198
RICHARD POIRIER
filled with the same specific
mix
of mixed old shit which they
had
heard before in the telepathic vaults of their new Brooks
Range
electrified mind." The singular "mind"
is
intended: D.J. (it can
stand for Dr. Jekyll) and Tex (whose last name is Hyde) are finally
one, electronically fused and headed for Vietnam. So much for the
effectiveness now or prewar literary rituals that still worked a scant
thirty years ago. The boys themselves speak of their trek as a "puri–
fication ceremony," or rather at one point D.]. reports that
Tex
has managed to "get the purification ceremony straight
in
his head."
D.J. knows
this
by telepathy, as if the phrase is simply "in the
air,"
part of the setup, in case any professional explicators should decide
to pounce with Faulkner at the ready. For D.]. and Tex a "purifica–
tion ceremony" might not be exactly their "thing" but with all
that
American literature behind them, going back to Emerson at least, it's
surely a "thing" for any red-blooded American boy to do, given the
chance.
Barth and Pynchon share with Mailer an awareness of potential
human submergence in the materials that literature has helped
to
invent and that technology transforms into platitude and ultimately
into waste. So far, however, there has been less daring self-projection
in their works than in Mailer's - or in Burroughs' or Ginsberg's,
for that matter -less belief, perhaps, in the reality of history as a
force physically as well as imaginatively felt. They don't propose
their
bodies as both source and victim of antagonistic agents, and
they
seem to me to exhibit, as a result, less of the stylistic energy that
is
the reflex of Mailer's sense of physical embattlement. The narrator–
hero of Barth's
End of the Road,
who in
his
first sentence sounds a
bit like D.]. - "I am, in a sense, Jacob Homer" - idealizes "articu–
lateness" to a degree that nicely hints at Barth's Protean enterprise
as a novelist:
Articulation! There by Joe, was
my
absolute, if I could be said
to
have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think about
which
I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feeling one usually
has
for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that
is
to
classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to
syntactify
it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but
only
so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only
in
so dealing
with
it did I ever feel a man alive and kicking.... When my mythoplastic
