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PARTISAN REVIEW
9. Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension?
Yes () No ( )
10. What is it (twenty-five words or less)?
Where failure or alleged failure becomes obvious in the novel of
the sixties, the mood is comedy. Where it is suspended, the mood
becomes romance. The acid test for the success of the strategies in
question is whether our contemporary fabulists and mythotherapists
show any of their characters finally living and comfortably at home in
one of the alternative universes which have been conjured up for their
benefit. The test divides the inhabitants of today's. fictional world into
comic failures-who either celebrate, or lament over, a redetected
contingency-and comic reincarnations of the traditional romantic
hero (who forever lives in the fabulous lands where everything makes
sense). In the latter case-approached as closely as possible today in
Barth's
The Sot-Weed Factor
or in Brautigan's
In Watermelon Sugar–
the American novel has turned full circle to become again what
Richard Chase maintained it has been all along: romance, the genre of
suspended probability, miraculous endings, and exalted meanings.
Only, it is a romance which, ideally, is conscious of the way that lies
behind it and yet decides to proceed a little further on this way.
It is appropriate that the final comment on this development
should be reserved for a writer who clearly anticipated it. In his essay
"The Literature of Exhaustion " (1967) John Barth maintained that
contemporary fiction marked the stage of exhausted literary possibili–
ties. However, he did not interpret this stage as an irrevocable end but
as a new beginning. Fiction, he predicted, could easily draw from the
reservoir of its historically actualized possibilities as long as it pre–
served a sense of where it has been and where it is now. Far from being
a dead end, a literature of consciously recreated models of the past
would become an ironic comment on the history of its genres and
maybe on art as a whole. And thus it would deserve a praise similar to
the one Barth had for Pierre Menard, a character of Borges's who in a
singular act of historical and imaginative coincidence produced an
exact replica of several chapters of Cervantes's
Don Quixote.
"His
artistic victory...," Barth stated, "is that he confronts an intellectual
dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.
If
this corresponds to what mystics dO-'every moment leaping into the
infinite,' Kierkegaard says, 'and every moment leaping surely back into
the finite' -it's only one more aspect of that old analogy. In homelier
terms, it's a matter of every moment throwing out the bath water
without for a moment losing the baby."
