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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
really storytelling, and the whole is embedded in a cement of docu–
mentary background, to make like the world of a novel."
Social realism is not the only norm for the novel, but each departure
requires new forms, not simply new intentions. Many recent novelists
engage in an unconscious duplicity, for on some deep level they no
longer believe in the form that they have inherited and whose tech–
niques they use uncritically. They can no longer imagine any sustaining
relation between the individual and the social, yet because they renounce
formal experiment--or because the very notion of form is suspect?-they
have not discovered new devices commensurate with their new ap–
prehension. Among novelists Kafka too was a metaphysician and his
vision of human isolation was if anything more extreme, but rather
than fall back automatically on the techniques of realism, he used them
originally by playing on the full irony of their inappropriateness; the
resulting form made individual alienation the focus of the story
rather than the unpremeditated source of its weakness. Under the
injunction to keep the great themes of Love and Death in view, meta–
physician Gold has room for considerations of form and thus his projected
novel of the sixties would remain abstract for just the reason that Kafka
is always absolutely concrete.
I have dealt at such length with <k>ld's essays on the novel partly
because they make the most substantial argument, partly because they
yield the most revealing clue to his stance toward his subject in all of
the others. Mr. Gold's critique has no social dimension: he is unable to
uncover the common institutional roots of seemingly divergent individual
problems. He makes passing reference to "a social structure which
cannot use the largest capacities of millions of individuals," but nowhere
is that structure analyzed or even discussed. One could almost say that
society is not real for him. As
'a
result he is a valuable critic of some
facile and counterfeit forms of community that flourish in America
today: among the hipsters, in some college classrooms, in the "new
upper-middle soap opera" brought to best-selling perfection by Herman
Wouk and others, and in such historic centers of expatriation as the
Left Bank and Greenwich Village. He builds up a vast mosaic of flight
from the responsibility to communicate, from the obligations of moral
choice, from emotion and the risks of love, and from the painful but
necessary demands of rebellion and creativity. But he has little to say
about how true communion and creativity could come about, other
than to recommend time and again a vague "respect for the possibilities
of the self."
