520
PARTISAN REVIEW
sheer exhaustion." Over 250 pages later the same garments still intervene
between Davenport and the right true end.
This frustration and exhaustion take on symbolic character despite
themselves. Geraldine and Geraldine's case and all the battles to break
down Geraldine's resistance are presented simply and totally as facts,
as events. We are forced to give factual assent at the same time that
it is impossible to give imaginative assent. There is nothing to be done
about Geraldine as a fact, at least not in a book, and since this is not
socialist realism, we are not directed to do anything about her outside
the book. Geraldine is not the occasion, as she might so easily have
been, of some qualita tively novel kinds of experience. In fiction the
qualitatively novel exists only as a mind perceives it in experience, and
experience can be evaluated only as it is placed with other experiences in
an imaginative order which the author's temperament requires and for
which he takes imaginative responsibility.
The joyless struggles with Geraldine recall as their opposite extreme
the joyful struggles which Frank Norris's temperament led him to
invent with Moran of the "Lady Letty." We don't have to give factual
assent to Moran, with her great ropes of hair, her man's tanned wrists
and her magnificent del toid muscles. She is born of the unconscious, of
eroticism and some rather trashy neo-primitivistic ideas, but Norris
so commits himself to her imaginatively that she becomes an experience.
There is no eroticism whatsoever in
Geraldine Bradshaw,
despite all the
bodily details. But the battles with Moran are not merely erotic. They
are so transvaluative for the hero when put in rela tion to the experiences
that San Francisco society had offered him, that they h ave a wonder–
fully liberating effect.
No such sense of liberation and transvalua tion occurs in Paul
Goodman's
Th e Dead of Spring.
Goodman mixes reali sm and fantasy
in a way that permits him to do anything he wants, but he uses his
wanton power over his shapeless fantasy figures chiefly to exhibit his
contemptuous impatience with them. "The stifling ambience of our
Empire City in the last stages of imperial decay," is taken as a deter–
minative fact which makes any imaginative satisfaction impossible. Free
fantasy produces no equivalents of Moran ; instead we have a tone
remarkably like that of
Geraldine Bradshaw,
with even greater pre–
occupation with the purely external indications of sex, especially in
the male. Instead of sexual experience in a transformed and
transfo~ing relation to other experiences, we have sexual exposure in its most em–
barrassing forms. There is more discursive reasoning than in Willingham's
novel, but no genuine experience to mediate between the rhetoric and
