562
WILLIAM
PHILLIPS
tasteful and restrained representation. As for one's imagination, it
is
even less restricted in its pursuit of erotic fantasies. Obviously, nor–
mality can no longer be regarded as a meaningful idea for writing,
though it would seem that traditional values cannot be entirely dis–
regarded. Frank Kermode recently argued that a commitment to the
new, such as Harold Rosenberg advocates, means giving up all
critical values, for
if
novelty creates its own value then the traditional
method of judging new works by existing standards can no longer
be applied. Kermode, it seems to me, was right in pointing to the
danger of a principle that softens us up for any innovation or break
with tradition. On the other hand, we run the opposite risk of op–
posing new styles in the name of old ones, and justifying this by
failing to recognize that every new work alters old standards. It is
clearly
this
reciprocal relation that makes for a proper balance of the
new and the old, though, admittedly,
it
is not always easy to keep
in mind that one is changing one's tastes in the act of applying
them.
In practice, the less eccentric forms of the new sensibility and
those which are related if only symbolically to more accepted intel–
lectual conventions are more readily assimilated. John Barth, for
example, is a less extreme figure, since sexual and social chaos are
represented in his novels as metaphors for each other; as is Pynchon,
in whom sexual fluidity appears to be a part of the fluidity of ex–
perience; or Susan Sontag, who in most of her writing shows herself
to be more an advocate than an exponent of free-wheeling sexuality.
Actually, it is the more extreme figures, like Burroughs and Genet (in
his novels) who pose the problem and force its definition. And though
extremism is one of the means by which literature deals with typical
experience, extremist writing has been successful usually when its
special vision has been able to generalize the extreme of human
behavior. Kafka is perhaps the outstanding example of the invention
of a new style of observation by a grotesque - almost psychotic–
imagination, that has become a natural style. But I am not at all sure
whether it can be said of Burroughs and Genet in his fiction, and
particularly of their disciples, that they have succeeded in imposing
their style on our experience. Undoubtedly some of the perversity of
modern writing has expressed itself in sexual cultism, especially in the
less gifted writers, for whom violence, sadism and homosexuality
