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ROBERT B. HEILMAN
amateur participation, where custom and passion are oddly inter–
mingled, and to an incipient maturity out of which, we assume,
will develop better ways of coming to terms with both. Yet what he
feels in himself is perhaps not the most profound source of what
he knows; it is something of an echo of what he feels, perceives,
recognizes in others to whom he is, for a time, bound. In the chief
buffalo-hunter Andrews discovers, as inner truth, an obsession
with process that can come to rest only upon exhaustion of the
materials: he sees a kind of totality that tends to make extermina–
tion the only possible end. In this there are suggestions, though
only the subtlest suggestions, of political symbolism. But the leader
is also engaged in economic enterprise, and the story somehow re–
capitulates the entrepreneurial myth-from the initial union of
talented half-possessed idea-man and venture capitalist and salaried
technician in a grandiose dream of the ultimate killing, to the
eternal irrationality of natural event, overriding passion, and hu–
man fickleness that, despite fantastic struggle and endurance, can
bring the dream to nought. Yet this economic symbolism is barely
hinted. Fortunately for the novel, its concern is with neither the
political nor the economic cycles whose shadowy presence one may
feel there, lurking in the narrative as a subtle increment, but with
what is prior to these-the ways of the human psyche. What Wil–
liams has caught sight of is the capacity deep in man for para–
doxically combining automation and frenzy, for achieving, at the
very summit of vital and passionate energizing, an insensate
re–
duction of life to thingship. He has discerned, in the classical ges–
tures of production, a latent impulse to destruction that, when the
manic absorption in operations whirls the dream into nightmare,
becomes the whole truth.
This is what the reader learns. But he learns it through An–
drews, whose learning of it is the first step in his own growth.
If
the great adventure, whose greatness is closely allied with its sick–
ness, kills one participant and maims two, it leads a fourth toward
knowledge. That Williams sees certain terrifying depths, and that
he sees that seeing these may mean, not despair, but a saving sense
of reality, is an index of his range in apprehending what man can
do. His range embraces the complementary insights that the dream
may become twisted into the nightmare, but that man may come
