500
ERICA JONG
of their generation felt very anxious about the romantics or about Ten–
nyson and Browning; no important modernist fiction writer felt much
anxiety about Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith. Their anxieties had
other causes, most of them extraliterary. Their main literary anxieties
were not the effect of a fear that they would be swallowed by precursors,
but the effect of a feeling that all the forms had exhausted themselves
or that under modern conditions literature was no longer possible. Thus
the polemical stress on making it new, thus the critical and parodistic
dimensions of modernist literature, thus the ironic self-consciousness of
works that are aware of themselves as poems, plays, and novels when
poems, plays, and novels are no longer possible, a self-consciousness that
makes old forms new.
In emphasizing the cost rather than the accomplishment, the blind–
ing and exile rather than the heady years of rule, Bloom arranges for his
own defeat in what might have been a stirring assault on Frye, Eliot,
and the New Critics, on the phenomenologists, structuralists, philoso–
phizers, and moralizers. Whatever Bloom is like in the flesh, the anxiety
in
The Anxiety of Influence
is not that of the Oedipus, but that of
Hippolytus, whose career is a cautionary tale of those good boys who
would rather turn their anxieties in upon themselves than rule the
roost. It is one more of those romanticisms that modernism helped us to
outgrow.
George Stade
EV,ERYWOMAN OUT OF LOVE?
THE SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK.
By
Doris Lessing. Knopf. $6.95.
A really good book resists reviewing, and
The Summer Be–
fore the Dark
is a really good book. The ending leaves me somewhat
dazed and confused, like life. Despite the allegorical overtones of the
narrative (which, at times, I found irritating), the novel finally has the
density and dreaminess of reality itself. For all her occasional polemicism,
Doris Lessing
has
no program for womankind nor for civilization. Her
characters are not "little engines of cause and effect"; "they wander in
the dark woods of their destiny" - to borrow two of my favorite phrases
from D. H. Lawrence's "The Novel and the Feelings." Lessing has, in
