FORM AND HALLUCINATION
647
entitled to say "I" and tell his tale in public; that one, no matter
what his talents or condition, is somebody, not in the future nor
as the result of what he
has
done, nor by family or place defini–
tion, but by the mere biological fact of having been born.
The fable of the gift of absolute being includes the opposing
fantasy of being deprived, the nightmare of being nobody; in
no other literature is there so much suffering from ontological
handicaps, the handicap of being an artist or an adolescent or a
Jew or a Negro or a wife or a husband or of not having gone to
Princeton or of having been changed into a G.!. The biographi–
cal perspective of our seriously intended novels (and of our plays,
which try as hard .as they can to be novels) strengthens this
vision of injured being with its primary resources of introspec–
tion and retrospection. The form of contemporary American
fiction of itself presents the individual as infinitely free subjec–
tively but constricted and wounded by "interpersonal relations"
the minute he touches the outer world. This is as typical of tales
of hucksters and flannel suiters as of
poets
and junkies. Here,
from a prominent young fiction writer, is an example of narra–
tive conceived .as a blend of free self-examination and remember–
ing, on the one hand, and painful interaction, on the other-that
the event takes place on the meanest domestic level makes it
all
the more "true to form" in that the life story is taken to be inter–
esting
per se
without larger connotations.
"Sit down, please," she said. [This sets the interpersonal scene.]
"Make myself at home?" [The speaker is being ironical, since he
is
"at home" with his divorced wife.]
She smiled tolerantly. He wondered if she had any imagina–
tion of how it disturbed him to visit the place which had been his
home, which
in
some way still was, which was so mysterious, like a
room dreamed of and then found and then you're suddenly unsure
of whether you really dreamed of it or only now think you did.
The story consists of an agitated pacing back and forth between
the
husband and his wife and the husband and his "dreamlike"
