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nological state are alleged to desublimate and pacify rather than
sustain
human energy.
The books I'll be talking about, a few fairly old, some very
recent, seem to propose this as the direction of our civilization: that
it releases life from invisibility only to ensnare and suppress it. In
the progress of
M oby Dick
and
Ulysses,
for example, what hap–
pens to the characters we meet at the outset, as in the first thirty–
odd chapters of the one and the first six of the other? They stay
around, we hear about them, but somehow they get less present
to
the ear and the eye than do the techniques used to account for the
world they live in. Environment, the media in which people exist,
moves to the center of interest, dictates the style and shapes the
form of the chapters. The techniques that emerge (both the tech–
nique of the books and the various technologies and industries being
described by the books) get to be more interesting than the char–
acters themselves. Characters become the passive receptors of phen–
omena from outside; they become
all
ears, listening to sounds of
voices, noises from the street, literary parodies and emulations, music.
The world at its more than Benthamite business, so works of
this
kind suggest, the blurred, half-identifiable noises the world
makes, emanate less from persons than from what corporate hu–
manity has created: the artifact, including those
types,
charactel'S
and roles that impose themselves back upon their creators. It is a
question about some modem writers whether the realities they pro–
pose
are
shaped
by the exertions of any
self
or by forces whose ex–
istence is prior to any individual human presence and eager
to
ab–
sorb it as one channel of expression. Questions of style must, as a
result, become increasingly questions about the media of popular
culture as well as of literary convention, and
if
this offends the
sensibilities of certain literary scholars then so much the worse for
their scholarship. Not merely who is speaking
to
whom, but what–
what film, what hero of a T.V. series, what pop group - is speaking
through the person who thinks it is he who is speaking to someone
else. "It's a
wise
man,"
says
Mailer's D.]. in
W,hy Are We In Viet–
nam?,
"who knows
he
is the one who is doing the writers writing."
And when it comes to plot, a
similar
question presents itself. Instead
of
being set in motion by the interactions of persons, plot seems
to
