MORRIS DICKSTEIN
189
losing forever . And as a figure of fun he's a threat to no one; he's low
down on the scale of Hobbesian competition, cut off from the rare–
fied zone of great fortunes and great falls.
Similar things are true of the other main figure at the center of
sixties novels, a cousin of the schlemiel, the picaresque anti-hero .
One striking difference between novels of the fifties and those of the
sixties is that the former, which tend to be more psychological and to
focus on the complexities of individual character, preserve a belief–
inherited from nineteenth-century realism-in the possibilities of
personal growth, a Freudian faith in the maturation of self through
the formation of adult relationships. In picaresque fiction , however,
the hero, who is often an indestructible naif or innocent, gets pro–
pelled not into familiar human interaction but through a series of
external events which are often random, bizarre, even surreal or
apocalyptic. Voltaire's Candide is too much of an Everyman to grow
or change; he cannot learn from his experience , he can only be inun–
dated . Instead of novelistic development we find a structure of repeti–
tion and intensification: the same thing always happens , but no one
will ever
learn
anything. Instead of fully rounded real-life characters
we find cartoonlike puppets, manipulated according to the author's
moral purpose .
Not all the black humor novels of the sixties approximate the
Candide
pattern . Kurt Vonnegut's novels come closest, especially
Slaughterhouse-Five,
whose befuddled , childlike hero, allegorically
named Billy Pilgrim, is set down in a world that kills and maims in
the most casual and summary way . What complicates this air of shell–
shocked simplicity are the bizarre " time warps" which layer the
action , so that all the disasters of crazy Billy's life seem to be hap–
pening to him simultaneously. To express what he sees as the in–
sanity of contemporary history, Vonnegut does a pop adaptation of
modernist experiments with time . Billy is a holy fool who "has come
unstuck in time ," who keeps uncontrollably enacting different mo–
ments of his life. As such he is a kind of novelist whose control has
slipped, who remembers too much of modern history and his own
private sorrow, so that the pressure has become too great , the ache to
tell must somehow be relieved . This is why
Slaughterhouse-Five
is
not one ofVonnegut's best books. As a writer he works best when he
can
be
most playful and inventive, ripping off public events
in
inspired
