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PARTISAN REVIEW
nightmares into the nightmare of history. The idea if not new is
brilliantly objectified.
Yet for all his dogged research and literary gifts, his fantasy of
national convulsion is a waste of talent. Even serious parody cannot be
sustained for over 500 pages. The Rosenberg case plainly told is
horrific enough without the garnishing of an obscene pseudohistorical
Pageant of America.
In
The Public Burning,
the impious entertainer
crowds out the moralist. And whereas Coover the moralist sees all the
sins of America reflected in the mirror of the Media, Coover the
entertainer is unable to resist punning and quipping like mad and
indulging in the kinds of verbal gymnastics typical of the Luce
publications he is ostensibly scourging. He turns into a bore.
The example of Coover prompts the melancholy thought that
even angry oppositionists, like the musical purist who finds to his
disgust that he's been humming some noxious commercial jingle, are
infested by the culture they execrate. What is more, they seek reassur–
ance from it and inadvertently become collaborators. Gore Vidal once
wrote that American writers today are power obsessed and that in a
society without a "moral, political, and religious center," there is a
tremendous temptation " to fill in the void" with one's presence and to
achieve a "crude celebrity." To write a merely "excellent" novel,
intellectually and aesthetica lly satisfying, is of no consequence to
Demos, "indifferent to literature" and only reachable "by phenomena,
by superior pornographies, or meretriciously detailed accounts of the
way we live now."
As
an example, Vidal cited Norman Mailer, an
honorable artist, who finding his best work ignored by a thick-witted
public and "unduly eager for fame, " clowned for attention. This
judgment, made before
The Armies of the Night
appeared, is even
more applicable to a number of Mail er's less remarkable contemporar–
ies who in their quest of a larger readership turn mystagogues and
allow their ideas, in T.S. Eliot's disparaging words, " to run wild and
pasture in the emotions."
For such writers, history as conceived of in the recent "docudra–
mas" offers a splendid way to attract popular notice. We live at a time
when real events are hardly distinguishable from imaginary or
"pseudo" ones. Movies and TV films not only seem to provide the
scenarios for actua l deeds of violence and crime (terrorists hij ack a
plane carrying among other passengers a troop of beauty queens) but
also dictate the behavior of criminal and victim. Plots of everyday
dramas reported in the press grow increasingly improbable and melo–
dramatic. A rich Texan is believed to have arranged the execution of
