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ALVIN C.KIBEL
such a world is physics teachable.
If
literature were the kind of thing
that Mr. Frye supposes, it would have a social issue by rigorously
manipulating all expressions of desire and anxiety into a coordinated
whole-a fair description, I suppose, of certain varieties of advertising
and propaganda ; at all events not an attractive program for culture.
To avoid this implication, Mr. Frye tells us that literature
is
free,
bloodless, not physics after all, but pure mathematics, an exercise of
the spirit uncontaminated by matter, which demonstrates the hypothetical
freedom of repudiation and desire from historical complication. This,
I think, makes history a gratuitous error on the part of mankind; certainly
it makes literature an irrelevance. Mr. Frye's system, if I may be allowed
the figure, offers a version, displaced onto criticism, of the myth of the
earthly Paradise, in which fantasy is once more pure and bodiless,
and
the curse of historical understanding has been lifted.
Alvin C. Kibei
THE DAY THAT VVAS
ONE DAY. By
Wright Morris. Atheneum.
$5.95.
Few writers in America at present can afford to disregard
the news. Responding to the assault of recent events, the writer has
determined to be relevant. This impulse has become perceptible across
a widening range of literary production, a range extending from the
Robert Lowell plays to Norman Mailer's latest publication. It has, of
course, had unhappy as well as salutary consequences.
This is the central problem confronting the reader of Wright
Morris' new novel. The
One
Day
in question is the day of John F.
Kennedy's assassination, and the author has attempted to link that event
with the lives of his characters. One is inclined to feel that this inten–
tion is, in itself, suspect. In its supposition that such links can
be
con–
structed, it veers perilously close to Leslie Fiedler's overwrought notion
of history as "the subtlest allegorist of alL" Even if the intention itself
does not always make for facile parallels, it assumes an uneasy fusion of
two orders of reality, each of which has its own form of analysis, yields
its own kind of meaning, and demands its own criteria for relevance
and credibility. In the novelistic terms of
One
Day,
the assassination
is
