in filth every day." (N.493) "I cannot describe," he writes, "the depths of my loneliness and distress." (N.62) At times an involuntary gasp of existential fear escapes him, "Dear Jesus, do something." (N.47-48) Like Shade, too, Kinbote tries desperately to escape from this terrifying solipsism. In Kinbote's case these attempts at escape first take the form of trying to imprint himself and his reality on Shade, even as Shade has sought to validate his images of the transcendental world in the mind of the woman who had died and seen the mountain. The efforts are at least as comical as they are pitiful as Kinbote spies on Shade from every point of vantage, peering out of his windows, standing upon garbage cans to peep under shades, inventing excuses to drop in and go for walks, bursting into the bathroom while Shade is bathing, always trying to enter the life of another and thus validate the self in the other, thereby escaping the terror of total loneliness. But, though Shade is a genial and extraordinarily tolerant and understanding man, the shades are always ultimately drawn against this intruder who is him­ self much too dense or self-preoccupied to understand what really is going on in the Shade household, an unusually tight nuclear family of poet-husband and protective wife. But Kinbote is not merely seeking companionship to lighten his lone­ liness, he is trying to get the poet John Shade to confirm his identity, to validate the Zemblan reality which is his hope of salvation by making it into a poem. There was once in the town of New Wye a mad railwayman who thought he was God and began redirecting trains on that basis. Shade—perhaps with a glance at Kinbote?—argues that one should not apply the word mad "to a person who delib­ erately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with

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a brilliant invention." (N.629) This is perhaps the way Kinbote has used the story of Zembla, but whether his story is true or invented, it is equally necessary to Kinbote's sanity that it become real, be believed, and he is unable by himself to achieve this necessary validation through objectification. So Kinbote tries to plant Zembla in Shade's mind, as the subject of a poem, trying to get him to fulfill the poetic contract as Words­ worth fulfilled it for Mill, and as the Imaginary Library had fulfilled it for generations of readers: "Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive." (N.433-34) "We all are, in a sense, poets," (N.629) says Kinbote, but his Zemblan story needs another better poet to authenticate it, in the way all the many poets who are incorporated in Shade's poem are needed by him to make his own poetic dreams real. But Shade, like many modern poets, disappoints his reader for "Pale Fire" is about the poet, not about Zembla, and so Kinbote must try in his notes to tell his own story, be his own poet. And he is not nearly so powerful a poet, for where Shade faces his solipsism directly, and still manages a wry detachment, Kinbote patches together a musty old ro­ mance and smuggles it into the notes attached to the greater poem to insure its being read and thereby becoming real. One of Nabokov's many ironies is that the good gray sen­ sible American poet Shade with his simple autobiographical poem is really far more daring in his search for an ultimate reality, more aware of his own aloneness, and more visionary in his simplicity, than Kinbote with his seemingly wild but extremely conventional romance of faraway kingdoms, secret passages, hair-breadth escapes, exotic landscapes, and secret band of murderers. But both, to put it most simply, tell in different terms the same story of fearsome isolation within the self and the attempt to break out of it: in the case of the poet into the metaphysical reality of finding some meaning in the abyss, in the case of the neurotic critic in telling the story of Zembla which gives substance and form to the justifying dream. So there are, it would finally seem, correspondences,

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some communication between people as isolated and different as Shade and Kinbote, poet and critic, realist and romantic, even though they do not speak the same language. This per­ haps is the meaning of the title of the poem and the novel, Pale Fire, taken from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens: The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves The moon into salt tears. (4.3.437-41) In Shakespeare the lines are spoken by Timon, himself an exile from the city of men, living as a hermit in the desert, and the words express his misanthropic conviction that all things in the world live in total selfishness, robbing from others. The lines obviously bear on the situation in the novel: Shade's poem "steals" from all the other poetry echoed in it and only palely reflects the metaphysical confidence of those earlier poets; Kinbote's Zemblan story is a retelling of a standard romance, and it steals Shade's poem by parasitically attaching the story to the poem in the form of notes, as all criticism steals the original works on which it feeds. But in the context of Nabokov's novel, the lines he has robbed from Shakespeare, lines which reflect so palely in Conmal's Zemblan translation retranslated into English—"The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it"—take on a secondary meaning latent in the original: that communication, however weak and indirect, is possible, that light still reflects from one point to another. The possibility of this positive meaning in the lines is strengthened by the fact that the Zemblan translation does catch something of the basic sense of the original, though it does not contain the words "pale fire," and that Kinbote, although he has with him only "a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zemblan"—is reminded of the correct scene in Timon by some cancelled variants of lines 39-40, although in his note to line 962—"Help me, Will. Pale Fire"—he cannot identify the Shakespeare play from which the words come. The pulses of the signal fade in and out in both sender and receiver, but

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they continue to flicker. A copy of Ttmon in Zemblan, perhaps the one Kinbote carries, was lying in the closet leading to the secret passage through which King Charles made his escape, passing under Timon Alley and Coriolanus Lane on his way to a hidden exit in the theater. Pale Fire seems to have picked up a Shakespearean subtext suggesting interaction and com­ munication, however palely, in the universe, and to have de­ veloped it by connecting Timon with escape, freedom, break­ ing out of imprisonment. Nabokov has, of course, purposely placed his readers in a most difficult position, forcing them to face the fact that any reading of his work may be simply a reflection of the reader's own subjective needs from within a prison house of self as confined as Shade's or Kinbote's. The interpretation I have offered may well be as self-serving a story as Kinbote's, though not nearly so interesting or amusing. By setting up the Kinbote misreading of the Shade poem, Nabokov involves us as readers in an awareness of the full extent of human subjectivity and its causes, and at the same time warns us against detectivestory types of interpretations which arrive at some absolute truth to the exclusion of all other possibilities. But the novel does not seem finally to deny the possibility of any corre­ spondence whatsoever between writer and reader, text and understanding. Indeed, it seems deliberately to tempt us by its own elaborately wrought internal form, to follow up the possibility of some overall meaning in the work, even as Shade followed up the hints of some overall meaning, however faint, in the cosmos. For the reader of Nabokov's novel that meaning must come not from Shade's poem "Pale Fire" alone, or from Kinbote's Zemblan story told in the notes, but from the larger image of poem and story in relation to one another, and both in the context of events during the winter and spring of 1959 in New Wye. And such meaning as appears will be not of a factual kind, precisely pinpointed, but only a possibility cre­ ated by hints, coincidences, suggestions. The reader must fi­ nally be like the "good Zemblan Christian" who "is taught that true faith is not there to supply pictures or maps, but that

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it should quietly content itself with a warm haze of pleasurable anticipation." (N.493) Approached in this way, seeking not the text but the context, "events, strange happenings, that strike The mind as emblematic," as Shade puts it in a cancelled variant printed in the note to line 70, appear. For example, the Vanessa butterfly appears at several crucial points in the poem in such a way as to tease us with the possibility that it may have some meaning beyond its immediate presence. Shade refers to his beloved wife Sibyl as "My dark Vanessa" (270); on the night before he dies and just as he finishes his poem, he looks out his window where, A dark Vanessa with a crimson band Wheels in the low sun, settles on the sand And shows its ink-blue wingtips flecked with white. (993-95) And Kinbote tells us that as he and Shade were walking toward his house, one minute before Shade's death, a Vanessa or "Red Admirable . . . came dizzily whirling around us like a colored flame." One's eyes could not follow the rapid butterfly in the sunbeams as it flashed and vanished, and flashed again, with an almost frightening imitation of conscious play which now culminated in its settling upon my delighted friend's sleeve. It took off, and we saw it next moment sporting in an ecstasy of frivolous haste around a laurel shrub, every now and then perching on a lacquered leaf and sliding down its grooved middle like a boy down the banisters on his birthday. Then the tide of the shade reached the laurels, and the magnificent, velvet-and-flame creature dissolved in it. (N.993-95) A reader inescapably responds to this butterfly, even as Shade responded to the white fountain, particularly because of its appearance at the moment of death and the verbal associations with "shade" and the poet's laurels, as a manifestation of some transcendental force in the universe moving in corre-

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spondence with human life, something like, perhaps, the pow­ ers Shade himself believed to play through human life: It did not matter who they were. No sound No furtive light came from their involute Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute, Playing a game of worlds. . . . Coordinating these Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making ornaments Of accidents and possibilities. (816-29) The possibility of meaning, however tenuous, is strengthened by long threads of association spreading throughout the novel from the Vanessa butterfly, the "Red Admirable," to Swift's Vanessa and her associations of love, poetry, and madness, and the red waxwing, with whom Shade identifies, which dies trying to fly through the reflected world on the window pane. Every event in Shade's world of New Wye has its correspond­ ence in Kinbote's Zemblan world, and so the waxwing and the Vanessa have their Zemblan correspondents, the sampel or "silktail" and harvalda, "the heraldic one," and the red color common to both leads on to King Charles who makes his escape from Zembla dressed in bright red, and his many loyal subjects who risk their lives to aid his escape by also dressing in red to confuse the police. In this "link-and-bobolink" way, everything in the "plexed artistry" of the novel seems to lead on to everything else and to tease us with the possibility of a completely articulated structure which if understood will allow us to fly through the barrier of the text into a meaning beyond. Shade's epileptic attack, which gives him for an instant the oceanic sense, begins when he is playing with a mechanical toy man pushing a wheelbarrow, and the last line of his poem, written just before his death, describes Kinbote's gardener "Trundling an empty barrow up the lane." His killer, now approaching, who uses an automatic pistol, is the mechanical man, Jakob Gradus, alias Jack Degree, in the Zemblan story, Jack Grey in the New Wye version. In the Zemblan version his automatism is that

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of the modern proletarian revolutionary, a "degraded" root­ less childhood, work in the mirror factory, blind obedience to party discipline, the gray dull life of cheap hotel rooms, buses, and stale sandwiches, and the emotionless killing on command of a king or a poet. In the New Wye version the automaton is a compulsive maniac who had been committed to a hospital for the criminally insane and has now escaped— a link with all the other attempted escapes?—and returned filled with hatred to kill the judge who sentenced him. He blindly fires at the man who looks like the judge and is stand­ ing on the steps of the judge's house. Shade is killed, in either version, of revolutionary assassin or compulsive maniac, by the same total solipsism, the automatism of the given, which he spent his life and wrote his poetry trying to escape. Escape cannot finally be for the poet or the reader, as the death of Shade indicates, from the uncertainties of self to a sure knowledge of some transcendent reality beyond the self, figured or mapped by the text, whether world or poem. Na­ bokov includes in his novel a Zemblan parable of the false art of the Zemblan painter Eystein, "a prodigious master of the trotnpe I'ceil," who in his paintings of the old kings and queens of Zembla had only managed to make them look more dead by his incredibly detailed, realistic renderings of the ob­ jects surrounding them, the flowers, the cloth, the panelling: But in some of those portraits Eystein had also resorted to a weird form of trickery: among his decorations of wood or wool, gold or velvet, he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device which was apparently meant to en­ hance the effect of his tactile and tonal values had, how­ ever, something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye. (N.130) The complete failure of this kind of art is portrayed in the

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efforts after the revolution of two Russian investigators, acting like readers or critics searching for solid meaning, to locate the crown jewels which they believe lie concealed behind one of Eystein's pictures. In their search they come at last to a metal plate which Eystein has inserted in a portrait of a royal treasurer as the cover of his strong box, but upon prying the plate off the picture they find only the shell of a walnut, the kernel of which had been painted in beautiful perspective lying on a plate resting on top of the safe. Eystein's art and the investigator's criticism offer another image of that mirror sit­ uation of imprisonment and solipsism in world and self which is the existential fact of the novel. But Shade, and Kinbote, and Nabokov offer a very different kind of art which does not try to find the kernel of truth by literally representing some absolute reality, but rather by palely reflecting the light of some distant sun, in an elaborate play of correspondences and possibilities which suggest, but do not prove, some ulti­ mate pattern of meaning, some elaborate game of complex moves. The truth that art offers is thus not in its literal pic­ turing of the world, or in the rendering of some ideal truth perceived by the imagination, but in a provisional truth con­ structed by the mind to satisfy its own necessities. This is what Shade partly discovers after his failure to validate the existence of the ghostly fountain: A feeling of fantastically planned, Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art, In terms of combinational delight; And if my private universe scans right, So does the verse of galaxies divine Which I suspect is an iambic line. (969-76) This is also what Kinbote dimly knows in his desperate belief that his Zemblan story will become real if only Shade can somehow be persuaded to give it poetic form. Powerful as Shade's statement about the value of art is, the

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old romantic certainty that the poet is a man speaking to men is gone, and in its place is an image of each of us, poet and reader, Shade and Kinbote, the citizens of New Wye and the murderer Grey, sitting in isolation staring into the mirrors of ourselves, unable to understand the messages sent us by the other and unable to send clear messages to others, despite a desperate need to communicate. Shade experiences this con­ dition in its extreme metaphysical form, as befits the tradi­ tional poet, trying to penetrate the barriers of the universe itself, trying to fly through the sky reflected on the windowpane. Kinbote experiences it in its most terrifying and absurd human form in which his understanding of himself and his place in the world may be either an implausible truth or an insane man's elaborate delusion put together to justify himself and escape an unbearable reality. We as readers experience it by trying to find an absolute, fixed meaning in a novel which reveals each of our strategies of interpretation as the reflection of our own desire for self-justification. But there is still in Nabokov's novel a glimmer of pale fire in the darkness, reflected dimly from the sun of some possible ultimate meaning, to the poet Shade, and from him to Kinbote, and from him, perhaps, to the readers. However different the players in the game may be—and they could hardly be more different—Kinbote's situation does correspond in certain cru­ cial ways to Shade's, and the poem "Pale Fire," however man­ gled and misunderstood by Kinbote, does evoke in him an expression of his own kindred existential loneliness and fear. Some communication at the most basic level is still possible. And in both Shade and Kinbote, and ultimately in Nabokov— who identifies himself with Kinbote in various ways—the act of poetic creativity with its order and coherence suggests the possibility, nothing more, of corresponding qualities in the universe. The structure may be right even if the facts are wrong, the context right, if not the text. But even if the many suggestions that this belief too may be mere illusion, that Shade and Kinbote are equally deluded in different ways, are rejected, Pale Fire still puts the matter of poetic communi­ cation in a very different light than do more traditional po-

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etics. The distance between poet and reader is as vast as it has become in the twentieth century, the languages as garbled, the solipsism as deep, and the need for validation through com­ munication as desperate. The poem is no longer a bridge be­ tween the writer and the reader, no longer a hard statement of an absolute meaning, no longer a validation of truths the reader desperately needs to have made real for him by the poet. Instead, each poem and each reading are merely pro­ jections of ourselves, fictions constructed to save ourselves in our loneliness by making our world seem real. If there is any communication it is only a sharing of nameless fear and an attempt to deal with it by creating stories which name it, shape it, and give it a context of possible meaning.

¥ THE TAKING OF THE MOON: THE STRUGGLE OF THE POETIC AND SCIENTIFIC MYTHS IN NORMAN MAILER'S Of a Fire on the Moon AT THE CENTER of the institution of literature there is, I have argued earlier in Chapter I, a world-view or myth which in­ forms the various activities of the institution and is in turn objectified by them. To speak of the myth of literature, as Frye does, is probably a mistake since no two minds seem to conceive literature in exactly the same way, and since the dialectic interaction of world and mind results in constant change in the myth. Nevertheless, the great central statements about the nature of literature during a given period tend to hang together well enough to permit us to speak of a governing world-view or myth of literature of that particular time. Within the romantic period with which we are concerned, from Wordsworth's Prelude to Shade's "Pale Fire" the major works of literature, for all their individual differences, join with the major works of criticism such as Arnold's Culture and Anarchy or Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, to create a ro­ mantic myth of a vast and mysterious universe, filled with the magic of the unexpected, which is therefore a perpetual source of wonder and joy, never quite to be explained. Its world is a plenum of many things endlessly different from one another, individuals, each with its own special quality and beauty. But in this infinity of variety all the parts are ultimately linked with all other parts in organic ways which can only be ap­ prehended by intuition, imagination, or powerful sensory ex­ citement—not by reason and logic. Only by paying careful attention to the unique being of each person or thing, only by responding to its "thou" of being with the "thou" of its

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own deep being, can imagination hear the music of the spheres. In this romantic cosmology, the world is not static as in the Great Chain of Being, or circular, as in a Myth of Eternal Return, but is in movement, through struggle, towards some only dimly perceived but surely glorious future. Its plot is a titanic struggle of opposites, God and the Devil, thesis and antithesis, Apollo and Dionysus, Id and Ego, poet and society. The great enemy is passivity, stasis, the lack of energy, entropy. In this struggle mighty Promethean heroes emerge, charged with divine or daemonic energy, to carry the fire through great apocalyptic battles with the forces of darkness. Despite the various forms of the myth of literature, it pro­ vides, however differently it may be conceived in different minds, the enabling charter of the remainder of literature. So long as it is believed in, thought of as a true picture of the world, so long the texts, the poets, the word craft, the criticism and all the other many activities which compose the institution of literature are valid and worth the labor expended on them. Attacks on the myth questioning its usefulness or its truth come therefore very close to the heart of literature. Such at­ tacks, usually centered on the fictional aspect of literature, have been fairly constant from Plato to the present, and have been met in the usual way of institutions by assimilation, as Aristotle adjusted poetry to meet Plato's objections, or at times by a radical change in the myth to accommodate itself to changed social conditions, as the romantics redefined poetry in the face of the new society brought about by the democratic and industrial revolutions. Recently, as we have earlier seen, that romantic myth of poetry, as modified over the two cen­ turies since its construction in the late eighteenth century, has been coming under increasingly heavy attack from Marxists who see it as merely an instrumentation of class interests, from philosophical critics who are deconstructing the logic of its assumptions, and from radical changes in the beliefs of the society which deny the basic literary principles. In Of a Fire on the Moon, a description of the landing of two Americans on the moon in 1969, Norman Mailer dramatizes these attacks

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on literature in a conflict of two great myths, science and poetry, for the control of reality. In identifying the basic threat to the believability of poetry's myth as another myth, that of science, Mailer is following a long line of distinguished romantic predecessors—Blake, Carlyle, Arnold, and Ransom, to name only a few—who well understood that the social world is always an arena of com­ peting systems of belief or myths and that literature's great competitor for belief has been, at least since the late eighteenth century, science. From Aristotle through Pope, poetry was usually defined by its difference from philosophy on one hand and history on the other as more specific than the first, more general than the second. But in the eighteenth century, at about the same time that the more universal term "literature" began to replace the older "poetry," a new social paradigm of the arts "began to develop. The crucial first step, described by Paul Kristeller in a remarkable article, "The Modern Sys­ tem of the Arts," was the full statement of a long-developing concept of Art as consisting of five fine arts—poetry, archi­ tecture, sculpture, painting, and music—distinguished from other activities by a shared purpose, the creation of pleasure through beauty, and by their total lack of any workaday func­ tion such as imitation or instruction. Poetry had, of course, long been loosely associated with music and painting, but only in the mid-eighteenth century were the various arts joined together in systematic form and the conception of Art created. As Kristeller explains the change: The various arts are certainly as old as human civilization, but the manner in which we are accustomed to group them and to assign them a place in our scheme of life and of culture is comparatively recent. This fact is not as strange as may appear on the surface. In the course of history, the various arts change not only their content and style, but also their relations to each other, and their place in the general system of culture, as do religion, philosophy or science. Our familiar system of the five fine arts did not merely originate in the eighteenth century,

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but it also reflects the particular cultural and social con­ ditions of that time. (226) Kristeller goes on to show that this conception of the identity of the arts under the concept of Art was spread through the Encyclopedie, and a philosophical and psychological basis for the special status of the arts was provided by Kant, in whose Critique of Judgment "Aesthetics, as the philosophical theory of beauty and the arts, acquires equal standing with the theory of truth (metaphysics or epistemology) and the theory of good­ ness (ethics)." (223) If poetry, and later literature, has been defined by its sim­ ilarity to the other arts, within the broad category of art, or, as Raymond Williams would have it, culture, it also has found its opposite, as we have seen, in a utilitarian industrial society, and chiefly in its principal philosophy, science. In good struc­ turalist fashion, then, literature has been known, and has known itself, by those things it is like, the other arts, and by what it is unlike, science. The warfare between science and poetry, or C. P. Snow's two cultures, has from this structuralist point of view been long and fruitful in that it has enabled literature to define itself in the great system of social institu­ tions by contrasting its subjectivity to science's objectivity, imagination to reason, connotative language to mathematics, and its sense of the mysterious uniqueness of events and things to the scientific assumption of the uniform behavior of par­ ticles of charged matter. But the opposition of science and poetry remains functional only so long as the poets can main­ tain in the face of science at least the possibility that their myth can describe or create a reality as true and believable as the scientific myth. In fact, of course, the poets have been far more nervously aware of science than the scientists of poetry, and the poetic myth telling of a world organized in conformity with human desire has long been on the defensive because the opposing scientific myth has proved so extraor­ dinarily powerful in the control it gives over nature that it has by its achievements increasingly discredited the poetic myth. Of a Fire on the Moon dramatizes what it conceives of as the

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last battle in this long war, for in the late 1960's, Mailer feels, the scientific conception of the world has all but triumphed, and the landing on the moon will demonstrate conclusively the enormous power of science, validate its myth, and com­ plete its dominion over the minds of men. The world will now become what science makes it, a world of objects moving in relationship to one another in accordance with immutable laws, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, lost in an infinity in which being is only relative. Literature and its hu­ manistic conception of a world corresponding to human de­ sire, organically related and metaphysically purposive, will disappear. As if to make clear its final assault on literature, science has now appropriated the myths of poetry: the mission is named Apollo 11, claiming for a rocket the name of the god of poetry and art, and it will land on and seize the tra­ ditional symbol of the poetic imagination, the moon, trans­ forming it into a dead object, another scientific fact, "alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies were dead." (32) The uncannily accurate prophecy of the poet Keats at the beginning of the nineteenth century will at last be fully realized: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— (.Lamia, II, 229-36) Against this scientific imperialism, this desacralization of the myths of a weaker culture by a stronger one, stands the poet Aquarius, Norman Mailer's persona, commissioned by a magazine to write a factual description of the moon-shot, but using the occasion to fight what he sees as the last battle between science and poetry, the Armageddon of art. But be­ fore we turn to a consideration of Aquarius and the myth he

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tries to make work once more, let us look at the beliefs of science as Mailer defines them in a typically romantic fashion, making them the exact opposite of poetic beliefs. NASA-land, "the very center of technological reality (which is to say that world where every question must have answers and procedures, or technique itself cannot progress)" (47) is almost overwhelming in its power, its complexity, its effec­ tiveness. Its machines are made of millions of parts, all of which are perfectly designed to interact smoothly with each other in flawless perfection and perform the most complex tasks without fail. Its buildings are taller than cathedrals, and its booster rockets as large as destroyers. The rocket fuel is maintained at fantastically low temperatures, where gases change to liquids, and when the fuel burns at thousands of gallons per second it produces fires with such enormous thrust power as to overcome the earth's gravity. The capsules sent into the vastness of space are navigated with pinpoint preci­ sion from the earth to the moon and back again. Every detail of the flight is monitored, every variation corrected with ex­ actitude, by thousands of men working together with the same emotionless efficiency as their machines. Voices and images are transmitted clearly over thousands of miles of space, emergencies are handled with ease, and no contingency among millions of possible variables is not foreseen and procedures for dealing with it worked out beforehand. No one, not even the poet Aquarius, can remain unimpressed when the great rocket leaves its launching pad to journey into space: two horns of orange fire burst like genies from the base of the rocket. Aquarius never had to worry again about whether the experience would be appropriate to his meas­ ure. Because of the distance, no one at the Press Site was to hear the sound of the motors until fifteen seconds after they had started. Although the rocket was restrained on its pad for nine seconds in order for the motors to mul­ tiply up to full thrust, the result was still that the rocket began to rise a full six seconds before its motors could be heard. Therefore the lift-off itself seemed to partake

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more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate, and was then pursued by flames. No, it was more dramatic than that. For the flames were enormous. . . . Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville's Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Ma­ donna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the (99-100) sky There is a good deal of the poet as well as the rocket in this lyric passage, particularly in its imagery, which tries to keep the humanistic world in play with the rocket, but the event in itself is powerful enough to be impressive in its own right. But elsewhere, though he is always respectful of the power of the event he is witness to, Aquarius is more often repelled by than attracted to the marvels of science and its technolog­ ical creation, NASA-land. Like the America out of which it comes, NASA-land is "An empty country filled with won­ ders." (103) For all of its intricacy and efficiency, it presents a smooth, emotionless face to the observer, gives off no smells—a particularly important sense for Aquarius—no signs of mystery or vitality. Its buildings are bleak and windowless, usually placed in some barren setting, its atmosphere air-con­ ditioned, its procedures developed from abstract rules rather than from human needs. Aquarius first sees the astronauts at a press conference be­ hind a screen of glass—to protect them from germs—and they never appear close up and in the flesh, but always as some distant, removed image, seen from far away as they move in their plastic helmets to the launch, are projected on television, and, finally, are glimpsed in a quarantine box on the carrier Hornet after they have landed. The personalities of these "shining knights of technology" are as removed and alien as

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their distant images. "What we can't understand, we fear," says the wife of one of them, and their internalization of scientific understanding relieves them of fear, of excitement, of pleasure, even of competitiveness. Like interchangeable parts of the machines they design and operate, one astronaut seems much like the other, and each could in fact exchange roles with the others and function effectively. The third as­ tronaut, Collins, who does not land on the moon but remains in the command ship circling the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin land, could equally well have been chosen to walk on the moon, and he insists that his failure to be chosen doesn't bother him at all since he is merely part of the team, and it is the mission, the group, not the individual which counts. This emphasis on the group, on the project, on the field, as it were, rather than the individual is close to the center of the scientific myth which empowers NASA. Behind Apollo 11 lies a vast bureaucracy, a host of contractors, an army of scientists and engineers, all working together like one of their machines with a minimum of friction and a predictable outcome. In­ dividuality, the unique or unpredictable, is frowned on, and the men who make up NASA are, according to Aquarius, all cut from the same cloth of middle America, short-sleeved shirts of synthetic material with several pencils in the pocket, crew-cut hair, muscular and trim, humorless, WASP, intent, rational, the statistical norm. The astronauts themselves are the farthest extensions of this human machine, and any hint of the unusual about them, physically or mentally, would disqualify them for the mission. Neil Armstrong, the leader, is particularly without any irregularities or psychic bumps. He comes from a small town in Ohio, worked hard as an errand boy to earn the money to learn to fly, waited long to marry a school teacher, served as a Navy pilot in Korea and then as a test pilot. Although he has known difficulties and tragedy in the death of a young child, he is still the American Dream personified, small-town poor beginnings, hard work and de­ termination, courage in the face of danger, intelligence and hard training, and now the biggest of all pay-offs, the first man to walk on the moon. Perfectly programmed for this

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mission, following their learned routines exactly and almost never called on for individual decisions, linked at all times to Mission Control in Houston, with even their heartbeats mon­ itored, watching their thousands of instruments, locked into and entirely dependent for their lives on the complicated ma­ chinery of which they have become parts, the astronauts in their plastic helmets and protective space suits are the perfect image of scientific man when they step clumsily and uncer­ tainly out onto the surface of the moon, unable to live or move except within the vast support system that extends back to earth. And though they are the principal figures in the trip to the moon, they can never become heroes, to the intense frustration of the millions who watched them, because systems emphasize teamwork, and heroes are romantic individuals. And they know this, are perfectly programmed to this pattern, so that every remark they make plays down their own im­ portance and emphasizes that success is the result of joint effort, just as their smooth quiet exteriors and calm voices efface all traces of personality. Aquarius has been charged with being unfair to the astro­ nauts and purposely dehumanizing them in order to sharpen his point. But since their return from the moon there have been several books about these astronauts which substanti­ ate Mailer's analysis of them. Two of the books were "ghost­ written," but the ghosts are not mysterious romantic spooks, only the familiar professional writers, specialists of the PR team which is the "communication arm" of the technological society. The official book, characteristically a team effort of all three astronauts, First on the Moon, A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. (1970), is said to be "written with" Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin, with, significantly, an epilogue by the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke which tries to make the voyage to the moon exciting and meaningful by the application of some imaginative dreaming about the future. The book was care­ fully read and approved in final draft by a NASA official. The royalties were distributed in equal shares to the members of the team, all the astronauts in the program at the time, not

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just the three who went to the moon first; when an astronaut left NASA, as Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins all eventually did, his share in the royalties ceased. The book makes a con­ siderable effort to humanize the moon venture by having Armstrong worry about his mail as the rocket is launched, by cutting to the nervous wives and families at home during the landing, and by showing Vince Lombardi telling his football players to pray for the astronauts because the voyage to the moon is even more important than football. But the book is flat, its touches of human interest only the stock-in-trade of the professional "flack," and the entire venture seems as meaninglessly dreary in this official version as Mailer depicted it in his book. Colonel Edwin Aldrin was for Mailer the most curious of the astronauts, an engineer and a pure product of technology, but still "with the hint of unpredictability," (23) and his book, Return to Earth, "written with Wayne Warga," (1973) proves in many pathetic ways Mailer's point that men cannot yet live as machines within machines. After the return from the moon, the astronauts were handed over to another mechanism, the PR machine, which sent them to endless ceremonies and ban­ quets, on friendship tours and visits of state around the world. Under these pressures the relationship of the astronauts broke down, and Aldrin, the super-achiever, began to drink, to have affairs, and to spend long hours simply staring at a wall, communicating with no one. At last he completely broke down and was hospitalized until a psychiatrist provided a conven­ tional but very romantic explanation of Aldrin's profound existential anxiety: I had gone to the moon. What to do next? What possible goal could I add now? There simply wasn't one, and without a goal I was like an inert ping-pong ball being batted about by the whims and motivations of others. (303) In the midst of his troubles Aldrin remembered a book, prob­ ably by Jules Verne, he had read as a boy about a voyage to the moon which encounters great difficulties and from which

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one of the astronauts returns insane. How delighted MailerAquarius would have been to know that a romantic fiction would eventually be needed to organize and give meaning to the life of an astronaut! In the end, by the aid of ministers, friends, modern medicine, and a faithful family, Aldrin's "dysfunction" is corrected and there is a conventional happy ending; but the power of his book derives from the pathos generated by the contrast between the extraordinarily sim­ plistic understanding of life it projects in all its language and values and the powerful and profound human needs at work in the man but baffled by and unable to find expression or understanding in the strange machine-like world in which he must live. Language is, we now believe, the central structure of mean­ ing and values in a culture, and it is the NASA language which generates its scientific myth and its social manifestation, the impersonal world of technology. When the reporters in an interview press the astronauts for "disclosure of emotion, ad­ mission of unruly fear—the astronauts looked to give replies as proper and well-insulated as the plate glass which separated them." (38) Their words never yield much—"Our concern has been directed mainly to doing the job" (38)—and the famous phrase uttered by Armstrong as he first stepped on the moon, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," (399) is so neat, so flatly delivered, so patently manufactured on Madison Avenue for the event that it reverberated with not even the slightest heartfelt spontaneous delight of a man doing something truly extraordinary. The language of the as­ tronauts and of the NASA administrators, always carefully controlled to eliminate or conceal emotion, is further insulated by the jargon Aquarius calls "computerese." The use of "we" was discouraged. "A joint exercise has demonstrated" became the substitution. "Other choices" became "peripheral secondary objectives." "Doing our best" was "obtaining maximum advantage possible." "Confidence" became "very high confidence level." "Ability

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to move" was a "mobility study." "Turn off" was "dis­ able"; "turn on" became "enable." (39) Computerese tends toward abstraction and the stripping away of emotional content, subjective responses, and the his­ torical accretions words have gathered over the centuries as a result of their involvement in the lives of men. Much of the vocabulary of computerese is made up of acronyms, EVA for "extra-vehicular activity," i.e., walking on the moon; PTC equals "passive thermal control." VAB, the acronym for the Vehicle Assembly Building where the great rockets are readied for flight could be, Aquarius remarks, the name of a drink or a deodorant, or it could be suds for the washer. But it was not a name for this warehouse of the gods. The great churches of a religious age had names: the Alhambra, Santa Sophia, Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame. Now: VAB. Nothing fit anything any longer. The art of communi­ cation had become the mechanical function, and the ma­ chine was the work of art. What a fall for the ego of the artist. What a climb to capture the language again! (55-56) But the dull language of fact, the acronyms, the jargon, the scientific cant, the plain but still somehow pompous state­ ments of the astronauts and their spokesmen, these are only the various paroles of a langue whose alphabet is ultimately number, numbers which because they are "abstracted from the senses . . . made you ignore the taste of the apple for the amount in the box, . . . shrunk the protective envelope of human atmosphere...." (138) The paradigm underlying com­ puterese is finally that simplest and most reductive of all math­ ematical forms, the binary system in which all things are ul­ timately plus or minus, one or zero, yes or no, go and no go, a flash of energy or its absence. Computers are built upon this langue, and computers are the very heart of Apollo 11, plot­ ting its orbits and vectors, tracking its progress, monitoring the heartbeats of the astronauts and the consumption of fuel,

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and doing all these in an infinitesimal fraction of the time it would take human beings to work out the problems. Without computers there would have been no moon walk, but the price paid for their service is that every question "fed" to them, every problem they solve, every pattern they work out has to be reduced to "bits." As a result this particular reductive struc­ ture of "thought" informs all the activities of NASA, the lan­ guage of men as well as its technical procedures. And so NASA and the astronauts think of things as yes or not yes, presence or absence, fear or no fear, go or no go, success or no success, true or not true. Computerese does not work in terms of the old romantic dualisms such as good and evil, or true and false, where the second term has an existence in its own right, but in terms of one or zero, the presence of a thing or its not presence, like Orwell's "Newspeak" in 1984, or like the or­ thodox but little-believed Christian theology which tried to eliminate evil by making it merely the absence of good. For Aquarius this radical monism of the computer makes it "some species of higher tapeworm . . . quietly ingesting the vitals of God." (352) As it is applied to more and more situations "to simulate what had hitherto been out of the range of simula­ tion," it solves "problems whose outer margins would be lost as the center was sucked into the binary system." (355) The binary language of the computer is at the heart of NASA and by its simplification of everything to presence or absence makes finally possible the achievement of the ultimate "world-vaulting... assumption that sooner or later everything would be understood—Ί paid a trip to death, and death is a pleasant place and ready for us to come in and renovate it.' " (108-109) Computerese eliminates misunderstanding and mystery to create a universe that is "no majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of in­ vestigation. . . ." (109) Beauty in this world is merely "system perfection," and truth only the possession and structuring of clear, uncontroversial data. But as the contradictions disappear, so does what Aquarius calls "firm sense of magnitudes," (302) by which he means

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the architectonics of the romantic world, the existence of many things in relationship to other things by virtue of their firmly established uniqueness. It is just this firm sense of magnitudes that the country as a whole lacks—"the American disease: Focus on one problem to the exclusion of every other" (386) —and which is personified by the astronauts who "like nar­ cissists, like children, like old people,... all exhibited a singleminded emphasis on each detail which arrived before them, large or small." (273) In the empty space in which they jour­ ney, all orders of human magnitude disappear, and on the moon as the astronauts see it through the eyes of technology there is no sense of scale, and therefore no differences, for a crater may be as large as New York or as small as a house. Everything blurs into a sameness which, according to Aquar­ ius, Cezanne, followed by Picasso and Cubism, prefigured when he abandoned the traditional emphasis on particular surfaces, "the sheen and texture, the hairs, the dust, the flick­ ering motes of light on the surface of a drape," (300) for a vision in which "the similarities between surfaces [are] now more profound than the differences." (301) An organization so internally consistent and coherent as NASA has no teleology and needs none. It is in a condition of homeostasis, runs in order to run, is entirely self-sufficient; therefore so long as it continues to function—and who will raise troublesome questions about it internally?—it really needs no purpose outside itself. To go to the moon, yes, but why? Collins, the most perceptive of the astronauts, realizes that something is lacking, "It's been one of the failings of the Space Program . . . that we have been unable to delineate clearly all the reasons why we should go to the moon." (341) But Armstrong when pressed with the question of why all this expense and effort can only come up with the flat, canned cliche used a thousand times to explain activities that have no purpose outside themselves: "I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face chal­ lenges." (42) And to other questions outside the system defined by computerese—"What will you do if you find the moon inhabited?" or "Will landing on the moon create any psychic

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disturbances on earth?"—NASA can only respond with a po­ lite shrug of incomprehension. Aquarius perceives that there is something pointless, tau­ tological, about the entire venture, "a meaningless journey to a dead arena in order that men could engage in the irrational activity of designing machines which would give birth to other machines which would travel to meaningless places " (152) Perhaps the best image of this monolithic quality, this enclosed system which reduces the world to itself and then blankly ignores whatever remains outside, giving off no odors of vi­ tality, no hints of meaning, is a painting by Magritte, which Aquarius sees in a house in Houston, "a startling image of a room with an immense rock situated in the center of the floor. . . . it was as if Magritte had listened to the ending of one world with its comfortable chairs in the parlor, and heard the intrusion of a new world, silent as the windowless stone which grew in the room, and knowing not quite what he had painted, had painted his warning nonetheless." (133-34) Solidly there, immensely powerful, impervious, self-contained, the rock gives visible form to what Aquarius had earlier felt, "The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation." (34) As more and more happens and events get bigger and bigger, wars, mass murders, famines, GNP, speed, they come somehow to mean less and less, to simply be, like the trip to the moon of Apollo 11. Of a Fire on the Moon quite obviously presents science in the images of NASA and Apollo 11 in a hostile fashion, but the undeniable power of technology, its perfect confi­ dence, the ability of its system to manage events and bring them to the desired end give it a solid and impressive reality. It is there, it is real, and somehow the literary artist like Mailer must deal with it, not the other way round. His commission from Esquire magazine is simply to write a lively but factual description of the moon landing, and Mailer fulfills his con­ tract, managing at the same time to criticize the venture very sharply for its banality and lack of what he as a good romantic would call meaning. Werner von Braun, the genius of the

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rockets that powered the space program, may describe the landing of two men on the moon on July 20th, 1969, as "equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land" (72-73), but for Norman Mailer writing about and trying to comprehend the event, "something was lacking, some joy, some outrageous sense of adventure." Strong men did not weep in the streets nor ladies copulate with strangers. . . . It was as if on the largest stage ever created, before an audience of half the earth, a man of modest appearance would walk to the center, smile ten­ tatively at the footlights, and read a page from a data card. The audience would groan and Beckett and Warhol give their sweet smiles. (385-86) But Mailer is not content with merely analyzing the reasons why the moon shot was so disappointing to him and to mil­ lions of viewers of the event on TV. Instead, and this is what makes his book so remarkably interesting, he attempts to make literature out of the fact of science, to impose the ro­ mantic literary myth on the very "reality" which denies its efficacy and truth. The center of Fire on the Moon is a con­ frontation of the poet with science in a titanic struggle to restore "magic, psyche, and the spirits of the underworld to the spookiest venture in history, a landing on the moon, an event whose technologese had been so complete that the word 'spook' probably did not appear in twenty million words of NASA prose." (131) In the most obvious terms, Mailer's im­ mediate problem is to lift the book "like a boulder out of the mud of the mind," (470) by making the moon shot, as we would say, "interesting," in the face of its resolutely mechan­ ical quality, its lack of mystery, its elimination of danger, its determination not to allow personality to intrude, in short, its objectivity. This difficult problem is approached by facing it squarely and making the real plot of the book the struggle of the poet to humanize, and thereby make interesting, the stone of the fact itself, to sieve "the transcript for lunar gold." (314) The task is, however, a Herculean one, for events had,

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Mailer realizes, developed "a style and structure which made them almost impossible to write about." (88) In the pursuit of his task, Mailer is, it is important to note, severely handicapped from the beginning by his inability to transform the fact of the moon shot into the fiction of liter­ ature. Fictionality has long been the most prominent, perhaps the defining, characteristic of literature—"the poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth," as Sidney puts it—and the poets have paradoxically maintained that though their fictions mirror the world obliquely, they reveal it more truly than do other more literal modes of description. The defenses of fiction range all the way from Aristotle's preference for poetry's probable over history's actual, or Boccaccio's expla­ nation that fictions are necessary covers of sacred truths which prevent them from becoming known to the vulgar, to the modern view, dramatized most effectively by writers like Borges and Nabokov, that all views of the world are fictional orderings of events which in themselves have no absolute meaning or form, and that therefore the creation of fictions in literature openly reveals the essential process by which men make the world. However its truth has been justified—and the ways are many—fiction has remained not only the primary method of the artist but the expression of his belief that the poetic imagination can create a truer world than that of muddy fact. But where less troubled romantic writers, like Jules Verne and later writers of science fiction, simply imagine voyages to the moon, filling the bleakness of space with color and animating it with humanoids, Mailer's imaginative vision is blocked by the unavoidable fact of NASA, which prevents him from making up his own fictional world and denies the validity of his other literary techniques. "The world," he re­ alizes, "had changed, even as he had thought to be pushing and shoving on it with his mighty ego. And it had changed in ways he did not recognize, had never anticipated, and could possibly not comprehend now. The change was mightier than he had counted on." (55) This overwhelming factuality saps the confidence of the poet who faces the encounter with NASA, the Armageddon of poetry. He is aware of and frankly

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talks about both the tremendous power of his antagonist and of his own consequent disorientation and lack of secure belief in his heartfelt artistic values: "he no longer had the remotest idea of what he knew. . . . He was adrift." (141) His mind is "a pit of wrenched habits and questions which slid like snakes," and with uncertainty and confusion comes a frequent loss of confidence in the ability to write—"It was a terror to write if one wished to speak of important matters and did not know if one was qualified." (435) Old, fat, tired, depressed, at times he accepts the final triumph of science over poetry, "the heroes of the times were technologists, not poets, and the art was obliged to be in the exceptional engineering, while human communication had become the routine function." (151) This artistic weakness in the face of fact had already been evident in Mailer's earlier work, where his artist-heroes regularly fail, and his own writing had already yielded to the "real" world in that he had abandoned fiction—that mark of confidence in the writer's ability to create reality out of his own imagination—and turned to the writing of "novels of fact" in which the events are supplied by the objective world but interpreted, i.e., given meaning, by the methods and sub­ jectivity of the artist. This invasion of the "real" into art continues in Fire on the Moon, where Mailer is prevented by the overwhelming sci­ entific facts from writing fiction, and his narrative is swal­ lowed up entirely by fact in numerous places where he simply gives in and reprints PR handouts and verbatim transcripts of long radio conversations between the astronauts and their Houston base. But elsewhere in Fire on the Moon, though denied the freedom of fiction by a reality grown too real to permit it, Mailer tries to transform scientific fact into literature by imposing upon it the romantic myth, using the rhetorical strategies which instrument and embody the values of the myth. He begins, in good romantic fashion, by putting an artist into the scene, himself in the persona of the writer Aquarius— a name with the associations of astrological magic and lifegiving wetness in a dry land. Of a Fire on the Moon begins

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with a lament for the suicide of Hemingway, "the greatest living romantic," (4) who while he was alive had made it still possible to believe that fear could be kept at bay by courage and style. But Aquarius-Mailer's romantic affinities extend far beyond Hemingway, for the poetic persona Mailer creates to dramatize himself and his views in the confrontation with science derives primarily from the entire radical wing of ro­ manticism, the energetic, tough, revolutionary line that leads from Blake and Byron, for all their differences, through such poets as Rimbaud to Sartre and Genet. Like an existentialist hero, he has without motive stabbed his wife at a party. He is a strutting, swaggering macho lover, a brawler and a drinker. He admires blacks, ethnicity, athletes, charismatic figures, the poor, but has no interest in rich and powerful but dull people, the managers, the bureaucrats, the pious, the middle-class. His politics are leftish—he has run for mayor of New York and lost badly—but although his instincts take him in this direction they do so not so much because he has any theo­ retical political-philosophic leanings as because it is on the left that he finds those romantic values he prizes above all else, energy, generosity, strong emotions, action, a desire for change, a sense of deeply felt engagement with the world, some suffering at its hands, and the consequent awe of its unpredictable powers. Aquarius is a very old-fashioned, very standard romantic poet: "his philosophical world" is a place ultimately of mys­ tery and uncertainty, built "on the firm conviction that noth­ ing was finally knowable." (7) Although trained as an engi­ neer, he is intensely suspicious of reason and science as ways of dealing with his enigmatic universe, and his distrust of machinery and scientific ways of knowing descends directly from such writers as Carlyle and Arnold. "He has little to do with the immediate spirit of the time," (4) and trusts instead, in a Keatsian manner, to his senses, particularly to his sense of smell, to put him in communication with the real and vital nature of things, to tell him where life is present and where it is not. In characteristic romantic fashion, the senses in turn lead him to feeling the identity of things and their ultimate

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relationship in some great unified whole. But despite his close association with the poets of the romantic tradition, Aquarius is at the end of that heroic line of great imaginers, and his own reality, actually the reality of Norman Mailer, weighs as heavily upon him as the reality of science presses down upon his imagination. Forty-six years old, overweight, with his fourth marriage breaking up, subject to fits of deep depression, uncertain of his own powers, witty, vulgar, self-conscious enough to be able to laugh at his own egocentricism, baffled by his world but still feeling it deeply, envious that he is not the center of the moon adventure, he is partly Childe Harold and partly Sancho Panza. His sweaty clumsy appearance in the same scenes with the cool, effortless efficiency of the as­ tronauts and engineers immediately enlarges the world of NASA enormously and complicates it with the presence of something familiarly human, with an individual "I," to oppose the collective "we" of NASA. With his appearance on the scene all the complexities and the poetic beliefs he embodies become real, and what was monolithically one immediately becomes differentially two. A rudimentary plot that can confer poetic meaning on events then becomes possible: a struggle between Aquarius and NASA, poetry and science, good and evil. As the book proceeds, the human context is constantly ex­ panded as the poet's art populates the NASA world with the ghosts of the old Indians who once walked the land where the rockets are now launched, with the memory of older ad­ venturers—Odysseus, Columbus, Magellan—with the faces of poor blacks representing all mankind deeply etched by life: the faces of saints and ogres, of emaciated angels and black demons, martyrs, philosophers, mummies and mi­ sers, children with the eyes of old vaudeville stars, chil­ dren with faces like midgets and witches, children with eyes which held the suffering of the lamb. But they were all faces which had gone through some rite of passage, some purification of their good, some definition of their remaining evil. (93)

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N O scene in Fire on the Moon is more powerful, more deeply

rooted in the human stuff of life, than the description of the people who gather to watch the great Saturn rocket of Apollo 11 fired at Cape Canaveral. The cars they drive, the cheap whisky they drink, the fears of losing their jobs, the despair, the sexaul urgencies, the hero worship, the deep antagonisms between husband and wife, the play of the children, all sur­ round the launch with a Breughel-like fullness of life, culmi­ nating in the most earthbound of images: "Out a car window projected the sole of a dirty foot. The big toe pointed straight up to Heaven in parallel to Saturn V." (63) It is not only people who make up the fullness of the poetic world Aquarius creates, but things as well, rendered in all their variety and their specificity, in contrast to the abstrac­ tions of science. Aquarius furnishes the void of every NASA scene with careful description of objects, the canteens, the food-serving machines that don't work, the red tiles, the bro­ ken-down dusty bus, the plastic webbing of the chairs, the round bed and floor-level bath of the luxury motel, the bleak­ ness of the Venetian blinds, the color and quality of the land, the trees, and the sun rising and setting over the sea. All of this is partly the descriptive realism of a careful craftsman, but it ultimately functions in the book to create the solidity and reality, the sensuous plenum, of a cluttered landscape that gives the feel of the real world as human senses know it. Aquarius' copious style is a typically romantic response to the monolithic quality of the event. His flood of words, his willingness to follow up every detail and raise every possibility of meaning, his relentless naming of parts and exploration of technological matters, his constant analysis of his own thoughts and feelings, his evocation of a vast world, past and present, around NASA, all are a frantic, at times excessive, verbal effort to give the landing on the moon some meaning, to break its self-contained isolation and pierce its stony same­ ness. But the copious style also suggests Aquarius' lack of certainty about his ability to deal with NASA—it is as if all the words in the world would somehow never be enough to humanize the technological fact by surrounding it with the

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variety and plenitude of the world and thus giving it the de­ sired romantic magnitude. These large-scale attempts to find meaning in, or force meaning on, NASA are backed up by the constant use of a variety of typically romantic rhetorical devices which work on a smaller scale, but at higher frequency, to achieve the same end. "To regard the world once again as poets," says Aquarius, we must "behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure." (471) Metaphor, the central trope of romantic po­ etics, is employed steadily and with great skill by Aquarius, who is nothing less than a genius at finding the striking and the telling comparison which brings objects to life in a sudden flash. His metaphors, various and numerous as they are, all tend to perform the same task: to translate the mechanical world of technology into immediately human terms, and to bind the abstract world of science into a larger continuum with the existential world of men. The Saturn rocket at takeoff consumes as much oxygen as half-a-billion people, a sixth of the world's population, drawing breath at once; "physics was love and engineering was marriage" (178); the procedures of science resemble efforts to bring together a couple compatible except that the husband has a body odor repugnant to the wife; the safety precautions in the space vehicle are designed on a principle like the 613 laws of the Talmud; the astronauts on the moon walk with "about as much coordination as a two-year-old in three sets of diapers." (387) If metaphor creates or discovers meaning by reassembling those isolated things which belong together in the romantic world view, ultimately building the world into a great whole, then the symbol, that other primary romantic trope, intensifies the power of a chosen object until it radiates the meaning it contains or loses its opacity and focuses a world of meaning lying behind it. The computer, the machine, and the rock are transformed from things into symbols which reveal to Aquar­ ius the nature of NASA; an old car buried at the end of the book—about which more later—manifests the condition of modern industrialism; and the rocket itself reveals the phallic

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worship of the technological society. Like other romantics, Aquarius assumes that objects "are shaped in a way which offers meaning, not only scientific meaning, but existential meaning," (302) and he follows the painters in believing that "form is a language which seeks to express itself by every means." (292) He looks carefully at every object, like some "medieval alchemist rubbing at a magic stone whose unfelt vibration might yet speak a sweet song to his nerve," (293) hoping that the arrangement of its parts will speak to him of its nature and its history in miraculous language. He speculates that even "the face of the moon might be a self-portrait which looked to delineate the meanings of its experience in that long marriage with the earth and its long uninsulated exposure to the solar system and the stars." (292) There is very little that is not made a symbol by the romantic Aquarius, and his ability to turn objects into symbols by focusing language on them until meaning flares out is one of his major techniques for attempting to enlarge the world of scientific fact. Working in this fashion, Aquarius surrounds the rock of NASA with an extensive context, verbal, human, cultural, and historical, and by bringing it into opposition with the poet puts it into the movement of a rudimentary plot. But the monolith itself remains as yet intact, and to extend and dem­ onstrate the truth of his romantic view of things, Aquarius must somehow split it, break into its center. To do so he must probe until he finds within NASA the conflicts, paradoxes, ambiguities, and mysteries which the romantic mind considers essential to reality. But these are the same qualities NASA has eliminated; like the machine its parts all work toward the same end and its components are interchangeable; co-operation not conflict is its guiding principle; and it moves toward the achievement of clarity and certainty in the place of mystery and ambiguity. So tight is its organization and so coherent are its theories that it is nearly impenetrable, but Aquarius believes that he can split the monolith if he can find the slightest aperture for his imagination to enter in: "where there is a little magic, there can be a mighty magic." (163) He notes that the maiden name of one of the astronauts' mothers was "Moon,"

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hoping that it may indicate some astrological influence; he eagerly seizes on each malfunction of the machinery as an indication of mysterious non-scientific forces at work; he ex­ pands on the possibilities of fate manifesting itself in the light­ ning which strikes an oak in Collin's yard on the night before the launch; he extensively pursues the possibilities of visionary foreknowledge in a dream that Armstrong had when he was young of holding his breath and being able to hover motionless above the earth; he tries to relate the apocalyptic figure ApolIyon in Revelations to Apollo 11, even though logic tells him that the names are etymologically unrelated. By continuing to probe and lever in a thousand little ways, he keeps opening the cracks wider and wider until he finds contradictory ele­ ments within NASA, ghosts in the machines, unconscious forces at work deep in the minds of the astronauts beneath their bland exteriors, apocalyptic tendencies in the emotion­ less efficiencies of science, and a metaphysical message in the smell of the dry dust of the moon. Using "every effort. . . to find an edge of the sinister in this first expedition to the pe­ culiar soil of the moon," (409) Aquarius ultimately locates a mystery concealed behind all the confidently reductive terms of science: what is electricity finally? or magnetism? or gravity? We know how to make these forces work, but their ultimate nature remains an enigma. Huge answerless ques­ tions are thus raised to cast their shadows over NASA's clarity. The deep powers of the mind posited by romanticism as the source of true knowledge, the imagination, the collective un­ conscious, the Dionysiac, the id, "the mansions, theaters, and dungeons of the deepest unconscious where knowledge of a more poetic and dread-filled nature may reside," (156) have been a fortress of literature long after science and rationalism conquered the surface of the daylight world. Psychology there­ fore inevitably becomes one of Aquarius' most powerful meth­ ods for opening up the depths of NASA and discovering con­ cealed mysteries and latent conflicts. By investigating their dreams and looking deep into all the peculiarities of their personal lives, he hopes to discover "how much at odds might be the extremes of [the astronauts'] personality. From their

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conscious mind to their unconscious depth, what a spectrum could be covered!" (46) Aquarius is very much a Freudian, and wherever he locates or creates a psychology, he assumes that it will have unconscious energies which will be individ­ ualistic, willful, freedom-seeking, and in conflict with the con­ trols exerted by the reality principle. He tries therefore by means of hints and guesses to endow every person he meets in NASA with a psychology, a mind internally at war, and in one of his most desperate efforts to psychologize the world even tries to demonstrate a psychology of machines, "for if machines have psychology, then technology is not quits with magic." (161) By demonstrating the uncertainties of science about how its apparatus ultimately works, and by showing that even the simplest machines are not always predictable, Aquarius is able to animate the machines and find "some all but undetectable horizon between twilight and evening where [the machine] is free to express itself, free to act in contra­ diction to its logic and its gears, free to jump out of the track of cause and effect." (162) Aquarius does not, however, try to impose his desired mean­ ing on the moon shot merely by revealing the possibilities of latent conflicts and mysteries which the scientific myth ignores. To achieve his goal of making literature out of the science which denies its validity, he must put NASA into some great dialectical struggle, some romantic plot which moves it toward an end that will explain the mystery of existence and tie it to the order of the universe. NASA has, of course, its own plot derived from the linear logic of the computer: to go to the moon and return. But the inability of NASA and the astro­ nauts to explain satisfactorily even to themselves just why they are going to the moon suggests the inadequacy of this plot, a lack of meaning felt by Aquarius and most of the people who looked at its climax on TV. In the failure of the scientific plot, Aquarius finds his op­ portunity to impose on the event his own larger romantic plot. A sense of history, of the organic relationship of present things to the past and the development of the future from them, has always been central to the romantic consciousness, and Aquar-

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ius labors mightily to give the trip to the moon this kind of history. It is a very romantic history he constructs, a Geistesgeschichte of titanic forces involving the spirits of peoples and the struggle of mighty powers for the control of the universe. The frontier has at last disappeared in America, and now the people, half afraid and half eager, are ready for new adven­ tures in space. The motive power driving the mission forward is twentieth-century corporate capitalism, and its deus ex machina, the German engineer Werner von Braun, is literally dropped into a meeting on the eve of the launch by a heli­ copter. After developing the German rockets fired at London in World War II, von Braun brought his crew of rocket experts to America and developed the big boosters which power the exploration of space. Aquarius plays with the idea that there is some meaning in the similarity of NASA and Nazi, but the geist that really creates NASA and shapes it in its own image is modern capitalism, "the marriage of huge profit with huge service, of teamwork ... and of detestation of contradiction." (183) In the Aquarian view of history, corporate capitalism has "run amuck" in the twentieth century, producing a flood of shoddy goods, spending its money on advertising rather than on crafting its products well, and in the process has wasted the earth, gagging "the bounty of nature" with "plastic wastes," polluting the atmosphere, and burdening the people with factory work death-heavy in its pettiness. But the cor­ porations have lost their nerve, their own ideas having gone dead in triviality and in fear of what has been done, and now in the 1960's, a fierce reaction, of which Aquarius is a part, has taken the offensive: "for years, the forces of irrationality had been mountjing into a protective war against the ravages of corporate rationality run amuck." (189) The voyage to the moon is a last effort by "corporate rationality" and the po­ litical system which mirrors and serves it: "to save itself [cor­ porate capitalism] would commit the grand, stupendous, and irrational act (since no rational reasons of health, security, wisdom, prudence or profit could be given) of sending a ship with three men to the moon." (189) This earthly history is only a part of a much greater war

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in heaven between good and evil which Aquarius imposes on the venture. He draws attention to his own Manichean incli­ nations early in the narrative, and throughout the book he poses the metaphysical question: "was our venture into space noble or insane, was it part of a search for the good, or the agent of diabolisms yet unglimpsed?" (140) "Man," he says, "was voyaging to the planets in order to look for God. Or was it to destroy Him?" (79) Whether God or Satan is at the helm of this new Pequod becomes for Aquarius the most crucial issue of his entire attempt to understand Apollo 11, but the question is never answered to his own satisfaction, though in the end, as we shall see, he asserts that in the long run the venture into space is on the side of good, even if those who create it do not know what they are doing and he cannot specify what the good will be. Aquarius continues to insist throughout his book that this cosmic plot is his chief instrument for transforming "a con­ ceptual city of technologese to one simplicity—was the venture worthwhile or unappeased in its evil?" (131) But the cosmic plot never quite succeeds in actually becoming the plot of Fire on the Moon. It remains merely one of Aquarius' many at­ tempts at sympathetic magic, and the actual plot emerges as a conflict between science and poetry, personified in NASA and Aquarius, for control of the book. If NASA wins, the book need not, cannot, be written at all, since the official version of the astronauts' journey to the moon will provide the needed record of the facts, or it can be merely a reprint of PR handouts and transcripts of communications between the astronauts and Houston base. If Aquarius wins, the book will be written and will transform the moon shot into the new Jerusalem of the poetic myth embodied in Blake's prophetic books, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, or, at the least, Byron's Don Juan. No such poetic triumph takes place, and instead we get a fragmented, disordered narrative of a poet lacking any firm a priori grasp of events, trying confusedly to impose his romantic ways of understanding on events he cannot con­ trol. Baffled by NASA, he must use a process of blind and furious association, a seizing of any stray possibilities, "sifting

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of haystacks of technological fact for the gleam of a needle or a clue." (467) Going back again and again over the details of the flight and his own responses to it, like the detective to whom he frequently compares himself, he hopes that some­ how with enough words and enough feeling he can write a book that will eventually animate the trip to the moon and make it shine with a light which sears the senses and satisfies the human desire for meaning to fill the void. The hero-poet as underdog, the Miltonian single just man isolated from his fellows, doing battle with a fearsome enemy, is a standard romantic plot, The Prelude retold in modern terms. But the feelings of the inadequacy and failure of the poetic vision are far deeper in Fire on the Moon than in Words­ worth, and there is, as we shall see, a very real question of whether they are finally overcome. Nothing causes AquariusMailer more distress and more doubt about his values than his allies in the great battle against corporate capitalism and its technology. At the end of his time as an observer of events in Houston and at Cape Canaveral, Aquarius returns to Provincetown to try to write his book. His friends, the artists and swingers of that intellectual community, have been drunk or stoned out of their minds all the summer during which NASA has taken the moon. As Aquarius looks at these late inheritors of the romantic tradition, though he loves them still, they disgust and frighten him: they had used their years, drinking, deep into grass and all the mind illuminants beyond the grass, princelings on the trail of hip, so avid to deliver the sexual revolution that they had virtually strained on the lips of the great gate. They had roared at the blind imbecility of the Square, and his insulation from life, his furious petulant ignorance of the true tremor of kicks, but now it was as if the moon had flattened all of his people at once, for what was the product of their history but bombed-out brains, bellowings of obscenity like the turmoil of cattle, a vicious ingrowth of informers, police agents, militants,

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angel hippies, New Left totalists, entropies of vocabulary. . . . (440) This is the counter-culture, the burnt-out ends of the romantic tradition in the summer of 1969. The poet feels betrayed on all sides by the course it has taken: the hippies, those "out­ rageously spoiled children who cooked with piss and vomit," Teddy Kennedy at Chappaquiddick, the Manson family, and Woodstock. What disturbs Aquarius most is the utter futility of all this "while the Wasps were quietly moving from com­ mand of the world to command of the moon," (440) and his sense of hopelessness is perfectly concentrated in a scene at the end of the summer when some radical-chic friends give a party at which a car is buried. An old wreck used for summer transportation has broken down, and now a hole is dug for it in the sand—the work done by a very technological bull­ dozer of course—and amid much drinking and laughing the car is pushed in backward so that it rests on its trunk. Sand is pushed around it, but the front end remains pointing up­ wards above the sand like some sad broken monument of technology. Passages from Vergil and the Song of Songs are intoned, the children animate it by painting ribs and belly on its underside in green luminescent paint, and a sculptor welds pieces of it into odd angles to transform it into a piece of statuary. It is a tribal ceremony, one of the rituals of sym­ pathetic magic about which Aquarius has been reading all summer in The Golden Bough, and it is a recapitulation of what he has been trying to do with the voyage to the moon, the humanization of the machine by means of art expressing romantic values. But Aquarius knows that this is weak magic, which finally has no more effect on the world than an earlier Provincetown ritual with the same import in which the image of a vagina with fluttering lips is superimposed on the TV screen and the image of the face of Richard Nixon, the political manifestation of the technological society and the robot man, as he speaks in the political version of computerese about the journey to the moon. In this attempt to instrument the ro­ mantic dream, love, or at least sexuality, replaces politics, the

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living organ the machine; but in the end it is only an illusion, for the substitution doesn't hold in the real world. Technology has conquered the moon. Fire on the Moon portrays the possible death of art, ro­ mantic art at least, its disappearance into fad and joke, as a result of its failure to control the world, to grasp reality and to shape it in the image of its own desires, to be, to put it most simply, any longer believable. Aquarius suspects that the end has come—"what if radio, technology, and the machine had smashed the most noble means of presenting the Vision [of the Lord] to the universe?" (469) —but he ends the book which has been so difficult to write on a small note of affir­ mation. He returns to Houston "looking for the smallest sign" and finds there "a true object, a rock from the moon," (470) the last appearance of the monolith he has been trying to breach. Through two layers of glass deep in the "plastic vaults" of NASA he smells the rock, "tender as the smell of cleanest hay . . . like the subtle lift of love which comes up from the cradle of the newborn," (472) and this evidence of the senses tells him that some living thing is there, gives him his sign and "certitude enough to know he would write his book and in some part applaud the feat and honor the astro­ nauts because the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us. . . ." (471) On the whole, this final note of affirmation is a noble effort, and characteristic of A Fire on the Moon in its hard-working, intense effort to come to grips with issues of fundamental importance, to assert despite doubts that art and the values it carries can still shape the world. But the scene in which the rock is made to give off smell seems contrived, imposed on a book whose only slightly concealed doubts about itself are sounded again in the words "might help to disclose." Throughout the book the large metaphysical schemes and meanings that Aquarius has sought to fasten on the voyage to the moon have not been asserted as fact but smuggled in as subjunctive possibilities or as questions. Events "suggested that it was in the nature of structures to address each other."

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(370) ii Was the world more polluted" because a great novel had not been written? "The astronauts could even be men with a sense of mission so deep it was incommunicable even to themselves." (316) Did an ape sent into orbit "sicken and die because of some drear but most recognizable message its animal senses had received from space . . . ?" (421) iiWas a curse building like the curse of the Pharaohs on the explorers who would open their tomb?" (174) Suspense is built by such means, but when almost every major statement of meaning, metaphysical, moral, psychological, is bracketed as only a possibility, such deep uncertainty is not overcome by the joy­ ous proclamation of the smell of a moon rock, through two layers of glass. It is not, of course, a question of NASA and the techno­ logical world it represents having some absolute claim on reality, of being themselves "real" in some absolute sense, while the poet is only a dreamer of what might be, some heroic wish-fulfiller. Mailer sees science and poetry as alternative world-views, myths, struggling for the human mind and the right to shape the world throughout the nineteenth and twen­ tieth centuries. Science has at last almost triumphed because its machines are capable of delivering such awesome power. What the steam engine and the spinning jenny started, the great rockets and the computers finally achieve, the authority to organize society, to create a new language, and to define the individual as another machine, mechanical or electronic. The conquest of the moon is the supreme achievement of the technological society, and its power in the world reveals that the romantic conception of the world and of meaning, far from being inevitable human ways of thinking, however "nat­ ural" they may by now seem, are rather a particular set of values, one way among many of organizing the phenomena of the world into a myth which endows the parts with mean­ ing. Literature, or art in general, is not, Ofa Fire on the Moon reveals, some unchanging, immutable thing, some eternally privileged way of writing about reality whose authority is located in some perennial psychological power—genius, imag­ ination, sensitivity—or in some especially true way of writ-

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ing—fiction, plot, hero, character, organic form—or in some special form of language—verse, metaphor, symbol. It is rather the expression of a set of values, a humanistic way of looking at and understanding the world, which has selected and stressed, made the essence of poetry, those ways of thinking and writing that, among all the many possibilities available, express its values and satisfy its needs: metaphor which binds diverse things together, fiction which creates new worlds from old, plots which bring the struggle of opposites to meaningful conclusions, heroes who express human individuality, sym­ bols which contain infinity in a grain of sand, the sublime which reveals the mysterious wonder of the world, and organic form in which each thing speaks in its structure and devel­ opment of its own essential nature. These ways of thinking and writing which constitute the romantic myth of literature exist, Fire on the Moon tells us in striking ways, in society where they must compete with other great systems of belief and their institutional organizations for power and continued existence.

VI FINDING THE NEW THING

"IN ANCIENT TIMES," says Charles Citrine, poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world. Of course, the material world was dif­ ferent then. But what interest could a Humboldt raise? .. . He consented to the monopoly of power and interest held by money, politics, law, rationality, technology be­ cause he couldn't find the next thing, the new thing, the necessary thing for poets to do. Instead he did a former thing. He got himself a pistol, like Verlaine, and chased Magnasco. (155) All the poet-protagonists in the books we have looked at in detail do a former, a romantic, thing. They act out, of course, different styles of romanticism. Aquarius and Humboldt are flamboyant Byronic rebels, Lesser is a Joycean exile living in poverty and cunningly perfecting his Flaubertian wordcraft, and Shade is in the tradition of Wordsworth writing that most characteristic romantic poem, the autobiographical story of the growth of a poet's mind, concealing behind an ordinary life a thirst for transcendental certainties. But each poet con­ ceives of his life in characteristically romantic terms as the struggle of an isolated individual consciousness with a mys­ terious and baffling universe and a hostile and alien society. They believe that their heroic vocation, their genius and imag­ ination, their powers of intense vision and feeling, their energy and strength to work and endure, their honesty and ability to face things directly set them apart from others and allow them to see beyond the surface of things and imagine or per­ ceive some ideal lying beyond the chaos of the immediate world. Their art of metaphors, symbols, the patterned line of

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verse, the organic structure whose beginning contains the seeds of its fulfilling end, are for them not mere rhetoric but extensions of their psychic powers, the wordcraft which en­ ables them to express and communicate to the world the per­ ception of wholeness and therefore of meaning which they have known. And in every case they seek that most romantic of ends, to tell the world in their writing that life makes sense, sense in human terms: that it is part of a gigantic struggle between good and evil (Aquarius); that the soul can flow "out into the universe and look back at the complete scene of earthly suffering" (Humboldt); that the work of art can create and make real in its style the love which does not exist in a world of hate (Lesser); and that for all our difficulties in know­ ing and communicating with "the other" there is beyond the tangle of the immediate world a transcendental reality that corresponds, however vaguely, to our poetic sense of it (Shade). But these high romantic hopes all fail. Art no longer works as it had worked so many times before. Aquarius does not really succeed in defeating NASA and making the conquest of the moon into a romantic story of man's epic struggle in a perpetually mysterious universe. Humboldt Fleisher, though he possesses genius and vision, manages to write almost noth­ ing, and ends his life sick and derelict; while his successor Charles Citrine, though he too has the vocation of the ro­ mantic poet, never succeeds in writing any real work of imag­ ination and retreats at last in silence to exile in Europe. Harry Lesser's novel about a novelist trying to write a novel dis­ appears into its own self-consciousness, art swallowing art, long before Willie Spearmint destroys the manuscript out of hatred and Lesser's attempts to recreate it turn into endless pieces of scrap paper. Shade's poem "Pale Fire" is completed on the last day of his life, but it cannot confidently assert the transcendental realities it sought, and its editor-reader is so locked into his own subjectivity that the poem cannot speak to him of even the little hope it has salvaged. Each of these novels is a continuation of the romantic plot of the artist in Promethean conflict with his traditional an-

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tagonists: Frankensteinian science and technology, the city of dreadful night, the wasteland of business and the money drive, the dark tower of solipsism, the selfishness that murders the albatross in a denial of love. But these forces have by the late twentieth century grown so powerful that the poet instead of overcoming them as he had in the past—like the Wordsworth of The Prelude or Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist— is castrated like Lesser, axed like Willie Spearmint, shot like Shade by some maniac acting out his story, locked up in his helpless fury in an asylum like Humboldt, stripped and driven into silent exile like Citrine. Aquarius, the strongest ego of the lot, preserves through his sense of smell some belief that his powers of imagination are still operative and that he can there­ fore write his book, but the epiphany of the moon rock seems weak at the best, trumped up bravado at the worst. NASA has triumphed so completely that it has taken entire possession of the world, while the shattered romantics are driven to the far end of Cape Cod to waste themselves in drug-induced dreams and impotent rituals, and Mailer can write only a factual account of his attempts to create what once would have been a novel or a poem. The poets are destroyed, the poems remain unwritten—or if they are written they are not understood by those who read them. Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, Nabokov, some of our finest traditional writers, seem to be announcing the near end of literature in the face of a world which their powers can no longer master and transform. And for them the crisis which deconstructs art comes not from philosophical or technical problematics in the craft of fiction but from what the world as it grew older has learned about just how difficult it is to know any metaphysical truths, how nearly impossible is com­ munication of any meaningful sort, how relative is all truth and meaning, how disastrous the turns of history continue to be, how deeply ingrained in the creature are selfishness and aggressiveness, and how much power is conferred by scientific ways of thinking and mechanical forms of organization. The world, as Aquarius realizes,

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had changed, even as he had thought to be pushing and shoving on it with bis mighty ego. And it had changed in ways he did not recognize, had never anticipated, and could possibly not comprehend now. The change was mightier than he had counted on. (55) America was just too big a country for Humboldt's imagi­ nation to comprehend and give human shape to, so it absorbed the poet into its myth, making him an object lesson in just how tough, difficult, and intransigent the world really is. Each of the books we have been considering constructs its own remarkable image, different from the others in detail but sim­ ilar to them in its reflection of an awesome anti-poetic power in the late twentieth-century world. Mailer's image of NASA and the society that creates it focuses in the power of the rockets that take man on a meaningless journey to the moon all the reductive rationalism and the bureaucratic organiza­ tion, running simply in order to run, which have created so many titanic but empty events in the twentieth century. Bel­ low's Chicago is the heart of materialistic America, inhabited by a remarkable collection of death-directed demons, canni­ bals, and sharks, incredibly energetic and violent in their pur­ suit of money and pleasure, who tear the poet apart. Malamud's image of the world as a decayed tenement house filled with horrors concentrates in small space the breakdown of the great cities and the industrial society which built them, isolating the poet behind the locked doors of his own involuted and fruitless art. For all its grotesque humor and irony, Na­ bokov's image of the failure of communication between man and man, each sitting in the impermeable darkness of self, is the most frightening image of the new reality which makes the old literature impossible: a probably insane man sits in the isolation of a tourist cabin, hearing only the noise of the amusement park across the street, editing the poem of another man, understanding scarcely a word, and using those few he does grasp only for telling the fantastic story he needs in order to justify and make sense of his own sufferings and relieve his terrors.

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This brings us back again to the central point of my ar­ gument. Literature, Mailer and his fellow writers tell us, does not and cannot exist in isolation from the society of which it is a part. The relationship, they show, is not simply a matter of the writer drawing on the world for his images, as D. H. Lawrence used coal mines or Thomas Mann tuberculosis san­ itariums; nor is it ultimately even just a matter of literature's having to objectify itself in the world in various institutional forms such as canons, texts, libraries, poetic roles, criticism, university curricula, etc. These social realities express and in­ strument the values of literature, but they and all of literature finally depend upon the continued believability of the axioms of romantic literature: the imaginative powers of the poets, the perfection of the texts, the power of poetic language to embody the truths that imagination knows and convey them to readers, and the great myth of a diverse and mysterious but ultimately coherent world charged with human possibility and moving towards some distant meaningful end. This set of beliefs is the charter of the Imaginary Library, and its con­ tinued existence is subject to actual conditions and what is considered believable in society at any given moment. If social circumstances—what society believes and does, the technology it uses, the psychology it employs, the way it or­ ganizes its life and work, the fashion in which it conceives of history and cosmology—if all these contradict too powerfully the world-view of literature, then the Imaginary Library, first its enabling beliefs and eventually its institutional manifes­ tations, can no longer exist. If literature were, as the romantics argued, a universal and absolute way of thinking, seeing, and writing, "hard-wired" in an unchanging human psychology, then we could contend, as many of course do, that literature will continue to be written in the same way and that the Imaginary Library will continue to exist in its traditional form, despite attacks and neglect. This is the conservative stance of many critics and teachers at the present moment. But what Mailer, Bellow, Malamud, and Nabokov show us in the death of poets and the failure of literary work is not merely the neglect of literature but society's radical challenge of what are

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now exposed as, in their weakness, only poetic ways of think­ ing and writing. With the exception of Nabokov, these writers continue like their poet-heroes to do a former thing, the last thing available to the old tradition of literature. They manage to make bril­ liant writing out of the impossibility of any longer writing literature, but, the end having been arrived at, it is difficult for them or for us to see where the road leads from here. For Humboldt it leads back into the world and to a temporary if not permanent silence: When the artist-agonist has learned to be sunk and ship­ wrecked, to embrace defeat and assert nothing, to subdue his will and accept his assignment to the hell of modern truth perhaps his Orphic powers will be restored, the stones will dance again when he plays. (346) But cultural institutions like literature seldom die like Hum­ boldt. Instead, they evolve and adjust to the new realities by finding a new way of explaining themselves and functioning in the new scheme of things. And these books about the death of the old romantic literature contain at least hints of one way the Imaginary Library might be remodeled. We might summarize the kind of changed social reality literature has encountered in the following way. The nine­ teenth-century vision of the world took as its basic plot a conflict of the mighty opposites of life and death. Darwin worked out this plot in terms of the evolution of biological life, Hegel in terms of a dialectical history, Marx in terms of economics and the class struggle, science in terms of energy and entropy, and Freud in terms of conscious and uncon­ scious. "Where id was, there ego shall be" expresses opti­ mistically the anticipated end of the struggle, portrayed in other terms as the withering away of the state or the survival of the fittest. Although it was hostile to industrial society in its crudest most immediate aspects, romantic literature shared in the optimism of the nineteenth century and found its place in society not only by resisting some of its more violent tend­ encies but by giving its hopeful view mythic statement as the

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struggle of freedom with tyrrany, coherence with fragmen­ tation, the higher consciousness of the poet with society. Each of the novels we have looked at shows this struggle for mean­ ing in one of its special poetic forms: Aquarius against sci­ entific rationalism, Humboldt against materialism, Lesser against ugliness, fragmentation, and hatred, and Shade against solipsism. In contrast to the nineteenth-century views of life as a mighty conflict, the twentieth century has been increasingly dominated by a conception of reality as a created system. In scientific form this conception was stated most completely in Einstein's theories of relativity, which posit a universe in which there is only one absolute, the speed of light, and see move­ ment, position, and time as relative to the observer. We make up our universe, that is, from our own particular point of view, and it would look quite different from other points of view, no one of which has priority over others. Saussure did for language what Einstein did for physics, breaking language loose from any absolute representation of a given reality and from any historical process of development. Language, ac­ cording to Saussure, is a formal structure or set of rules within which at any given time a word or a concept derives its mean­ ing not by referring to a fixed reality but from its place in the system, in relationship, that is, to the other parts of the system. The same concept underlies the characteristic social sciences of our time, anthropology and sociology, which see the dif­ ferent human societies they study as so many codes, systems for living, constructed by men to arrange in some kind of coherent order all the things and activities the system chooses to include. Man in these views is no longer a Promethean struggler for absolute truth or an actor in a long historical process, but a system-maker, a creator of cosmic, social, and linguistic fic­ tions, and his human business is no longer to seek and rep­ resent some absolute truth, but to live within and perfect the system in which he participates, recognizing that it is only one of many ways of organizing a world. It is this new way of thinking and living which the writers Aquarius and Shade

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encounter in some of its many various forms. Aquarius' NASA, seen from a less hostile point of view, is not so much romanticism's old enemy science grown to fiendish strength, as it is a model of society as a man-made system, not seeking meaning in striving towards some metaphysical absolute out­ side itself but finding meaning in the achievement of an ar­ bitrarily selected end, and in the perfect ordering and inter­ action of its own parts, with a minimum of friction in its machines and a minimum of conflict between its members. Nabokov in Pale Fire presents this new reality in psycho­ logical terms. His poet-heroes pursue the old romantic ends: Shade's Wordsworthian quest for some certain knowledge of an after life and powers that unseen guide the world, and its parody version in Kinbote's modernized Gothic tale of de­ posed kings and secret passages, of disguise and relentless pursuit by the forces of evil. But Nabokov's juxtaposition of the stories of Shade and Kinbote, like the double plots of Elizabethan drama, removes the emphasis from the individual quests and distributes it to a shared existential condition in which each man sits in terror and isolation and makes up stories about himself and his world in order to make his life meaningful and therefore bearable. Though the stories are supposed to be identical, the comments of a "scrupulous" editor on the text of an autobiographical poem, they differ so absolutely in detail, exclude one another so completely at the surface level, that together they make it clear that each man constructs his own world-view, his own self-justifying plot, which reflects not some absolute truth external to itself but only the need to believe there is a truth and to objectify it in a story. What the stories have in common, what they in combination communicate, is not the image of the fixed ex­ ternal reality each seeks, but a psychic need to create that reality by means of our own stories, even as Shade believes that his iambic lines and metaphors "guarantee" the existence of a similarly ordered cosmos, and Kinbote hears the re­ morseless approach of Gradus the assassin in each measured poetic foot. The image which emerges from Pale Fire is of man as a maker of fictions, of every man, as Shade the poet

170

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says, "playing a game of worlds," (819) moving the given parts and pieces about in conformity with a set of poetic rules to construct a satisfactory image which he calls reality. That created world, like the "plexed artistry" of Nabokov's text, always holds out the possibility of some absolute and final meaning. Butterflies appear and reappear at crucial places. Mirrors flash their reflected light on other mirrors. Red and green, fawns and automatics, appear in patterns of link and bobolink. Word golf gets us from "love" to "hate'" in three. But Shade and Kinbote's stories are perfectly constructed sat­ isfactions only of their own psychic needs, not of any reality outside themselves. And Nabokov allows us to consider that his novel is also, by extension, not a statement of reality or truth, but only one more of an infinite number of possible organizations of the world. If we the readers look in it for some positive and absolute truth, treating the text of the novel as a whole as if it provided an image of a final truth, then we mistake what the book tells us about the relativity of all knowledge in a world that has no absolute form, but in which men have an absolute need to give it form, either Nature or Zembla. Nabokov's novel makes clear what is latent in Mailer, Malamud, and Bellow: literature is not itself absolute truth, an image of superior, unchanging realities, but only one among many ways of thinking about and organizing the world in accordance with human need. Even while picturing the death of the old literature in a world which denies it, these writers are accomodating literature to that world by revealing its beliefs, methods, and institutional embodiments not to be enduring though discredited truths but rather a prime instance of society's chief business, world-making. In a surprising way, this view points toward at least a possible restoration of the poet's powers, for in an age when man's chief activity, his defining human quality, is seen to be making worlds, then an art which openly creates fictional realities can present man in his most characteristic stance. The art which displays rather than disguises its fictionality has been with us for some time. It is the art of the surrealists,

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of Picasso, of Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, Pinter, and many others. Aquarius has already seen and disliked the new art in books like Finnegans Wake and painters like Cezanne who dissolved the rich materiality and variousness of the sen­ suous surface of the world—"the sheen and texture, the hairs, the dust, the flickering motes of light on the surface of a drape" (300)—into a "panorama of rises and depressions" in which "the similarities between surfaces" were "more pro­ found than the differences": Art had embarked on an entrance into the long tunnel where aesthetics met technology. Picasso and Cubism would pour through that hole in the old love of surface until one could not tell which wall was near and what floor had begun to recede. It was as if the century to come was already anticipated in the veins of its artists, as if the century to come would go out to explore the dissolution of all orders of magnitude and so begin a search into the secrets and unwindings of death. Little surprise that be­ fore the century had finished its seventh decade, the artist had crossed from the brush to the wind machine and blew up walls of plastic through which the patron all blindfolded would creep. Art and theater were ready to view the dimensionless dimensions of the moon on its far side. (301) Mailer had, himself, as we have seen, already made, in Fire on the Moon and elsewhere, a considerable adjustment of his own art by abandoning fiction, that primary expression of the romantic artist's belief in the superiority of his imagination to crude fact, in favor of a novel of fact, "faction," using literary techniques to interpret and arrange another made world imposed on him from the outside. But the art he cor­ rectly points to as appropriate to the new world of systemcreation is a surrealistic art which openly, extravagantly, shows man making up a world by distorting perspective and covering nature with plastic. Where romanticism justified its fictions by arguing that they revealed absolute imaginative truths or rendered the ultimate reality of the world in a mean-

172

FINDING THE NEW THING

ingful form, this later art reveals man in his new function as a designer of fictions, new systems made by the selection and rearrangement of parts, none of which, as in Picasso's paint­ ings, has any reality except in relation to the other pieces with which it coexists. Mailer's own book remains a romantic Gotterddmmerung, the final voice, the latter end, of the older view of art and life in which the last story must be the Wagnerian failure of the artist to defend the moon of imagination and his god Apollo against the forces of evil. There are many who share his view of the new kind of art as unsatisfactory in its failure to render the deep-piled textures of unique things or to state enduring truths about the nature of man and the world. This new art is, in fact, open to the danger that Aquarius-Mailer finds in NASA of transforming art and life to intricate machinery run­ ning without variation or purpose, sitting like the rock in the room. So many men, so many stories! But it is an art and literature which accords with the dominant conceptual motifs of our time, fits its world, and therefore has some chance of speaking to and affecting the society to which it is inevitably tied. And as Pale Fire suggests, it need not limit itself to the mechanical repetition of the point that man is a fiction-making animal. It can move on to explore with the freedom of art the social and psychological motivations that are the source of this activity, how it interacts with the historical and given world, how it works its transformations, which types of fic­ tional systems are acceptable and which are not, and what the consequences of this kind of activity are, its possibilities and its dangers. If it moves in this direction, the institution of literature too will probably change, as it is already beginning to, not disappear. The Imaginary Library will be reorganized. The old works will remain on the shelves but will be rear­ ranged as new revisionary histories of literature are written, the canon changed to give precedence to different works— say, Tristram Shandy over Tom Jones, Lewis Carroll over George Eliot—the literary curricula of the schools adjusted to allow new courses such as "Man and his Fictions," and a new poetics constructed by critics which will legitimate all

FINDING THE NEW THING

173

these changes by showing them to correspond to the eternal order of the cosmos, the unchanging truth of social life, and the permanent deep psychological energies of man. But this is all speculation, and the future of literature, if it survives, may well lie in some entirely different direction. The value of understanding literature as a social institution is not that it confers any ability to predict what will happen in the future, but that it forces us to realize that we will make that future. None of us, not even the most powerful writer, or critic, or publisher, will make it alone, of course, for it will be made out of a complex dialectical interplay of many in­ dividual interests; out of the intricate body of literary texts, theories, and poetic lives that have already been assembled in the Imaginary Library; out of the social needs of our own age and the other systems of belief it constructs to satisfy those needs; and out of the technologies and social organizations the future offers. The pressure of seeming necessity that all of these elements in combination exert, and will continue to exert, should not conceal from us, however, that literature is never made but always making, and that perhaps its contin­ uation and certainly its value to humanity and the world de­ pend on what we who are part of the institution choose to make of it. If science were to cease, its object of study, nature, would continue on its own way untroubled; and if social sciences like economics or sociology were to disappear, the family and the exchange of goods and services would surely go on; but if all the many various activities which serve literature were to cease, the Imaginary Library would disappear as well, for the institutions we call the humanities or arts, literature in­ cluded, are not based on, and therefore not guaranteed, by the order of things. Recognizing the contingent status of literary things confers, I believe, a considerable amount of freedom, for while there is by no means an infinity of things that can be said about literature—limits, being imposed by what has been said in the past and what can believably be said at pres­ ent—there is a very wide choice of things which can legiti­ mately be said. It is very important for the future of literature

174

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that we exercise the degree of freedom we have, for, as the books we have looked at suggest very powerfully, it is prob­ ably impossible to go on saying the old things, at least if we expect anyone in the world at large or even in the classroom to listen. But freedom to make literature what we would like-it to be is very far from being license to say anything that seems cu­ rious, exciting, or iconoclastic. Since men and women are responsible for the shaping of literature, the question that must always be asked is, "What effect does writing or thinking or teaching in a particular manner have on literature as an institution?" Not much effect at all in most single cases, prob­ ably, but in the aggregate the kind of poetry and novels, even the criticism and Ph.D. dissertations, that are written, as well as the classroom curricula and the books that are published and catalogued in the library as literature, do define over the long run our Imaginary Library. At the present time, to take one easy example, we seem to be moving without much en­ thusiasm in the direction of using literature in the classroom as the basis for a science of interpretation. Since, the argument sometimes known as critical pluralism goes, the meaning of texts is indeterminate and all methods of interpretation are equally valid, the literary text—which is peculiarly, self-consciously ambiguous about its meaning, in contrast, say, to an historical text, which takes itself as objective fact—can be used to advantage to teach the ways in which human beings build systems of meaning individually and socially. This is certainly a perfectly acceptable definition of literature which does not go beyond the range of possibilities already implicit, and to some degree explicit, in the Imaginary Library, and it is certainly consistent with a good many powerful modern conceptions of knowledge, including the view of literature as a man-constructed social institution. But before going down this particular road, it seems to me crucial that we should remember that it is not at all necessary that we do so—there are after all many other roads that can be taken—and that we should ask whether a shift in the direction of semiotics, reader-response, and grammatology will be as interesting and

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useful to our students and society as the views we are dis­ carding of literature as a fictionalized image of people living out the most intense human experiences.

WORKS CITED

Abrams, Meyer, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, Ox­ ford University Press, 1953). Adams, Hazard, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1971). Aldrin, Edwin E., Return to Earth (New York, Bantam Books, 1973). Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971). Barth, John, "The Literature of Exhaustion," in The Novel Today, ed. Malcom Bradbury (Glasgow, William Collins Stone, Fontana Original, 1977). Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow, Fontana/Collins, 1977). Bate, W. J., The Burden of the Past (London, Chatto & Windus, 1971). Bellow, Saul, Humboldt's Gift (New York, Viking Press, 1975). Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy (New York, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1969). Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construc­ tion of Reality (New York, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967). Bishop, Morris, Petrarch and His World (Bloomington, In­ diana University Press, 1963). Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973). Borges, Jorge Luis, "The Library of Babel," in Labyrinths (New York, New Directions, 1962). Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, cor­ rected by J. D. Fleeman (London, Oxford University Press, 1970).

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Bradbury, Malcom, and McFarlane, James, eds. Modernism 1890-1930 (New York, Penguin Books, 1976). Camus, Albert, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, Knopf, 1954). Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier (1528), trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York, Doubleday, 1959). Diderot, Denis, "De la poesie dramatique" (1758), trans. Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, Vol. I (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955). Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England, Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1979). Eliot, T. S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Lon­ don, Faber and Faber, 1933). Faulkner, William, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York, Random House, 1977). Fish, Stanley, Surprised by Sin, The Reader in Paradise Lost (London, St. Martins Press, 1967). Flaubert, Gustave, "Letter to Louise Colet" (1852), in Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1954). Fowler, Alastair, "Genre and the Literary Canon," New Lit­ erary History, 11 (1979), 97-120. Frye, Northrop, The Secular Scripture, A Study of the Struc­ ture of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976). Goethe, J. W., Kurze Anzeigen (1826), trans. Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven, Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1955), I, 222. Hassan, Ihab, The Dismemberment of Orpheus (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971). Heine, Heinrich, Heinrich Heine's Memoirs from His Works, Letters and Conversations, ed. Gustav Karpeles, trans. Gilbert Cannan (London, Heineman, 1910), Vol. I. Heller, Erich, "The Uses of Literary Scholarship," Times Lit­ erary Supplement (Oct. 11, 1974). Hirsch, E. D. Jr., "What Isn't Literature?" in What Is Liter-

178

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ature} ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 24-34. Holland, Norman, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975). Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader, Patterns of Communi­ cation in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Balti­ more, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Kristeller, Paul Oskar, "The Modern System of the Arts," in Renaissance Thought II, Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1965). Levin, Harry, "Literature as an Institution," Accent, 6 (1946), 159-68. Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in EighteenthCentury England (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1970). Lord, Albert, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1960). Lukacs, Georg, "Balzac: Lost Illusions," in Studies in Euro­ pean Realism, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York, Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library, 1964). Mailer, Norman, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston, Little, Brown, 1970). Malamud, Bernard, The Tenants (London, Eyre Methuen, 1972). Mallarme, Stephane, "Art for All," trans. Bradford Cook, in The Modern Tradition, eds. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (New York, Oxford University Press, 1965). Malraux, Andre, The Voices of Silence (1953), trans. Stuart Gilbert (London, Paladin Books, 1974). McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, Uni­ versity of Toronto Press, 1962). Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). Palmer, D. J., The Rise of English Studies (New York, Oxford University Press, 1965). Petrarch, Francis, "Coronation Oration," trans, and ed. Er­ nest Hatch Wilkins, Studies in the Life and Works of

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Petrarch (Cambridge, Mass., Medieval Academy of America, 1955). Piaget, Jean, Le Structuralisme (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet: Comedian and Martyr (1952), trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, New American Library, 1964). Tax, Meredith, "Introductory: Culture Is not Neutral, Whom Does it Serve?" in Radical Perspectives in the Arts, ed. Lee Baxandall (Harmondsworth, Pelican Books, 1972). Trilling, Lionel, Beyond Culture (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1967). Vidal, Gore, Matters of Fact and of Fiction (New York, Ran­ dom House, 1977). Wellek, Rene, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1941). "What Is Literature?" in What Is Literature} ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1978). Wilde, Oscar, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London, 1948). Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Lon­ don, Chatto and Windus, 1958). Wimsatt, W. K., "Battering the Object: The Ontological Ap­ proach," in Contemporary Criticism, Stratford-uponAvon Studies 12, eds. Malcom Bradbury and David Pal­ mer (London, Edward Arnold, 1970).

INDEX

Abrams, Meyer, 41 The Aeneid, 22, 70 Aiken, Conrad, 49 Aldrin, Edwin, Return to Earth, 139-40 Aristotle, 14, 23, 68; defends po­ etry, 131; the probable, 146 Arnold, Matthew, 132, 142, 148; Culture and Anarchy, 92, 130; Empedocles, 39; "Study of Po­ etry," 90 art, fails, 163; fictional reality, 2829, 158, 170; life imitates, 91; modern, 171; system of fine, 132-33; theory in Eystein, 12627; unknown to ancients, 19 art for art's sake, 28, 66, 72, 82 Artaud, Antonin, 41 Augustine, Saint, 67 Austen, Jane, 68 Atlas, James, biography of Schwartz, 51 Aquinas, Thomas, 23 Balzac, Honore de, 72, 91; Cornedie, 54; Lambert, 39; Lost Illu­ sions, 71 Barth, John, 33 Barthes, Roland, 112; death of the author, 45, 46 Bate, W. J., 46 Baudelaire, Charles, 60; revolution­ ary, 27 Beckett, Samuel, 33, 87, 111 The Beggar's Opera, 68 Berger, Peter, 12, 94 Berryman, John, 47

The Bible, apocrypha, 67; Frye's scripture, 25; Job, 22; Lesser writing, 80; Psalms, 81; Revela­ tions, 153; Song of Songs, 22, 158 Blake, William, 23, 27, 42, 45, 132, 148, 156; Milton, 39 Bloom, Harold, anxiety of influ­ ence, 45-46; misprision, 98, 111; strong poets, 68, 100 Boccaccio, 15, 22, 146 Borges, Jorge Luis, 146, 171; "Li­ brary of Babel," 67 Boswell, James, compared to Kinbote, 105; Life of Johnson, 4-5, 40, 68 Braun, Werner von, 145-46, 155 Brecht, Bertolt, Mother Courage, 110 Broch, Hermann, 74 Browning, Robert, 91; in Pale Fire, 100; Sordello, 39 Byron, George Gordon, 51, 60, 148, 162; Don Juan, 156; revo­ lutionary, 27 Cambridge University, school of English, 92, 93 canon, coherence, 17; created by print, 22, 69-70; making, 66-69; in Shade's poem, 100 Carlyle, Thomas, 132, 148 Carroll, Lewis, 172 Cezanne, Paul, 143, 171 Chatterton, Thomas, Rowley poems, 39 Chekov, Anton, 111

182

INDEX

Clarke, Arthur C., 138 Coleridge, S. T., 14, 25; drugs, 51; imagination, 42; organic form,

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 73 Dryden, John, first systematic critic, 23

81

Commonwealth literature, 93 competence, linguistic, 13, 110; lit­ erary, 13, 16 Conrad, Joseph, 68; Marlow, 45 Cooper, Mrs., 69 copyright, 5, 21 Cornell University (Wordsmith), 98 The Courtier, 3-4 courtly poetry, 3-4; social function, 89 craftsmanship, 14, 163; harms Spearmint, 84; Lesser's, 80-82; validates reality, 104 Crane, Hart, 47 Crashaw, Richard; Crashaw Club, 102 criticism, 16, 126-27; as commod­ ity fetishism, 31-32; "cosmicizes," 23; functions, 6-7, 12-13, 24; late appearance, 23-24; Kinbote's, 106; like theology, 14, 23; parasitic, 109; pluralistic, 32, 174; semiotic, 174; in universi­ ties, 105 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 41 Dante, 25 deconstruction, 9, 30, 32-33, 75, 77, 164; death of author, 45; grammatology, 174; intertextuality, 46, 100; reception theory, 98, 111, 174 A Defense of Poetry, 8, 23; defini­ tion of poetry, 72 De Man, Paul, 112 Derrida, Jacques, 112 Dickens, Charles, 91; Coketown, 27 Dodsley, Robert, 69

education and literature, 12, 16, 74, 90; crisis in, 31; curriculum, 24, 92-93; effects, 96-97; hu­ manist, 4, 92; objections to, 94; Oxford, 95; parodied, 98-99 Einstein, Albert, 168 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 18 Eliot, George, 68, 172 Eliot, T. S., 6, 75; dissociation of sensibility, 68; imitated in "Pale Fire," 100; praises Humboldt (Schwartz), 49; on teaching liter­ ature, 94; on tradition, 66; wasteland, 27, 79 Emerson, R. W., 102 Encyclopedie, 133 Eugene Onegin, 106 Faulkner, William, quoted on writ­ ing, 73; Yoknapatawpha, 113 fictionality, essence of literature, 27; human function, 129, 16869; Mailer's lack, 146; older jus­ tifications, 146; reality, 170; sci­ ence fiction, 138; Zembla as fic­ tion, 113 Finnegans Wake, 73, 171 First on the Moon, 138-39 Fish, Stanley, 111 Flaubert, Gustave, 73, 77, 79, 85, 162; his ideal work of art, 72; Ie mot juste, 81; Yonville, 27 Fowler, Alastair, 17 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 73, 110; Schreber, 113 Frost, Robert, compared to Shade, 99-100 Frye, Northrop, 14, 23, 130; secu­ lar scripture, 25

INDEX Genet, Jean, 148; see also Sartre Gibbon, Edward, 67 Goethe, J. W., 100; Tasso, 39; Werther, 110 The Golden Bough, 158 The Golden Treasury, 67 Hassan, Ihab, 45 Hegel, G.W.F., 14, 167 Heidegger, Martin, language writes, 45 Heine, H., 92 Hemingway, Ernest, 148 Hirsch, E. D., 17 history, contrasted to poetry, 12, 132; created by Aquarius, 15556; nineteenth-century views, 167; in romanticism, 154 Hobbes, Thomas, 23 Holland, Norman, 111 Holmes, Sherlock, 114, 115-16 Homer, 22, 25, 66 Horace, 39 Houdini, Harry, 60-61 Housman, A. E., definition of po­ etry, 101 Hutchins, Robert, 49 Huysmans, J. K., 41 imagination, 6, 15, 25, 27, 42, 152-53 internalization, 13, 14, 93; in reli­ gion, 14; in science, 137 Iser, Wolfgang, 111 James, Henry, 68, 73; Art of Fic­ tion, 24; House of Fiction, 77 Johnson, Samuel, 5, 68, 89, 105; Dictionary, 69; personality, 40; talks with king, 4 Jonson, Ben, 40 Joyce, James, 73, 79, 162; aesthetic pleasure, 88; epiphanies, 42; see

183

also Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses Jung, C. G., collective unconscious, 42 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judg­ ment, 133 Keats, John, 72, 148; Lamia, 134 Kennedy, Edward, 54, 158 Kermode, Frank, 17 Kristeller, Paul, system of the arts, 133 Kuhn, Thomas, 29-30 Kiinstlerroman, 39, 62, 80; Prom­ ised End as, 82 language, computerese, 140-42; defines literature at Oxford, 9596; disappears, 87; like litera­ ture, 13; makes reality, 81; mod­ ern problems with, 99, 109-10, 111; Newspeak, 142; structural­ ist theories of, 110, 141, 168; writes, 45; Zemblan, 118-19 Lawrence, D. H., 166 Leavis, F. R., 68, 89 libraries, Alexandrian, 68; of Babel, 67; British, 67-, catalogues, 12-, Citrine's, 53; of Congress, 67; George Ill's, 4; Imaginary de­ fined, 21; Lesser's, 79; Oxford and Cambridge, 4 London University, literary curricu­ lum, 92 Longinus, 23 Lord, Albert, 69 love story, 85 machines, 7, 26, 53; automatons, 126, 137; bulldozers, 64, 158; cars, 50, 64, 158; deus ex, 79, 155; ghost in, 153-54; homeosta-

184

INDEX

machines (cont.) sis, 143; opposite of literature, 27; wheelbarrow, 125 Magritte, 145 Mallarme, Stephane, preposterous to teach literature, 94 Malraux, Andre, 18-21 Mann, Thomas, 73, 166; von Aschenbach, 39, 45 Manson family, 158 manuscripts, 69-70 Marxism, 31, 73-74, 131 masterworks, 25 MacPherson, James, Ossian, 39 McLuhan, Marshall, 18, 71 metaphor, 14, 161, 162, 169; cen­ tral romantic trope, 71, 151 Milton, John, 3, 41, 68, 71, 89, 157; Paradise Lost, 25, 39, 101; regicide, 40; Satan, 110 modernism, 7-8, 30; stresses text, 75 Moliere, Misanthrope, 110 Montaigne, Michel, 22 Morris, William, 73 Muses, 67-68 museum, 18-21, 59 myth, 6, 15, 27, 42, 56, 72; of concern, 25; cosmicizing, 23; de­ fined, 55; of eternal return, 131; Orpheus, 56-57, 60; romantic, 130-31, 156; scientific, 160; stolen by NASA, 130; Sibyl, 101, 103

nationalism and literature, 93 neo-classicism, 7, 89 Nietzsche, F., 14, 22, 106; Apol­ lonian and Dionysiac, 25; on reality, 27, 88 Nixon, Richard, 158 The Norton Anthology, 67

oral poetry, 14, 69; in other socie­ ties, 15, 22; Shahrazad, 55 organic form, 14, 71, 154, 161, 163; contrast to machine, 27 Orwell, George, 142; in Spain, 27 Ovid, Orpheus, 57-58, 60 The Oxford Book of English Verse, 67 The Oxford English Dictionary, 5 Oxford University, school of Eng­ lish, 92-95 Pater, Walter, 72 patronage, 25, 171; defined in Courtier, 3-4; Johnson, 5; uni­ versity as patron, 97 The Pequod, 156 Percy, Bishop, Reliques, 69 Petrarch, Francis, 46, 64, 71; Af­ rica, 39; coronation, 37-39; ex­ amination, 40-41 Petroniusr 56 Picasso, Pablo, 171 Pinter, Harold, 171 Pirandello, Luigi, 111 The Plague, 74-75 Plato, questions poetry, 88, 131 Plotinus, 23 Poe, Edgar Allen, 47, 100 Pope, Alexander, 68, 71; Dunciad, 71; in "Pale Fire," 100, 105, 119 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 35; Dedalus, 39, 63, 164; role of poet, 43; see also Joyce Pound, Ezra, in asylum, 51; Mus­ solini, 27 The Prelude, 5, 25, 28, 35, 101, 130, 157, 164; end quoted, 44; poetic role, 42-43; see also Wordsworth Princeton University, 49, 50 print, 25, 29; anti-print tradition, 3-4, 71; creates canon, 21, 69-

INDEX

71; effect on writer, 5, 54, 144; emphasizes style, 71-72; makes imaginary museum, 20; publish­ ing, 12, 91, 96-97, 144; shapes literature, 18 Proust, Marcel, 73, 79 psychology, as romantic value, 153-54; see also Freud and Jung Pynchon, Thomas, 45, 171 Rabelais, Francois, Gargantua, 56 Ransom, John Crowe, 132 readers, 15-16; Kinbote as, 105 ff., 123; literacy, 7, 31, 97; made in universities, 92-93, 111-12; reader-response, 98, 111, 174; romanticism defines, 91, 92 relativity, 168 religion, 53; art replaces, 21; paral­ lels literature, 13-14; Petrarch uses, 38; Zemblan, 123-24; see also Bible Richards, I. A., 42, 111 Rilke, Rainer Maria, bees, 42 Rimbaud, Arthur, 148 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 171 roles in literature, 12, 22-23; courtly poet, 41-42; made in poems and biography, 39-40; Mailer's Aquarius, 134, 147, 148; Petrarch's, 37-39; romantic poet's, 15, 42-44, 43, 82, 162 romanticism, 7-8, 26; mystery, 152; myth of, 130-31, 156; val­ ues of, 148 rules, classical, 3, 71 Salinger, J. D., 45 Saporta, Leon, 111 Sartre, J.-P., 148; anthropodicy, 91; Genet, 39, 45 Saussure, Ferdinand, 110, 141, 168 Scaliger, J. C., 14

185

Schwartz, Delmore, 47 science, 14, 164, 173; as NASA, 135-37; defining opposite for lit­ erature, 132-33, 160 Shahrazad, story telling, 55 Shakespeare, William, 22, 40, 66, 71; Lear, 25, 82; Prospero, 39; Sonnets, 39, 41; Timon, 122-23; Variorum, 106 Shelley, Percy B., 90; chatter about, 95; Prometheus, 156; utilitarian­ ism, 90 Sidney, Sir Philip, 6, 15; Astrophil, 39; death of, 40 Snow, C. P., 133 solipsism, 101, 116,120; intensified by university, 105 Steiner, George, 110-11 Stevens, Wallace, 31, 100 style, 14; anti-style, 73-75; copious, 150; emphasized by museum, 20; foregrounded by print, 70-73; romantic, 147 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver, 110; madness, 40; Vanessa, 125 symbol, 14, 30, 71, 161, 162; in Pale Fire, 103, 123-25; primary romantic trope, 151-52 system-making, 168 Tax, Meredith, 31 technology, 26, 162; camera, 1920; computer, 140-42; of indus­ trial society, 26-27; movies, 31, 47, 61-63, 79; printing, 18, 20; television, 25, 31, 158 texts, 13, 100, 117, 166, 170; cen­ tral to literature, 66; idealized by scholars, 16; stabilized by print, 21 Thoreau, Henry D., 102 Tolkien, J. R., hobbits, 113 Tom Jones, 172

186

INDEX

Trilling, Lionel, 31-32, 34 Tristram Shandy, 68, 110, 172 Trollope, Anthony, Barchester, 113 Vlysses, 7, 25 Vergil, 158; Georgics, 38; model for craft tradition, 70 Verlaine, Paul, 52, 162 Verne, Jules, 146 Vidal, Gore, 24, 67, 97 Voices of Silence, The, 18-21, 117 Vonnegut, Kurt, 67 Watkins, W.B.C., 69

Wellek, Rene, 4, 69 Wilde, Oscar, "Decay of Lying," 90-91; Dorian Gray, 91 Williams, Raymond, 26, 133 Winters, Yvor, 49; Jones Very, 68 Woolf, Virginia, 7 Wordsworth, William, 39, 42, 45, 73, 89, 100; model for romantic poets, 80; poet's mind, 42, 63; thought of by Lesser, 77; see also Prelude Yeats, W. B., 72, 100; automatic writing, 42

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Kernan, Alvin B. The imaginary library. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society. I. Title. PS379.K45 813'.54'09 81-47928 ISBN 0-691-06504-7 AACR2