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THEODORE SOLOTAROFF
the roots of religious inspiration. Because they have so much less
to start with, such stories require that much more solidity of spe–
cification to serve as a metaphor for human actualities or possi–
bilities. So Conrad in
Heart of Darkness,
for example, builds up
his world slowly and thickly. However, except for their savage but
meaningful rites of marriage and prophecy, the culture of the
Dangs is vague and so are the responses of the hero. His reactions
are not a Negro's reactions but just reactions; except for his use
of the Crucifixion to prophesy to the Dangs, his experiences in the
two worlds become essentially disjunctive--that of an academic
time-server and that of a great religious prophet. "The NRACP"
raises finally even greater resistance in my mind by failing to do
the work of making the mentality of a Negro Relocation Camp or
the world of American culture outside sufficiently altered-suf–
ficiently psychopathic-to explain the process by which in the
interest of social planning all of America's Negroes are to
be
secretly killed and their flesh exported to the hungry nations. Pre–
sumably, Elliott wants us to believe that present-day tendencies in
state planning and minority group segregation can be logically
extended to provide a sufficient cause for such a policy. But can
they? Once again, one comes back to the idea that the imagined
context is too incomplete and insubstantial and abstract to serve
as a valid and meaningful reference to contemporary or universal
experience.
I raise these objections in some detail, for they also apply, I
think, to a more sustained and intricate piece of recent fantasy,
Ernst Juenger's novel
The Glass Bees.
Like
On The Marble Cliffs,
it is a slowly paced, philosophic novel in which the moral crisis of
modern Central European history is presented through a mixture
of fable and commentary. The hero is a retired Army officer, Cap–
tain Richard, whose allegiance to the traditional code of the pro–
fessional officer has caused him to fall into disgrace in the service
and to go hungry in the post-war world, after "having twice paid
the piper for inefficient governments." Deciding that his code of
honorable scruples is out of date
in
a time when "trust and faith
no longer existed" and "discipline had vanished from the world,"
Richard agrees to apply for a morally dubious post with the scien–
tific wizard Giacomo Zapparoni, whose manufacture of robots,
