538
PARTISAN REVIEW
she "got no fun, she told The Young Man, out of putting horns on her
darling's head...." When she finally tells her husband that she is to leave
him, she discovers the real climax of their relationship. After this she
must act out the pattern, moving through it under the twin pressures of
society's expectations and her own not understood compulsions.
The next four sections come, from different angles, at the problem
laid down in Part
I. In
Part II, Margaret Sargent works as a secretary to
a shady art dealer, a Mr. Sheer, who is full of tricks and disguises. It is
not the story of Mr. Sheer's rise which is the subject of this section, but his
peculiarly ambivalent attitude toward success; he is, in an oblique fashion,
a sort of alter ego to the heroine. Or perhaps more accurately, Mr. Sheer's
problem is a variation of the heroine's problem. Part III presents the
Pullman romance of the heroine with a minor capitalist, "the man in the
Brooks Brothers shirt," to whom she dramatizes herself as the bohemian
radical, but from whom, also, she expects some definition of herself. But
the man in the Brooks Brothers shirt has his own problems of definition.
Part IV shows her as a guest at a party of the "genial host," a man who
loves to bring people together, who has, as it were, no self except the frag·
ments of selves he can pilfer from others. Part V, "Portrait of the Intel–
lectual as a Yale Man," shows the effect of Margaret Sargent, violent'
Trotskyist, on the "intellectual." Her incorruptible, logical, coherent,
fearless political self is set over against his confusion, a confusion result–
ing from the struggle between his two selves--the self of an editor of
The
Liberal
and the self of the "Yale man."
In Part VI, we see her, now the wife of a successful architect, lying
on the couch in the office of a psychoanalyst, who has defined a kind of
unity of self for her, who interprets her present condition in terms of
childhood conflict and estrangement. But she cannot accept this easy way
to unity: "Oh my God . . . do not let them take this away from me.
If
the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity." So, by
her repudiation, the Self defined by the psychoanalyst becomes simply
another self.
The repudiation would imply that the resolution of the book is not
intended in merely clinical terms. And
if
the resolution had been attempted
in such terms, it would scaicely be acceptable. For the clinical case, as
pure
case (action reduced to automatism, the factors of character's choice
and of author's judgment upon such choice removed), can scarcely be of
fictional interest except in so far as the clinical case achieves a symbolic
extension into contexts which, though perhaps involving the factors which
make choice and judgment impossible in the clinical case, permit a margin
of choice and judgment. (One might cite
The Magic Mountain, The Ameri–
can Tragedy
or certain items from the so-called decadent Jacobean tragedy
as involving examples of such symbolic extension.) In other words, Mar–
garet Sargent, when she prays to be preserved in disunity, is praying that
she may not become an automaton, no matter how well "adjusted." She is
praying to keep, even though ruinously, the disunity as a symbol of poten-
