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is impressed with Wolfe's development, but he seems to assess it too much
in
Wolfe's own assertions, not enough through the evidence--the only
cogent evidence-of a created work of art. And the vexed question of to
what degree Faulkner is a writer with a genuine vision of social decadence
rather than a synthetic Dostoevsky cannot be settled by the easy assump·
tion that he is "equal to any technic." His technic must
be
scrutinized, his
devices seen in their component parts, his diction and rhythms alertly
listened to, if we are to judge whether his effects are genuine or manipu·
Iated.
The chapter which shows Geismar's real strength within his limita·
lions is naturally that on Dos Passos, since Dos Passos as a conscious
social critic presents of all the group the most significant range of intel·
lectual development. By considering everything the novelist has written,
Geismar demonstrates how utterly the early Dos Passos hero, the aesthetic
young man, was dissociated from American life. So too with this hero's
creator: his concern with revolution in the post-war world was conditioned
almost exclusively by European models-witness how much he seems to
have learned, at the very start of his career, from the Spanish radical
novelist Pio Baroja. In consequence of his lack of any living contact with
the American past, a lack widely felt in his immediate generation, Dos
Passos in his trilogy often seemed to equate democracy with finance capi·
talism, and to ignore our own revolutionary tradition. This restricted
view caused him, as Geismar notes, to miss entirely the tragic significance
of Woodrow Wilson at the climax of
1919,
to see in him not the defeated
hero of the older liberalism with his
hamartia
of pride, but a mere hollow
gesturer, a marionette with his poppies at the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier.
As evidence of Dos Passos' more recent growth, Geismar cites
The
Ground We Stand On,
and though he does not exaggerate the value of
that amateur history of the era from Roger Williams to Jefferson, he
seems to press its implications for Dos Passos' re-orientation pretty far.
He finds that, as a result of that study, the novelist now seems to be on
the verge "of his own big American critique." But the ground we stand
on is no longer the brightly lighted terrain of the philosophers of the
Enlightenment, and any effectual human freedom .must obviously be won
through the control of far more complex economic forces than our revo·
lutioPary fathers had to face.
It is to such complex forces that both Nuhn and Geismar devote their
final chapters, and thus most clearly indicate the date·line at which their
critiques have been shaped. Geismar would seem to be in substantial
agreement with Nuhn's statement that "There is a new idea in the world,
effective common choice in economic as well as political rule." In his
concern that our individualism should no longer be distorted into "the
superiority of one individual over another," Geismar attempts to chart the
most fertile lines of development for our social novel. He has by no means
escaped the fashionable jargon of our journalistic criticism, which in·
