THE MAN ON THE T RA 1N
491
three alternatives. He may simply affirm alienation for what it is and
as the supreme intersubjective achievement of art set forth the truth
of it: how it stands with both of us. Such is Joseph K.: Kafka's point–
ing at and naming alienation has already reversed it, healing the very
wound it re-presents. For an intersubjective discovery of alienation
is
already its opposite. Rotation, on the other hand, is transmitted intact.
Repetition is polarized, transmitting as the interesting, canceling as the
existential. What is omitted is the serious character of the search.
If
it should happen that a real Charles Gray came to himself one morn–
ing in the full realization of the absurdity of his life in the surburbs
and if on the occasion of a chance recollection of Clyde he has the
strongest inkling that back there, not ahead, lies the thread in the
labyrinth he has lost, and if, like Kierkegaard's young man, he de–
veloped a passion for recovering himself beside which his family, his
work, science, art, were of no account whatsoever- such a passion
would not transmit aesthetically as a passion but only as the interest–
ing. This is to testify, not to an artistic deficiency of the writers of
repetition, but to the validity of Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage- which
can in no wise be self-transcending.
Marquand hit the motherlode when he applied the device of
the Return to the promising vein of exurbanite alienation. The disen–
chantment of Charles Gray may never go beyond the genteel limits of
irony, of the attractive emotion with which he suffers his wife's con–
versation (Aren't you going to wear your ruptured duck today?) ; it
needn't go beyond this limit; indeed it should not-it is impossible to
imagine Charles Gray in the full grip of anxiety, staring at his hand
like Roquentin and shaking like a leaf at what he sees. It is altogether
inappropriate that he should be. His little excursion into alienation,
the pleasant return to Clyde, the mild disenchantment, stoically borne,
which follows-is no more or less than what we bargained for. It
would not do at all for Charles Gray to come to despair or to ex–
perience a religious conversion.
Whatever may be the ultimate decision-and one is tempted to
contrast Marquand's Book-of-the-Month Club disenchantment with
Kafka's Mitteleuropa alienation- the fact is that Charles Gray is the
suburban counterpart of Joseph K. (and in my opinion, a not un–
worthy counterpart: the first hundred pages of
Point of No Return
are of a very high order). Charles Gray
is
a gentle wayfarer who
is
