BOOKS
485
ested in making a criticism that stands as the richest possible transcript of
one's private transaction with the primary literature. Paul Zweig's
The
Adventurer
is an example of the latter, so fluid and pragmatic in its ap–
proaches
to
the problem of the transmutation of the adventurer through
the Western imagination that it would confound the person who begins it
looking for Zweig's method; but so persuasive, so alive, and so immensely
intelligent that it transcends its function as a book about literature and
becomes a meditation on experience at large, on the energy and fatigue of
styles, on the power and perversity of the great models of the imagination,
of the very
vita activa
itself.
If the word "adventurer" sounds loose and woolly to the ear, it is not
so in Zweig's argument, where it is defined and demonstrated with great
precision. The adventurer leads a heightened life, full of courage, strength,
cunning, and resourcefulness. But unlike his polar opposite the "hero," he
is
not loyal and selfless:
Adventurers are self-derived, self-determined . Therefore they walk on
delicate ground ; an abyss opens at their feet. Why do they court dangers
and isolation? For no reason . For themselves. To " live dangerously" is
for them an act of self-indulgence, not of loyalty. The applause they
receive will be charged with distrust, and with a secret longing
to
witness
their downfall. From the viewpoint of the common good, these men are
worthless. Apparently that is why we are thrilled by their acts. They
stand outside the categories of duty and obligation. They give us the
spectacle of the self-determined man who defends not us, but himself.
His inner destiny
is
his law. He reclaims for man an area of the for–
bidden ground.
Odysseus
is
Zweig's first and best example. Every example after Homer,
as Zweig acknowledges, is diminished or qualified in some way: Beowulf,
Sir Gawain, Casanova, the dominant figures of Gothic romance, Conrad's
Kurtz, T.E. Lawrence. The fact that every adventurer after Odysseus is less
than a fully realized type, rather than undermining the concept, allows
Zweig an extraordinary leverage in dealing with figures such as Robinson
Crusoe, who is a kind of antiadventurer, a figure in an exotic setting, called
upon for courage and cunning, who responds with labor, reason, and sur–
vival. Mter reminding us of the centrality of the adventurers in most other
times and cultures, and after tracing his mutations and decline from Odys–
seus to the present, Zweig asks again, as he asks at the beginning, how it is
that we, who continue to value individuality, have corne both to devalue the
adventurer and to cast his image in marginal and subliterary forms.
It
is, of
course, not the first time that a cultural phenomenon has been seen most
clearly at the point of its obsolescence.
