BOOKS
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self-reductive system of ingrown relations. Furthermore, the books make
heavy demands on the reader. Because
Conversation
offers all the familiar
pleasures of character and plot, but in an unfamiliar format of narrative
editing equivalent to film montage, and because
Cobra
exhibits nuggets of
prose and outrageous wit, but in a histrionic text of acute self-reflexiveness,
these books may gratify the reader though they certainly train him
to
reading
that is often austerely difficult, coldly problematic. The question is this: an;
we ready for that sort of thing in our new-formed relationship with Latin
American literature? The blurbs and prefaces
to
these books, with their creaky
references
to
"levels" of vision or meaning and "keys"
to
understanding
(that antiquated way of reading fiction as if it were a locked apartment house
and we, thieves in search of a
passe par tout),
don't offer much hope for a
genuine response
to
the books' originality. However, if such a response
develops, itwill do much
to
challenge our notions of what we have learned
to
like and dislike in contemporary Latin American fiction.
Ronald Christ
AMERICA, AMERICA
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: THE KNACK OF SURVIVAL IN
AMERICA.
By Robert Coles. Rutgers University Press. $7.50 .
. observation about us engenders the very opposite of what we seek :
triviality , crassness and intellectual bankruptcy . And yet what we do see
can in no way be excluded. Satire and flight are two possibilities ..
But if one remain in a place and reject satire, what then? To be democrat–
ic , local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experi–
ence) [we] must for sublety ascend to a place of almost abstract design
to keep alive. To writing , then , as an art in itself. Yet what actually
impinges on the senses must be rendered as it appears , by use of which,
only , and under which , untouched , the significance has to be disclosed.
- "The Work of Gertrude Stein "
Robert Coles is not a trained literary critic or scholar by vocation or
avocation.
It
may be this salutary amateurism that has enabled him
to
write
such a clear, intelligent book onWilliams's fiction. Certainly, there has been a
quickening in the amount of critical articles and books on Williams since his
