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Ulysses.
This freedom
is
licensed by the fact that the hero
is
possibly
part goat, probably fathered by a machine and has been nurtured
in
ways that absolve him from the human burdens of guilt and
suf–
fering. Giles only begins to suffer at the end when, married, a father
and founder of a sect, he develops a human consciousness of time
and therefore of love and death. He decides that perhaps truth
is
found only in the loving eye, not in any of the various efforts he has
made to fill the mythic and allegorical roles assigned him as goat,
human, grand tutor or even husband.
And here, as in most of the extraordinarily intricate, multiple
plotted and hyperbolicized works of this century, there
is
something
as
poignant as it is recurrent: that when the imagination manages
to push through contrivance and into those areas of irreducible, of–
ten inarticulate human needs, it discovers that these are heartbreak–
ingly simple. There
is
scarcely any language for them, perhaps only,
as George Eliot imagines, "that roar which lies on the other side of
silence," while we go about our business "well-madded with stu–
pidity." The most complicated examples of 20th-century literature,
like
Ulysses
and
The Waste Land,
the end of which seems parodied
by the end of
Giles,
are more than contemptuous of their own formal
and stylistic elaborateness. Finally, as in Faulkner's
The Bear,
such
books ultimately appeal to "the heart's truth," in terms so simple
as
to
be
subverted by the formal complications
in
which they're em–
bedded, much as they are lost within the stuffed complications of
modern consciousness. It's politically important, I think, that such
radical (and conservative) simplicities are also the mainstay of
those younger people who today express their antagonism to the
structured world less in violence than in a terminology that borders
on silence,
in
totemic words like "peace," "love," the hummed "om"
of Ginsberg, in chants and in bodily freedom. Nakedness and re–
linquishment - the astonishingly persistent goals of the heroes of
antiindustrial and particularly of American literature - are still the
goals of the heroes of the works I'm discussing, even of Mailer's
Rojack
in
An American Dream,
when he wishes finally to
be
done
with the magic and plotting that provide the substance of the book's
fiction, and pleads to "let me love that girl and become a father,
and
try to be a good man, and do some decent work." Such an
appeal will seem peculiar only to those who don't know how essen-
