BOOKS
471
Wapshot novels, and so a less coherent notion of culture itself as evil.
Indeed, the "moral chain of being" that Cheever identifies in the
preface as one of the "constants" he means to find in life is most
profitably understood as a notion of the "chain" of "mores" that links
the moments of life to one another, and that provides whatever sense
life may hold for Cheever's characters. Rather than rail against the
"chain" as. though it represses nature and desire, Cheever prefers
instead to analyze the way the "chain" of culture produces what
thoughts and feelings we have. To characterize Cheever's project in this
way not only suggests his links with James and Hawthorne before him,
but also his less manifest links with postmodernist contemporaries like
Borges or Pynchon. Despite its realist premises, after all, Cheever's art,
too, is ill search of a means to represent, not life itself, but the
representations that structure and determine our experience of life. By
remaining at the same time resolute in its obligation to render that
experience in the sympathetic terms of the particular individual and
his relation to the quotidian, however, Cheever's fiction wins for itself
the additiona l distinction of maintaining two apparently antithetical
modes-one realist, one antirealist or surfictional-in an equilibrium
that would co llapse in less knowing hands.
PERRY MEISEL
POETRY AS DISCOURSE
A HISTORY OF MODERN POETRY.
By
David Perkins. Belknap Press.
$6.95.
"A work of art," wrote Ezra Pound, "need not contain any
statement of a political or of a social or of a philosophical conviction,
but it nearly always implies one." The same holds true for literary
histories. David Perkins's
History
is no nightmare, but it rests in a
certain methodological slumber from which readers may feel the need
to awaken. The volume's format uses the devices of past literary
