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PARTISAN REVIEW
to the lugubrious fogs of Jack Kerouac. But this immature line of ecsta–
tic hyperbole is not the only effort to give the crude and simple tran–
scendence. The alliance of naturalism's socially common, emotionally
primitive and physically sordid and violent materials (minus the posi–
tivistic ideology of earlier naturalism) with modern lyric poetry's meta–
phoric and idiosyncratic language and complex rhetorical and sym–
bolic organization (minus the formal order of traditional poetry) would
appear to be characteristic of several diverse contemporary literary
movements. It is not only a Faulkner, and the Southern Honeys who
have nourished themselves off his rich hive of rhetoric and extremity,
who torture the violently ordinary into prose-poetry. Stendhal and Dos–
toevsky and Gide presented unique heroes through an ostensibly trans–
parent style of dialectical insight; Faulkner and his contemporaries hide
ordinary (or sub-ordinary) heroes behind an apparently obscure style
of overpowering actuality.
The increasing tendency to join lyrical rhetoric and naturalistic
extremity can be seen as pervading an unexpectedly wide range of fic–
tions. Under this impetus, even the
aesthetic
novelist concerns himself
with larger, cruder, more sexually and socially representative reality.
Even Vladimir Nabokov, the delightful manneristic
blagueur,
moves
from the esoteric material of his earlier novels
(Bend Sinister, Camera
Obscura, The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight)
to the voracious Ameri–
can teenager and highway-culture of
Lolita.
His fictional aim remains
almost purely aesthetic-the incongruous image, the covertly expanding
metaphor, the literary parody, and, most basically, theme and variations
on the artist
manque
and his impossible muse; but the naturalistic ex–
pansion of his materials to include statutory rape, motels, American
sight-seeing and all the ugly-beautiful oddities of mass Americana has,
evidently, confused more than one reader. On the other hand, the
social
novelist now also concerns himself with elaborate stylization, meta–
phoric language and artful literary symbols. Even Bernard Malamud,
in the incisive social and psychological realism of
The Assistant,
parodies
a line from Othello in a crucial scene ("Dog-uncircumcized dog!"
says the simple Jewish girl as the ultimate response to the gentile bum
who has just raped her). Despite some incongruity with his realistic
manner, the author then develops the motif for his concluding gro–
tesque metaphor of the castrated
goy.
Such artifice, and the ironic
use of allusions to Dostoevsky and other literary matters, attempts to
give a symbolic resonance to what nonetheless remains a neo-naturalistic
genre-study of an exalted but emphatically ordinary Jewish family
In
the Depression who are victims of their socio-economic milieu.
