648
HAROLD ROSENBERG
past, the assumption being that the reader will feel interested
in
these people because he has "met" them.
By comparison with other literary forms, that of the. life
history .seems to demand a minimum of patterning, and its great
models in American fiction are eruptive writers like Dreiser or
Wolfe.
An
author in this vein is permitted to dip into the
in–
formal and even the unformed, as does Mailer in
Advertisements
for Myself,
and it is here that the "serious" mass writer and the
literary artist tend to merge. Since meaning is held to be inher–
ent in the life story, a major requirement is that solemnity shall
not be violated-when Saul Bellow in the best of his longer
works,
Henderson the Rain King,
parodied the life history by
piling half a dozen lives into
his
hero, the reviewers did not know
whether to treat the book as an allegory or resent it as literary
subversion-they ended by doing both.
Contempt for form is the program of new literary genera–
tions in search of spontaneity and the facts of life. In practice,
however, formlessness is simply another Look and a temporary
one at that (in time, organization begins to show through the
most chaotic surface). Today's automatic writing merely re–
minds one of the
simulated
automatism of Joyce. Nor can social
hallucination (thinking and acting like a square) be overcome
by suppressing the mind that might be hallucinated. The author
who shakes off popular forms may wind up with popular anti–
form (as in "experimental" TV).
As
we saw in
The Raw Youth,
the denial of "literary graces" only tends to make one coy.
.
To honor fact, art must honor itself. Mter noting that, given
the vision, actual life may reveal greater depths than Shake–
~peare,
Postoe:vsky backs away: "But the whole question," he
exclaims, "is
whose
vision? Indeed, not only to create and write
artistic works but also to discern a fact something of an artist
is
required." That modern literature has decided to pursue reality
is only half the story; the other half is its discovery that the sub–
version of literary form cannot be··accomplished ·except
by
liter–
ary means, that is,
through an effort essentially'
fo:rmal. '
