84
PARTISAN REVIEW
ends, still retains an almost romantic appeal: for all of the world that is still
unaccounted for remains a field for imaginative play, for the discovery or
creation of a more adequate and just, more beautiful and true, vision.
In Dreiser's fiction, characters pick up their ideal roles and begin to
move around,
to
use their minds to propel themselves through the dark
void left by religion and a lost idea ofAmerica. And although Dreiser moves
with the burden ofgenerations of inhibition, in his work the mind begins to
play in its new wasteland. Indeed,
An American Tragedy,
with a vision of the
electric chair at its core, succeeds in moving one so massively that, for all
the blindness and loss it depicts, it seems a glorification of that dark void.
The mystery of the emptiness itself draws the imagination on, making one
turn from art to daily life and back again, thus corroborating the realistic
method which itself turns back and forth from life to art with the sense that
the two have equal weight.
Dreiser's example ofopenness and acquisitiveness and doggedness, the
,
wild, nearly oblative involvement of the writer with life, represents the
strongest example of the realist's open-ended method. It is a narrative mode
which, in its attempt to create fiction that is both popular and moving,
begins with the stories people believe about themselves and corrects them,
conservatively, carefully, in light of knowledge gained from observation of
the world itself, until the stories fall apart and the common-man pro-
tagonists and the writer are left in the void of daily life. As he puts down
such a book, the reader is left with the feeling that he too is lost in a
pointless fiction, that the palpable things of his real world, the characters,
the plots, the scenery, are merely local material being endowed with the air
of the period-piece by a pointless flow of time. Then the reader scrambles to
assert his own story and make order, his own crude art, again.
