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RICHARD POIRIER
understood book asks, in effect: what can I invent that the Kennedys
haven't actually accomplished, what hyperboles are left to the ima–
gination when reality is almost visibly exceeding any hyperboles?
Small wonder that Mailer is a throwback not so much to D. H.
Lawrence as to Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy.
Novelists and dramatists who want to compete with the invented
world of contemporary politics or the daily news and who can't, like
Mailer, turn the competition itself into news - such ambitious people
might well decide with Carl Oglesby to give up the writing of fiction
for political agitation. There aren't yet any instances where
this
choice has been especially self-denying or where it has proven un–
generous either to politics or to literature. Let talent for invention
find its own opportunities. Literary culture is more likely to prosper
by desertions from its ranks than from some current and preposterous
inflations of its importance, like those implicit in George Steiner's
castigations of literature for not saving us from Nazism. Remember
that Proust caused the fall of France.
Literature has only one responsibility - to
be
interesting about
its own inventions - and it can do this without paying much atten–
tion to alternative inventions coexisting under the titles of history,
life, reality or politics. Indeed, there's plenty of evidence that writers
who operate on the assumption that they live in a world of fictions
are not denuded or depressed by the competition. Joyce and Nabokov
derive their energies from it, and it sets in motion the creative powers
of Jorge Borges, John Barth and Iris Murdoch, among others. Dis–
tinctions have to be made, however - nowhere in the works of the
last three named, not even in the brilliant contrivances of Borges, is
there a competitive response equal to the vitality of Joyce or Nabokov.
Borges, Barth and Miss Murdoch, however different from one another
in many respects, share a debilitating assumption: that it is interesting
in and of itself to make the formal properties of fiction into the
subject matter of fiction. While it isn't wholly uninteresting to do so,
those readers most capable of appreciating the idea are also apt to
be the most impatient with any lengthy demonstrations, with the
~epetitive
effort, page after page, to show that literature is a hoax.
The intellectual prowess of Borges, Barth and Miss Murdoch isn't
at all in question. They are perhaps more intellectually attuned, and
they are surely more philosophically adroit, than all but a few of the
