NEIL SCHMITZ
113
language appropriate to the delicate malicious knowledge of us all as poor,
forked , corruptible , the feeling of pleasure and pain that comes when
something pure and contemptible lodges in the imagination-I believe in the
'singular and terrible attraction' of all this ." History in such fiction no longer
exists as a coherent formation of events. Neither Hegelian nor Marxist, it has
no destination , no implicit meaning-it is only a place, an environment, a
theater in which everything happens and where, before flats that signify
1918nessor 1930nessor 1945ness, this "poor, forked, corruptible " Everyman
enacts our common and immutable fate . Yet how often can these horrors be
rehearsed before the terrible becomes merely the exotic, before the writer
himself begins to participate in the alienation of the humane?
It
is a question
Alfred Kazin asked in examiningJerzy Kosinski's
The Painted Bird
and one
that Susan Sontag recently rephrased in contemplating the photographs of
Diane Arbus . For the artist, however, whether Hawkes or Arbus , hardness is
not so much a mode as an ethic, the ethic of the survivor who uses ironic
detachment as a shield against the overwhelming data of his own immediate
history . When Hawkes humorously knocks off the sole good man in
The
Cannibal ,
an inept schoolteacher named Stintz , braining him with his own
tuba , he expresses the truth that after Paschendale and Verdun, after Dresden
and Hiroshima, there is no rebirth, and at the same time he refuses the burden
of hope. " To have humanism," Fausto Maijstral reminds us in Thomas
Pynchon's first novel,
V.
(1963), "we must first be convinced of our
humanity . As we move further into decadence , this becomes more difficult. "
The question in that modern art which strives to represent this mangled world
is not, then , historical , Hegel's question : "to what principle, to what final
end these enormous sacrifices have been offered ," but rather the question so
relentlessly stated by Burroughs in
Naked Lunch :
what
is
human?
In Pynchon's fiction the obscene so finely wrought in
Nightwood
and
sparingly told in
The Cannibal
is epically extended and retold . Like Hawkes,
Pynchon writes novels that are "hard, ruthless, comic ," fiction that reveals
exactly what is done when the hook is surgically removed from aJewish nose or
how in castration the scrotum is clenched and the testes spilled. But the most
intense suffering that occurs in his fiction is intellectual , not physical, and in
this regard Pynchon is the most violent of our modern writers, typically
amassing great volumes of knowledge in specific detail only to mystify and
confound the obstinate knowers who search in his texts for the right reading ,
for the true interpretation . He is interested not in those who operated the
ovens at Dachau but in those who devised them, in those systems and
technologies that enabled the Eichmanns, gave them timetables and switches
to
pull. All the enigmas painstakingly left unresolved in
V.
and
The Crying of
Lot
49 (1966) are resumed and massively rephrased in his most recent novel,
