Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction by Arthur M. Saltzman (review)

272Rocky Mountain Review ARTHUR M. SALTZMAN. Designs of Darkness in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1990. 153 p. The title of this book is misleading; it is not about "darkness," its subject is deconstruction. The contemporary American fiction Saltzman deals with is "metafiction" and "megafiction," work from writers like Barth, Coover, Barthelme, Pynchon, Hawkes, and other younger writers of "postmodern fiction." Throughout the book, when citing "current literature," "recent fiction," and "the contemporary novel," he is referring to them alone, as if they are the only people writing today. "At the core of this study," Saltzman tells us, "lies what now amounts to a tradition of insecurity about the communicative capacities of language. Gone is the conventional wisdom regarding our employment of language entrusted with defining us to ourselves and delivering ourselves reliably to others" (96). It's ironic that Saltzman himself uses language in his attempt to convince us that language is not to be trusted. I write realistic fiction, the very thing that Saltzman attacks in this study. His basic premise seems to be that "realistic" novels are lies, distortions, smug simplifications ofa chaotic and random universe, that language itselfis tainted by cultural prejudice and expectations. "Recent fiction," he says, contends that "the orderly straightforward transmission of meaning is no longer possible; in fact, it may no longer be a primary goal" (98). This thesis strikes me as the sort of idea a bright undergraduate might throw at me, then elbow a classmate and whisper, "I've got him now." Saltzman declares that the moments of self-realization, epiphany, and closure in realistic novels are "verbal mirages" (6) that exist only in the writer's imagination and craft. The dramatic structure of realistic novels, with their generating circumstance, rising action, climax, and resolution, are not reality. The writer just makes it up\ Saltzman applauds the metafiction writers and their unstructured works because they faithfully mirror the random world we live in. Through their work, "the realistic novel has been debunked for its naive presumptions regarding the reliable transmission of reality ..." (31). Debunked? A novel isn't "reality," it's art, fabrication, a combination of memory and imagination that, when done well, offers an emotional truth at least as valid as anything in the "real world." It seems to me that a piece of art, a novel, is like a cabin built in the wilderness during a midnight hurricane. You fight the winds, trying to keep your tools and two-by-fours from blowing away. Other people run past in the dark shouting, "Give it up, you fool. The monsters are coming." But ifyou're brave enough to keep at it, and lucky, you end up with shelter. Slam and bolt the door and you're safe for a while. It's never as good as you'd like, but it is shelter from chaos and despair. After you die, ifyou were as brave and honest as you knew how to be, your cabin remains, offering temporary safety to others who come by later. Then someone like Saltzman comes along on a sunny afternoon, tears it down, and declares, "It's nothing but a bunch of boards." But a cabin is more thanjust the sum of its parts, in the same way that Moby Dick is more than "just a bunch of words." Book Reviews273 Maybe I'm not the best person to review a book like this. In my opinion, any discussion of deconstruction and "metafiction" is frivolous. A waste of time. If, as Saltzman claims, language can't be trusted, if "all systems of organizing and selecting evidence are falsifications. . ." (30), then any meaningful discussion is impossible. The works of metafiction that Saltzman uses to illustrate his thesis are certainly clever, packed with puns and irony. They're like elaborate crossword puzzles, and Saltzman is very clever in the way he figures them out, but I think that art is much more important than crossword puzzles and cleverness. Let me give you an example. I was a soldier in Vietnam, and I became a monster. I enjoyed stalking human beings so I could kill them. That didn't bother me very much while I was...