Neil Schmi tz
DESCRIBING THE DEMON:
The Appeal of Thomas Pynchon
When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their
violence; the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even
(rather we might say
especially)
with
good
designs and righteous aims;
when we see the evil, the vice , the ruin that has befallen the most
flourishing kingdom which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce
avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and,
since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human W ilI–
a moral embitterment-a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place
within us) may well be the result of our reflections.
Hegel,
The Introduction to The Philosophy a/History
Given all the evil, the vice and the ruin that has befallen the
world set forth inJohn Hawkes'
The Cannibal
(1949) and William Burroughs'
Naked Lunch
(1959), and again in Saul Bellow's
Mr. Sammler's Planet
(1969), Hegel 's remark seems an apt introduction to contemporary American
fiction. Certainly
this
kingdom, the' 'last, best hope of earth," has stopped
flourishing and its writers, confronted decade by decade with the spectacle,
show all the signs of moral and philosophical exasperation. The "Good
Spirit" rarely speaks in their fiction and its tone is ironic when it does speak.
It
has lost an eye in wartime Poland and since then taken the Apomorphine
Treatment .
It
whistles a thin tune in the dark of postwar history . As Hawkes
explained in 1962 , his moral stance is to have no stance . Only the writer who
"maintains most successfully a consistent cold detachment toward physical
violence ... is likely to generate the deepest novelistic sympathy of all," he
wrote in
The Massachusetts Review,
"a sympathy which is a humbling before
the terrible and a quickening in the presence ofdegradation." What animates
Hawkes in this essay is his admiration for Djuna Barnes' comic treatment of
violence in
Nightwood,
her stylistic equipoise in the face of Unreason, and
finally he elevates the cool elegance of her writing to the status of an existential
leap . He too believes in fiction, "hard , ruthless, comic" fiction that finds "a
