PARTISAN REVIEW
585
Borges is like a Kafka without anguish, then another important but
little known novelist who can be associated with this line, Raymond
Roussel, is like Kafka without anything, a castle without a moat, with–
out walls, without buildings - an absence.
The Castle
can be read as
an allegory of everything, Roussel's
Impression of Africa
reads like an
allegory of nothing, gratuitous inventions, puzzles solved by further
puzzles, insignificance explained by what turns out to be even less
significant until, as with Kafka, one is driven out of the depths back
to the cryptic surface of experience that exists despite interpretation
and beyond interpretation. The connection with the French "new
novel" is clear, especially with Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet - Butor
having moved off into the architectonic mode. With a twist of the
surreal in the direction of the fantastic you arrive at Donald Barthelme,
and with another twist in the direction of the psyclHglogical you come
to John Hawkes. Somewhere in this area you also find Leonard Michaels,
Ishmael Reed and, lately, Jonathan Baumbach, as well as Kenneth
Patchen, whose
The journal of Albion Moonlight
is another excellent
book elbowed out of the way by "the" novel. Here also, and especially
in connection with this line's recoil from the idea of profundity, you
might run across Witold Gombrovicz, whose
Pornografia
reads like an
eroticized Henry James, with all the latter's suppressed devils unchained
and raging.
There are two important types of modern fiction that disappeared
almost completely during the literary depression of the forties and
fifties, although in this case we tend to bury them with critical lip
service. "The revolution of the word," as they used to call the Paris
experiments of Joyce , Stein and the Surrealists, is probably still the
crucial element in a rene\\'ed fiction , and the one least reckoned with
by contemporary novelists. The reason it is crucial is that it deals with
the nature of language itself, and any art, after all the other things
it may be about, is fundamentally about its medium. Both the im–
possibly oYerloaded punning in
Finllegans Wake ,
and the impossibly
opaque wordplay in Stein's
Tender Buttons,
raise the question of
whether it is really the pragma tic, discursive, ra tiona lly intelligible side
of la nguage that best puts us in touch with our experience of the world
and of ourseh-es. All writers are in love with nonsense as the \\'a ter in
which e\'eryone swims, and Rimbaud's desperate assertions as well as
Mallarme's desperate negations are the extreme strategies of lovers at–
tempting union with our na tive element. John Ashbery \\Tote recently
that there are two ways of going about things: one is to put e\'e rything
in a nd the other is to leave everything out. Joyce If'nds
10
put e\'ery–
thing in and Gertrude Stein tends to lem'e everything out and they
