BOO KS
365
end of the analytic novel. Analysis must, if we are to move forward,
be replaced by projection; and the meanings of a book must be en–
trusted not to an ever more subtle examination of motive, but to the
symbolic implications of nonrealistic plot; the end of analysis is the
end of realism.
Miss Murdoch's quite satisfactorily absurd plot I will not attempt
to recite, except to say that the action is presided over by a certain
Mischa Fox, a man with two different colored eyes, an extraordinary
bisexual charm and a thoroughly unbelievable influence over personal
lives and international politics. This international Jewish capitalist–
artist is the Enchanter from whom everyone
in
the book flees or
toward whom they run. He is, quite appropriately, the latest version of
the Gothic Hero-Villain who has brooded in calm melancholy over
cheap literature ever since the eighteenth century; and he inhabits a
mysterious house descended via Kafka from the haunted castles of the
same disreputable books. Indeed, it is to the depths beneath this
legendary habitation that Miss Murdoch leads us.
What she has known is not only how to see but how to render the
embarrassing fact that our world is more like the neurotic fantasies of
writers of horror-fiction than the polite or sentimental constructions of
the realists. What escapes documentation and is available only to the
imagination is what moves us these days in the mass horror that has
succeeded politics and the private terror that threatens to supplant love.
We have pretended too long that our experience corresponds really to
the order of plot-logic or of formal analysis. Miss Murdoch has man–
aged to find lies which tell us the truth about a plight, which "truth–
telling" in the older senses does not illuminate.
Leslie A. Fiedler
SOCIALISM AND SOCIOLOGY
THE POWER ELITE. By
C.
Wright Mills. Oxford University Press. $6.00.
To the ironic critics of the age, the militancy of C. Wright
Mills is suspect. Annoyed, as by a gadfly who insists on landing some–
where, Mills' fellow critics have fixed on the exaggerations to which
his militancy has led-the partisan use of evidence, the unrelieved
gloom. In American social letters, Mills is bracketed as a naif, a pure
dissenter in an agreeable time.
If
this were all, if Mills were accused
of nothing worse than being naive, of remaining narrowly negative in
