318
PARTISAN REVIEW
ments; he
is
its meaning, more legibly inscribed: its incapacity
to
know
reality, the diijunction at its heart between what it dreams and what it
becomes;
its
arucieties that
confees
the poorly-kept secret
of
its wish for
self-destruction.
The monsters he encounters in society do not contradict his night–
mares; his most abominable fantasies of guilt are generally, symbolically
true; and, most horribly, the world finds it possible to do business with
him, to make profit of his madness. The Jew (as Hunchback, physically
the symbol of his special inner alienation) can make his delusions a
racket; the Woman (as Skirt, the blue bivalve of her dress) can pawn
his abandoned books; the Cop (as Peeper and Pincher of Thighs) can
inherit his bed.
The conflict of private fantasies that makes society demands the
hallucinated prophet. Peter Kien's hallucination is a touchstone: his
delusive vision of his wife's death, consuming her own flesh, is a Utopian
truth, ideally more accurate than her actual fate: to share a bed with
the sadist gendarme. And the fire he foresees throughout, that we have
all come to
see,
is more than the fire he sets in the end, burns more than
his
25,000
books.
There is, of course, no private cure for his ill. The psychiatrist, our
customary
deus ex machina,
this time at least fails. In the novel, the
brother of the victim, motivated by an envy of, a longing for insanity,
hopelessly, balanced in a disordered world, he can only by his fumblings
speed the holocaust, and return to his dreams of the Madman as Swain.
The chief flaws of the book inhere, I think, inevitably in its
kind
of judgment of experience. It avoids the grosser pitfalls: a furtive en–
joyment of the horror it explicates, or a self-indulgent surrender to its
symbols, the elegant stylization of madness that mars such a book as
Nightwood.
But since will and belief, the minimal intervention of effec–
tive reason, are necessarily precluded, the characters are always on the
verge of dissolving into the flux of their velleities and anguish, of slipping
below human concern; in the end
pity
is inhibited, horror, to some de–
gree, baffied.
Moreover, the scrupulous resolve of the author to suppress his own
voice in the story, confuses the intent
of
the section headings which assert
his presumable point of view: "The Head without a World," "The
World without a Head," etc., clear indications of a large symbolic
reference. We are impelled to translate his meanings from literal to
anagogical, but are given no specific clues beyond the background pres–
ences of Mencius and Confucius who, from the first page, preside over
the doom of their expositor. In the end we hesitate: are we to accept
an implied Mencian analysis, that where the Intellectual refuses the
leadership of the people and the people are without a fixed living, dis–
order and evil result; or is the intention a larger irony, to suggest behind
the phantasmagoria of actual evil the noble fal sehoods of the Chinese
