124
CALVIN BEDIENT
ous forbiddingness, is the surest, maybe the
only,
way to bring about
the destruction of what is really valuable in that culture. I would like
to be surer than I now am that Brustein could hear and debate such
objections outside the role he's allowed his idea of "revolutionary thea–
ter" to assign
him.
Thomas R. Edwards
BLIND MOUTHS
WONDERLAND. By Joyce Carol Oates. Vanguard. $7.95.
Wonderland
is about a cluster of deeply related things - a
cluster that seems to writhe frighteningly from a single source. It
is
about the spirit's hunger for strength and identity, its consequent need
to possess others, its terror of the anonymity of flesh, of the blank
nothingness of death. Oates seems uncannily up with all of us, the very
young, the middle-aged, the old; and though her three "book"
titles
sound tritely pretentious - "variations on an american hymn," "the
finite passing of an infinite passion," "dreaming america" - she
is
to
my mind one of the most comprehensive and knowing American novel–
ists now writing.
The novel begins with a commonplace instance of American viol–
ence - family slaughter. One child, Jesse Harte, escapes his murderous
father by leaping through a window. The book ends a little after Jesse,
himself a father, prevents his drug-hollowed daughter from jumping
from a third-floor window to escape him. "I am not here. There's no–
body here," she whispers. "I don't exist and you can't get me." Getting
other people, eating them, fattening the spirit so that the flesh, or the
dust, can't suck it in -
is
this our famous American drive? Con–
versely, emptying oneself out so that no one can get at one - is this
the sickness, the childish strategy, of the doped-up young? The book
is perturbing. There Joyce Carol Oates is, in the "radical middle," to
use Renata Adler's phrase for her generation - a generation that
"was
forced into the broadest possible America" - desperately inward with
an older generation's will to power, sorrowfully inward with a younger
generation's hatred of control. To eat others to feed identity, to spew
them out to escape it - the book roils with the futile strain of both.
Wonderland
is
nihilistic, but only in the midst of the most terrible
struggle for life.
