SELF-PARODY
341
say something else at that moment. What I want to urge
is
some
less casual assurance within the area of these generally accepted
limitations. Insofar as they are available for discussion, life, reality
and history exist only as discourse, and no form of di;course, as
Santayana insisted, can
be
what it expresses; no form of discourse
can
be
life, reality or history. Where
is
the Civil War and how do
we know it? Where
is
Lyndon Johnson and how does anyone know
him? Is he a history book, an epic poem or a cartoon by David
Levine? Who invents Lyndon Johnson, when and for what immedi–
ate purpose? Think of the inventions that crumbled, of the new ones
that emerged at the end of his speech of renunciation. Earlier, in one
of his 1967 press conferences, his mannerisms, though unfamiliar in
their variations and in his frightening relaxations, were reported in
the press to be those, at last, of the "real" Johnson, the Johnson
his
friends had always known and of whom the public had never had a
glimpse - after nearly thirty-seven years of public exposure! And
what about Richard Nixon, the living schmoo? Where does the
fiction end and the historical figure begin? By now, he has no idea
himself, and he's still at it, still inventing a character for that great–
est of all theatrical enterprises, the American electoral system.
No wonder anyone who cares about politics, especially anyone
reading the script for 1968, finds the claims made for literature
by most critics ridiculously presumptuous. Why should literature be
considered the primary source of fictions, when fictions are produced
at every press conference; why should novelists or dramatists be
called "creative" when we have had Rusk and McNamara, the moth–
ers of invention, "reporting" on the war in Vietnam? How do we know
that war any more than we know Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon?
Challenges to the fictional uniqueness of literature have come, oddly
enough, from those most likely to suffer from the challenge - from
the people, especially the novelists and dramatists, who create it.
For some of these, the escape from the notion of a special status for
literature has involved at least one kind of political stimulation: their
occupational preferences for intricate fictional plots has been broad–
ened by a Hegelian suspicion that the world itself is governed by self–
generating political plots and conspiracies more intricate than any
they could devise. Such
is
the logic of the "plotting" in Pynchon's
V.
and
The Crying of Lot
49 and of Mailer's
An American Dream.
Mailer's way of writing in that brilliant and almost wholly
mis-
