DREAMERS
349
thirty years after Roth first conceived them, a valedictory both to
his child protagonist in bed and to his own career as a writer: "He
might as well call it sleep. It was only toward sleep that every wink
of the eyelids could strike a spark into the cloudy tinder of the dark,
kindle out of the shadowy corners of the bedroom such myriad and
such vivid jets of images...."
We know, having come so far in the novel, what those images
"toward sleep" were, and are obviously doomed to be until death for
Roth and his protagonist: the adoring mother, exposed
in
her naked–
ness before jeering kids; the terrible rage of an actual Jewish father,
and the guilty dream of a
goyish
spiritual one; the Jewish girl betrayed
in abject love to a mocking Gentile; the spark out of the bowels
of the earth, up from the third electrified rail of the streetcar, bright
enough to redeem all from darkness and pain; and, weaving in and
out of the rest, the cry of the Prophet: "I am a man of unclean lips
in the midst of a people of unclean lips. . . ."
Joseph-the solver of dreams-has become confused with Isaiah
in the terrible thirties, learning to talk dirty instead of speaking fair;
and he moves, therefore, not toward recognition and acclaim in his
own lifetime and his father's, but like West or Roth, toward prema–
ture death or madness and silence.
If,
at long last, posthumous suc–
cess has overtaken Nathanael West, and almost posthumous acclaim
Henry Roth-this is because the forties and fifties learned once more
to believe in the Happy Ending, which the writers of Genesis postu–
lated for the Joseph myth, but which the thirties could imagine no
more than Kafka himself. The lowering into the pit, the descent into
Egypt or Hell was all of the legend which seemed to them viable;
and trapped in the darkness, they looked not to Pharaoh for deliver–
ance, but to the psychoanalysts, the heirs of that Jewish Doctor who
had boasted that he could set very Hell in motion.
In our time, however, with benefit of analysis or without, Joseph
has once more been hailed into Pharaoh's court, once more lifted up
in the sight of his enemies and brothers; once more recognized as a
true Master of Dreams, under his new names of J.D. Salinger and
Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. But this is the
achievement of an era just now coming to a close, a decade or
more of responsibility and accommodation, in which those erstwhile
outsiders, Freud and Kafka, became assigned classroom reading, re-
