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PARTISAN REVIEW
dark air where everything happens." Itemisation of stories is pointless
but I would single out one called "Away in Night" which hinges on a
man's obsession with wolves which he is sure he can see encircling his
house. His dread mounts until he sees one enormous wolf leaping
through the door at him. The drop-off point comes when we suddenly
realise the man is blind. And "Our Golf Balls" is a very good example
of Jerry Bumpus' ability to release some of the mystery in the small
thing. It imagines the sensations of the golf ball "silently squealing its
terror through space" and what it must be like to be poised at the edge
of the final hole: "imagine looking into a hole, lit by tiny pinpoint
light bulbs, four inches wide and a mile deep.
If
you have succeeded in
this, next imagine you are a golf ball. (Densely round. Squint. Clench
your teeth.) Ready? Fall." And so we do.
When the great bourgeois novel began to hit its stride there was
much interest in what was called "the condition of England" question.
The preoccupation has shifted very much to the "condition of lan–
guage" problem. Thus, for example, the following declarations from
Statements:
"I have always thought that all life networks that enable
us
to
proceed wherever we are going, or prevent us from doing so, are
predicated on a system called language" (Walter Abish, author of
Alphabetical Africa).
"This country was made by people who were
busy losing a language. The result has been a kind of affectless,
musicless school English. One of the things going on is the struggle to
discover our language. Not style, use of language. Something about
energy, about knowing" (Eugene Wildman). Nothing very new in this,
to
be
sure, whether you care
to
think of Saussure or Mark Twain. But I
think the absolutely foreground position occupied by aspects of
language is a distinguishing feature of contemporary American fiction.
What makes it different from other contemporary fictions with a
similar preoccupation is the non theoretical nature of most American
probes into the mysteries and magics of the word. Where French writers
are usually cerebral American writers tend to be much more visceral.
The sheer physicality of much recent American writing is a notable
accompaniment to the focus on the word. The body, in many of its
most extreme postures, is seldom off the page; just as, the feeling goes,
the page is never off the body, since wherever we turn we are in text of
some kind or another. To take just one example from the material
under review, there is in
Statements
a very imaginative piece called
"Jean Lambert Tallien: A Brief Romance" by Frederic Tuten (from a
work in progress). This recounts the conventional biographical data
concerning the French Revolutionist but goes off into meditative
