160
PARTISAN REVIEW
ultimate goal appears to be the automatization" of life; a "Quest, an
Investigation which attempts to bring the Plot to light"; and in
between the characters who in struggling "to solve the secret of the
Plot, ... struggle also to regain what the Plot has stolen from them."
Abreaction,
McConnell tells us, is the technical term for the comedian's
and paranoid's talent for raking upon themselves "the unpleasant
aspects of chaos." In
Gravity's Rainbow,
Pynchon describes the war as
"the Abreaction of the Lord of the Night." Pynchon takes upon
himself the insanity of his time in order to win through, as McConnell
wisely puts it, to an " earned sanity" that is " comic, reductive, a
rationality just this side of bedlam." McConnell considers Pynchon's
the most nightmarish of the novels treated here, but he overlooks the
oddly saving contrast made by Pynchon's youthful exuberance, the col–
lege humor really, of the first two novels,
V.
and
The Crying of Lot 49.
The rapid success of demanding and innovative novelists like
Barth and Pynchon, or of an obscure poet like Ashbery, shows thar an
audience brought up on the modernist classics has been taught
to
welcome innovation and difficulty.
It
is also a sign of the vitality of the
romantic and modernist tradition that the spirit of innovation has been
renewed once more, that we have seen since the sixties a revival of the
radical or avant-garde style-this has shown most spectacularly in the
way older writers like Lowell and Mailer have changed style-even if
the avant-garde style is no longer at odds with the public but just what
the public has been educated to long for. Modernism, as enfolded in
romanticism, seems
to
be a movement whose end is nowhere in sight.
ROBERT LANGBAUM
