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PARTISAN REVIEW
The Rock
treats a period of intense religious conflict-in particular
between an emergent Islam and a beleaguered Christianity. In reading a
book about the seventh century that is at once history and fiction, the
reader inevitably speculates about its contemporary relevance.
It
seems
to me that the narrative tries to find within the turmoil of religious and
national conflict moments when "the forces of competition, prejudice
and hatred are in abeyance," when, that is, the sacred is conceived as a
presence beyond the exclusive possession of any community or commu–
nion. The competition of religions is all about rival claims to hallowed
ground-the very act of naming and of signifying implies mastery and
possession. Or the competition may be in rival claims about what con–
stitutes hallowed ground. Ka'b's rock has to contend with the increasing
passion of others for a different rock. (As it turns out, there is more than
one rock, the one in Jerusalem and the other in Mecca. Where should the
worshiper face? Can the rocks be reconciled?) Religion is at its best in its
respect for the unknown, its resistance to the naming and the possession
of it. Do I need to say more about
The Rock's
contemporary relevance
to our time? And I have in mind not only events in the Middle East.
Fiction has the virtue of not presuming to be the exclusive truth
about the rea lity it depicts. It is a medium tha t a ll ows various stories to
be told about the same events, and as I have already remarked it encour–
ages a diversity of points of view. It resists the temptation of idolatry.
Writers of fiction in their use of symbolism and metaphor are nominal–
ists, searchers after truth, yet provisional in their truth claims.
The Rock
nevertheless shares something of the ido later's passion for the Rock and
the Temple. Without that passion fiction would be deprived of its
beauty and conviction.
Eugene Goodheart
Pooh-Poohing the Postmodernists
POSTMODERN POOH. By Frederick Crews. North Point Press.
$22.00.
IN WHAT WAS SURELY A HAPPY COINCIDENCE, Frederick Crews's delicious
parody of freshman casebooks,
The Pooh Perplex
(1963), arrived during
the same year I began my graduate studies in English at the University of
Washington. I also served as a teaching assistant, which meant being
entrusted with several sections of freshman composition. Casebooks-on
