430
PARTISAN REVIEW
imitates
The Education of Henry Adams
in its ironic third person
narration and its combination of self-ironizing autobiography
with idiosyncratic philosophizing about history. Both men par–
ticipate in the long American tradition of what Sacvan Bercovitch
has called the "jeremiad"-a Puritan sermon addressed to a
present crisis of "declension" in public morality that prophesizes
an imminent millennia
I
future through the moral dedication of
true believers. Mailer ends by evoking Lincoln's rhetoric and sa–
luting the civilly disobedient Quakers as America's redeemers.
In 1980, six books on the bestseller list of the
New York
Times
obscured the old distinctions between fiction and nonfic–
tion. What is alarming in this trend is the danger of corruption
in a facile blurring of boundaries. Alex Haley's
Roots
has been a
hugely popular success as a book and even more as a television
show, but how much of it is literary plagiarism, legitimate nov–
elizing, or reliable reporting is moot. Creators of such hybrids
take it for granted that we will not press them hard to be candid
about where they have fictionalized. There is fun and no harm in
this, of course, when it is merely a matter, for instance, of having
Sigmund Freud meet Sherlotk Holmes, who has by now also fic–
tionally met Dracula, Dr. Jekyll, Jack the Ripper, and even Pres–
ident Theodore Roosevelt, in various detective stories. But in
journalism hybrids are corruptible into lying, as in the recent re–
voked award of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism to a reporter whose
story turned out to be fiction.
Voracity of another sort characterizes much fashionable, se–
rious, contemporary fiction. A French critic has celebrated
American "postmodern metafiction" because its "schizoid struc–
ture" and "hallucinated subjectivity" tend to "the subversion
and the destruction ot the narrative form itself. " In short, Ameri–
can novelists like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon sound to
him like French structuralists and deconstructionists. Praising
Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom!
for its author's ambiguous and
agnostic attitude about the truth of the questions his narrative
generates, one critic calls on R. G. Collingwood's critical idealism,
with its emphasis on the historical imagination, as a philosoph–
ical basis for uncertainty. Yet Collingwood himself always knew
that the historian's "business is not to invent anything, it is
to
discover something." He even believed that a historian could
make an argument that "left nothing to caprice and admitted of
