BOOKS
451
Melville, and his work indeed testifies to a veritable cathedral of con–
sciousness. But more recent writers have revealed a sharp contraction
in the dimensions of the architecture of consciousness. The hero of
Walker Percy's
Last Gentleman,
for instance, (who lives mainly through
his telescope), finds his ideal domicile in a small truck with a plexiglass
roof, "mobile yet at home . . . in the world yet not of the world"; the
isolated hero of William Gass's
In the Heart of the He'art of the Coun–
try,
("living at last in my eyes"), is cooped up in a very small house
indeed; and now Susan Sontag's Diddy, (purveyor of microscopes), ex–
plores what happens when you withdraw into the furthest reaches of
inner space. At one point (perhaps when he is making a bid for re–
covery), he thinks he will "try to view the world more generously. Not
only as an arena of contamination, but also as a space to
be
continually
reinvented and reexamined." But as often in American literature, the
wo~ld
!s intractable,
closi~g ,
in l!ke the walls on
~oe's prisone~.
Diddy
"thinking ... to etch
hl~
benIgn fantasy upon It. (Now) fmds the
world cJosing in on him, untransformeu. and unequivocally menacing."
Under the circumstances it seems that the only way left is to draw
further and further away from the world, into the shell and down the
tunnel of self. And what Miss Sontag does show, and it makes her book
an important and significant one, is that in the inmost center of the house
of consciousness is to be found "the house of death." The "stately man–
sions" have given way to the morgue, and it is in the morgue, interest–
ingly enough, that Miss Sontag's imagination shows most signs of life.
I
don't suppose she would approve of my finding a moral in her book,
but
I
think there is one, and one of some moment for American writing
of our day. Namely - what shall it profit a man if he shall gain his
head, and lose the whole world?
Tony Tanner
NAKED CITY
THE MYTH OF THE MACHINE. By Lewis Mumford. Harcourt. Brace
and World. $8.95.
THE RADIANT CITY. By Le Corbusier (translated by Pa.mela Knight.
Eleanor Levieux and Derek Coltman.) Orion Press. $22.50.
THE LEVITIOWNERS. By Herbert
J.
Gans. Pantheon. $7.95.
After World War II, the American city passed from the realm
of necessity into the realm of freedom. The result has been a social and
aesthetic disaster.
Up until 1945, urban form, taken in the broadest sense of the term,
