1M
MARY McCARTHY
an independent, sovereign world to which Joyce has managed
to gain access. There is no doctrine of "sympathies" or a-touch–
of-nature-makes-the-whole-world-kin underlying
Ulysses.
Or
underlying
The Sound and the Fury,
where Faulkner explores
the inner life of the mental defective Benjy-his own, you might
say, diametrical opposite. Much of modern literature might be
defined as the search for one's own diametrical opposite, which
is then used as the point-of-view. The parallel would be if
Dickens had tried to write
David Copperf:eld
from within the
sensibility of Uriah Heep or
Oliver Twist
through the impressions
of Fagin.
Difficulty alone (though
it
always exercises a charm) does
not explain the appeal of such enterprises for modern writers.
There is something else- a desire to comprehend, which seems
to be growing stronger as the world itself becomes more in–
comprehensible and dubious. The older writers, when they
sought their characters from among the poor and the obscure,
assumed that there was a common humanity and were concerned
to show this. But it is that very assumption that is being tested,
tried out, by the writers of today when they start examining their
own opposites. I will give an illustration from my own work
to show what I mean, rather than presume to speak for others.
When I first had the idea of the book called
The Groves of
Academe,
it presented itself as a plot with a single character at
the center. An unsavory but intelligent professor who teaches
modern literature in an experimental college is told that his con–
tract will not be renewed for reasons not specified but because
in fact he is a trouble-maker; whereupon, he proceeds to demon–
strate his ability to make trouble by launching a demagogic
campaign for reappointment, claiming that he is being dismissed
for having been a Communist and par!lding himself as the victim
of a witch-hunt. This claim
is
totally false, but it is successful,
for he has gauged very well the atmosphere of a liberal college
during the period of anti-Communist hysteria that reached a
climax in Senator McCarthy. No one in that liberal college stops
