490
PARTISAN REVIEW
When Proust tastes the piece of cake or Captain Ryder finds himself
in Brideshead, the incident may serve as an occasion for either kind:
an excursion into the interesting, a savoring of the past as experience;
or two, the passionate quest in which the incident serves as a thread
in the labyrinth to be followed at any cost. This latter, however,
however serious, cannot fail to be polarized by art, transmitting as the
interesting. The question: what does it mean to stand before the house
of one's childhood?, is thus received in two different ways, one, as an
occasion for the connoisseur sampling of a rare emotion, the other
literally and seriously: what does it really mean?
Repetition is the conversion of rotation. In rotation, Shane cannot
stay. In repetition, Shane neither moves on nor stays, but turns back to
carry the search into his own past (we need not consider here Kierke–
gaard's distinction that true religious repetition has nothing to do with
travel but is "consciousness raised to the second power"-which I take
to be equivalent to Marcel's secondary reflection). In
East of Eden
Steinbeck leaves the wheel of rotation, the wayward bus, and with a
great flourish turns back to Salinas and the past. In a less cluttered
repetition,
I
n Sicily,
Vittorini's "I", on the occasion of a letter from
his father, leaves his life of everydayness in Milan where he is besieged
by "abstract furies" and makes the pilgrimage back to Sicily. It is a
very good repetition, or as Hemingway says in a somewhat purple
introduction, it has rain in it. Like rotation, repetition offers itself as
a deliverance from everydayness, yet it is, in a sense, the reverse of
rotation.
It
is also a reversal of the objective-empirical. The latter
world-view cannot get hold of it without radically perverting it. For
example, the dust jacket of Vittorini's book says something, as I recall,
about modern man's renewing his vital energies by rediscovering
his roots, etc. This remark is no doubt true in a garrulous dust-jacket
sense, yet it is the very stuff of the "abstract furies" which drove him
from Milan in the first place. It is the objective-empirical counter–
attack, the attempt to seize and render according to its own modes the
existential trait-which it does only by re-reversing and alienating.
(Even when a critic tries to stay clear of the abstract furies and writes
of
The Adventures of Augie March
that it has the "juices of life
in
it,"
if
it did have any juices, he is already drying them up.)
To say the least of it, then, whatever the ultimate metaphysical is–
sues may be, the alienated man has in literature, as reader or writer, the
