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PARTISAN REVIEW
it also as perhaps a fraud, an illusion, the ultimate unreality com–
pared to the individual's humblest private need .
The early sixties was itself an ambiguous period , for like these
novels it did really have an exuberant and expansive side that was not
mere Camelot rhetoric. A nascent civil rights movement, then still
in its hand-in-hand, "We Shall Overcome" mood, was translating
the stirrings of the Court into direct action. A nascent New
Left,
humanistic in its values , spontaneous and American in its methods,
but potentially radical in its goals, seemed determined to avoid the
ideological rigidity and conspiratorial mentality of the Old. In Beat
poetry and the new vogue of folk music these social movements found
their artistic accompaniments, as poets and folksingers reached past
the academic insularity and pop commercialism of the fIfties , towards
the cultural side of the left-wing heritage of the thirties, the populism
of the Popular Front .
But the opening up of the novel was a deeper , more ambiguous
development, and I think it revealed more about the changing sensi–
bility of the early sixties . Grandiose and experimental in form, these
books partook of the imperial buoyancy of the Kennedy years. But
their vision sometimes had a bleak, dead-end character that belied any
official optimism.
Catch-22
had a plastic creative freedom and energy
hardly present in the novels of the fIfties, but it imagines a world
wholly unredeemed by rational purpose or humanistic uplight. A
similar ambiguity attaches to the theme of paranoia and the vision of
history in Pynchon's novels . On one hand his form and language,
his historical range and complexity of plot match Heller in creative
exuberance, and many in his endless cast of cartoonish characters are
pure products of the comic or satiric spirit. Even his paranoid theme
has its exhilarating side: it enables him to make astonishing connec–
tions and fantasize breathtaking possibilities , to subvert and intimi–
date our pedestrian sense of reality and causation , "to bring the es–
tate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning" (as Oedipa Maas
mus~s) .
" Shall I project a world?"
Oedipa asks herself in
The Crying ofLot
49, situating herself neatly somewhere between the novelist 'and the
psychotic. She is neither, but the elaborate plot that her sleuthing
gradually intuits makes for a novel that's both impressively sqmber in
tone and yet amazingly conditional and tentative in substance. For
those who entirely associate black humor with apocalyptic ffUce and a
