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PARTISAN REVIEW
In a brilliant passage foreshadowing both Quentin Anderson's
The Impen'al Self
and Ernest Becker's profound discussion of modern
neurosis, narcissism, and the "Causa sui" project (in
The Denial of
Death),
Van Doren wrote that Hawthorne:
. . . merely knew that [his agel was wrong when it said with
Emerson that self-reliance is a sufficient virtue comprehending
all other virtues . . .. "The world has done its best to secure
repose without relinquishing evil." . . . And if evil in its extreme
forms makes men inhuman by isolating them from their broth–
ers, so does arrogance of spirit. The Transcendental brethren
worshipped solitude, which Hawthorne could see only as isola–
tion . His hell, like Dante's, was cold and solitary, a wilderness
where nothing blossomed but the will.
MICHAEL D. AESCHLIMAN
FOUR WRITERS
CIGARETTES. By Harry Mathews. Wiedenfeld
&
Nicolson. $17.95.
THE VOYEUR. By Alberto Moravia. Translated by Tim Parks.
Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $18.95 .
BELOVED. By Toni Morrison. Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
THE GOLDEN DROPLET. By Michel Tournier. Translated by Bar–
bara Wright. Doubleday. $16 .95.
The nightmarish interweaving of past and present, re–
called and imagined; the entanglement offamily; people's insatiable
attraction to an elusive and partial truth - these themes run through
a handful of novels whose differences, however obvious, are finally
less striking than their essential similarities. The differences tell us
something about the technique and temperament of the individual
novelist; the similarities are even more eloquently informative, both
about the art of fiction and about fiction's subject, human lives.
The novels' titles foreshadow discrepancies of style and tone.
Tournier chooses an amulet whose symbolism is discussed over and
over, and whose relation to his hero is both poetically appropriate
and abundantly clear. Mathews takes a common, fashionable,
harmful article of frequent use and uses it metaphorically, to some–
what obscure but very evocative effect. Moravia deploys an ambigu-
,
