320
PARTISAN REVIEW
sages, with their assertion of man's radical goodness and inherent ra–
tionality: the ultimate madness of the dream of sanity.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
THREE STORIES
THREE.
By William Sansom. Reyna[
&
Hitchock.
$2.50.
I
N
THESE THREE new stories by the young English writer, William,
San~
som, the parts are more impressive than the whole, the language more
original than the characters, the casual details more striking than the
larger conceptions, which is merely to say that Sansom is neither better
nor worse than most serious writers
of
his age. He is certainly to be
praised, I think, for his poetic and generous sensibility; on every page
there are bright and genuine touches that one honors even when one is
dubious about the final development of the story.
"The Cleaner's Story" is a rather daring attempt to go beyond
the insufficiencies of the anecdotal method in order to make more ambi–
tious comments upon life. The narration is assigned to a cleaning woman
who scrubs the floor of a bar in a provincial French town. She, quite
literally, lives on her knees and the town and its actions take place on
a higher plane; she knows the people in the bar by their feet and their
voices; life falls down upon her from above in a way that reminds one
of Kafka's "Investigations of a
Dog."
There is a fine spatial sense in
the story, but, once that has been established, the action is disappoint–
ingly predictable and the characterizations are incomplete. The cleaning
woman herself, having been formerly a gentlewoman, has also, one might
say, dropped to the floor from above, a fact that makes her pathos a
special case, vaguely operatic, like the Russian noblemen reputed to
be
driving taxis in Paris. Her spiritual problem, as Sansom presents it, is to
create an entire world out of her scrubbed and unscrubbed squares, to
unite herself completely with the floor and to exclude the gossip and
life going on above her since attention to the latteP can only make her
isolation more painful.
If
I am correct in interpreting Sansom's hopes for this story, I
should say that the trouble is due to the misused influence of Kafka.
Kafka's genius depends upon the miraculous
rightness
of his situations
which, for all their eccentricity and superficial narrowness, always con–
tain the possibility for limitless, significant variations and constant sur–
prises. The first thing one notices ' about a Kafka story is that it can go
on forever and the first thing one notices about most Kafka imitations
is that they are immediately exhausted. In this kind
of
writing the
author is easily seduced into exaggeration of the symbolic value of his
material, particularly if the chosen fictional situation has, as I believe
to
be
the case with Sansom's cleaning woman, limited symbolic poten–
tialities to begin with. More is asked of the irony of the prone position
