84
LESLIE FIEDLER
fully masturbating dreams" etc. But throughout that study, it seems
to me now, I tried to justify my quite valid determination to deal
with "pop books" as well as "classics" with snide or ironical asides.
It
is one of the few things I would now change if I could without
falsifying my earlier version. And yet reading in other critics such
typical ploys as, "One cannot condemn Elvis Presley for not being
like Gigli. On the other hand it is not enough ..." or "One can
study pornography by its own standards, but one has always to make
it clear ..." I know the limitations of such a double view, shudder
to think how strongly and for how long it affected my own criticism.
In both realms of art, if in fact they are two, form follows func–
tion as it properly should. The structure of the subpornographic
novel, for instance, is as unorthodox as its sentences, since-like many
pop genres, eg., the daytime radio and T.V. serial-it tends to be
all middle, with no real beginning or conclusion. The
books
of Lip–
pard and Sue and Reynolds are, in essence, endless books.
The
Quaker City,
though itself a fairly thick volume, is one of the smallest
of the lot; seeming, indeed, almost slim for all its five hundred odd
pages, when compared to Reynolds'
Mysteries of the Court,
which
ran to some four and a half million words, and Sue's
Mysteries of the
People,
which covers two thousand years of history in enough pages
to make perhaps fifty modem novels. What is reflected in their bulk
is not so much the dream of writing the "total novel," a model of
all human experience, like say, Balzac or Faulkner, but rather the
hope of entertaining forever an insomniac public quite as tyrannical
as the story-loving Sultan of Scheherezade. The pop novel of Sue
and Reynolds and Lippard represents, that is to say, a model, not of
swarming life, but of the mass media themse1ves--an unremitting
stream of words intended to combat a finally unmitigatable ennui.
Styleless and structureless, in any classic sense, the genre is also
-and most disturbingly, perhaps-characterless. The multitude of
persons who move through its pages are not portrayed in any kind of
psychological depth; and certainly they never change, since they are
representative rather than individual,
given
once and for all rather
than developed in time. When such characters become memorable at
all,
it
is as mythic figures, names of mysterious resonance inextricably
associated with certain immutable qualities and postures; not as fic–
tional personages, endowed with souls and lifestyles, pasts and futures.
Moreover, as mythic figures, they rapidly pass out of their inventor's
