669 / 676
BOOKS
671
Fiedler calls the "youth impersonators"; they must do quite a good
impersonation, since among the genuinely "very young" Burroughs is
rarely read and when he is it is as a curiosity (all banned books are
attractive), not as a "leader." Burroughs is too far away and too far
gone to reach this generation where it counts; nor is this due, as Mr.
Fiedler might further suppose, to what is in his narrow view its current
"disaffected" and already doped-up state.
The author then reports that it was Allen Ginsberg who "gathered
together the scraps of narrative, protest, and hallucination which make
up ...
The Naked Lunch,"
who gave to them "what semblance of a
shape--approximate only, even after Ginsberg's ministrations-the book
has." It is a mystery how Mr. Fiedler can conclude from this that among
the "various ways to declare the death of the novel" one way is "to
explode
it, like William Burroughs."
If
this is true, there must
be
hundreds of unseen, ungathered, and unpublished novels detonated
every day, although judging from
Mr.
Burroughs' own method of
composition it seems improbable that he, at any rate, could even find
the fuse.
Reports of the novel's death have been greatly exaggerated, but
to the howls of numerous symposiasts the author feels compelled to add
his own. In his unwelcome "The End Of The Novel" essay, one proof
offered for the genre's passing is a list of recent novelistic failures
("a cluster of egregious flops," as he puts it): this is a bit like saying
that baseball is dead because the Yankees cannot win the pennant.
If
one does not "explode" the novel, Mr. Fiedler argues, one can
testify to its demise
by
mocking it from inside out, like Nabokov;
but surely this
is
nothing new. From the beginning, novelists have
parodied or played with the form's limitations and its possibilities: from
Fielding
to
Sterne's
Tristram Shandy,
through
Zuleika Dobson
to
Mann's
BuddenbrQoks
and Gide's
The Counterfeiters.
And while it has
always been possible to ape particular conventions (the epic) and sub–
classes (the gothic) of the novel, or to subvert them to one's own ends,
the genre is so vast and flexible that to imagine something that would
qualify as a parody of the form itself seems difficult, if not impossible:
even an "anti-novel" is a novel.
Pale Fire
is not, as Mr. Fiedler states,
an "anti-novel"; it is a new style novel in which the form is so ingenious–
ly manipulated that one hardly feels
it.
The story could be told an–
other way and more conventionally, but it is funnier this way. Mr.
Burroughs, on the other hand, has been remarkably successful in not
writing a novel (which is not quite the same as writing what is darkly
and portentously referred to as an "anti-novel"); whatever weighty