194
PARTISAN REVIEW
so unmodulated . The Dostoevskian extremism and desperation of
Jewish black humor is hard to keep under control, even when it's
deeply felt; sincerity is not enough. It's a rare book like Bellow's
Herzog
or
Humboldt's Gzft
where this frantic quality justifies and
fulfills itself, by serving its subject and
allo~ingfor
emotional nuance.
Herzog's letters especially enable Bellow to move from a merely pri–
vate and psychological case to the redefinition of a whole cultural
period (an ambition that boomerangs disastrously in the rank , em–
bittered pages of
Mr. Sammler 's Planet) .
Failure to make such connections is what defeats a great deal of
the verbal black humor of the sixties , which makes only a marginal
advance on the personal novel of the previous decade . It alters the
tone of the fifties novel without expanding its horizons. It brilliantly
exploits vulgar, "pop" material, often with sexual audacity, and
sometimes achieves a rollicking , exuberant comic tone . But with the
exception of a few books like
Portnoy 's Complaint
it rarely stakes out
new social or fictional territory . It partakes of the liberated spirit of
the sixties but rarely does much that's constructive with its new-found
freedom . Quite the opposite is true of the writers I've called "struc–
tural" in their black humor. Construction is their strong point, mazes
of plot, astoundingly complex fictional textures reminiscent ofJoyce,
Kafka , Borges , and Beckett-though sometimes we may wonder to
what point all the energy of formal invention. These writers make
a much sharper break with the private world of the fifties novel.
Characteristically, like Pynchon, they reinvent an older literary form,
the historical novel , which had descended into a moribund popular
genre (the costume novel) , or, like Vonnegut, they do devious and
inspired take-offs on topical materials, such as the Eichmann and
Abel cases in
Mother Night,
right-wing lunatic groups in
Mother
N ight
and
The Crying ofLot
49, Caribbean dictatorships, the Bomb,
and the end of the world in
Cat 's Cradle,
the politics and philan–
thropy of the Rockefeller family in
GodBless You , Mr. Rosewater,
all
sorts of politics in the stories in Donald Barthelme's
Unspeakable
Practices, Unnatural Acts ,
and so on . In other words, these writers of
the sixties rediscover the historical world, the public world-even as
they are deeply skeptical of it-just as the sixties in general rediscover
the joys and horrors of politics, even as many feel poisoned by it.
Like many of the activists of the sixties, the key writers. whatever
