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TONY TANNER
ened but still detached: "I could not even decide what I should
feel:
all
I found in me was anguish, abstract and without focus." It is a bleak and
airless book in which ideas are more real than people, and the look
in
the
mirror so much more real and prolonged than any look out into the
world. As a study of a certain state of mind it is at times very penetrating,
but it is also a distressingly factitious book and this seems to me
evidenc~
that both the narrator and his author appear to have what may be called
a rather nominal sense of reality. In the book there seem to be no people,
only masks; no living, only role playing; no things, only thoughts about
things; no world, only a "vaudeville"; no fixed and necessary actualities,
only arbitrary verbal constructions.
It
is as though the dialectic between
life and mind has broken down and the dissociated consciousness drifts
along in sterile isolation, sealed off in its own circular musings. Such
encounters with external life Horner does have seem much more theoretic
than real. Horner himself admits only one absolute value: "articulation
... to turn experience into speech ... is always a betrayal of experience,
a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and
only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking." One
admits the proposition, noting the deliberately pejorative terms (why not
as well a clarification, a celebration, an exploration of experience? Does
Tolstoy betray life or vivify it?). But in this book the impingement of
actual experience seems so muffled and attenuated and the domination
of word and thought seems so uninterrupted that one scarcely feels that
word and thought have got close enough to experience even to betray it.
There is a good deal of existentialist talk in the book ("a man is free not
only to choose his own essence but to change it at will"), but it remains
talk, a series of propositions entertained but not enacted. What we often
get is speculation divorced from circumstance, a severance which tends to
make the speculation less immediate and interesting. (In Musil, an author
who may well have influenced Barth, the circumstance is rich and thick
and the speculation correspondingly relevant and involving.) What it
comes to is that in Barth's early work there is something approaching an
absence of environment; all those things which condition thought seem
to have receded or been excluded and in the resultant emptiness the
mind (Barth's via his narrators') runs "free." In a sense this is not so
uncommon in American literature, which tends to offer the extreme
visions either of man totally released from the molding and limiting
powers of environment, or man totally dominated by them-dreams of
perfect freedom alternate with nightmares of inexorable forces. (Richard
Poirier had some very cogent and subtle things to say about precisely
this point
in
the last issue of
PR.)
Barth is certainly
in
the line of those
who deny the omnipotence of environment; indeed, in his work the
