The Names, and: Richard A (review)

116 the minnesota review REVIEWS Don DeLiIIo. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. 340 pp. $13.95 (cloth). Sol Yurick. Richard A. New York: Arbor House, 1981. 446 pp. $14.95 (cloth). These two novels by distinguished American writers underscore once again the spatial dilemma confronted by contemporary fiction in the "world system." That dilemma can be schematically described as the increasing incompatibility—or incommensurability—between individual experience, existential experience, as we go on looking for it in our individual biological bodies, and structural meaning, which can now ultimately derive only from the world system of multinational capitalism. This tension—which ought not too rapidly to be assimilated back to the old ideological opposition between the "individual" and "society"—has of course always been present in earlier periods, where, however, the social frame was nowhere near so vast, and was always somehow closer to individual perception. In the face-to-face situation of the village, the insertion of individual experience is achieved by way of the anecdote or the tale, the old-fashioned story. In the already more distant horizon of the industrial metropolis and the nation-state, the realistic novel has often been taken (e.g., by Lukács) as the classical moment of balance, in which the narrative of individual experience can still adequately map out larger social boundaries and institutions . In a later moment, particularly when the apparent unity and intelligibility of the nation-state will be modified (and in many cases violently limited) by the new international system ofimperialism itself, this earlier formal possiblity will begin to disintegrate, making way for that explosion of formal and narrative experiments we call modernism. In our own time, however—and the new slogan post-modernism may be taken as a symptom of this development—the older relations of imperialism and classical colonialism have been restructured into what must now be called the multinational or "world" system of late capitalism now grasped as a new stage in its own right. Here the principle of structural intelligibility is for the first time virtually completely invisible to the individual subjects whose lives it organizes: one may play with the terminology of the natural sciences, and suggest that the world system operates on a tonal or perceptual level beyond the capacity of the individual human body, or yet again, that it is a dimension of organization, in time and space, which is experientially as absent from our daily life as the ultimate laws of Einsteinian relativity are from our normal dealings with Newtonian gravity on this small planet. This is then the situation in which enormously gifted writers—who wish for whatever reason to preserve the novel as a living form—confront the paradox, that where they still build their narratives out of pieces and bleeding chunks of raw experience, these last are without meaning; and insofar as they venture into the area of socio-historical and economic explanation of what happens to people in our world, what comes out is abstract and nonnarrative . RichardA. and The Names are particularly enlightening in this respect, since they adopt what are not only antithetical solutions, but ones which may perhaps be emblematic of the two fundamental logical choices in the face of this dilemma: totalization by fìat, in a situation in which lived totalization is impossible; and life among the unlinked fragments of the same untotalizable world. I will call Yurick and DeLillo "epistemologica!" writers, in the sense that for both the central "problem" to be solved formally is this ineradicable tension between fragmented, private experience and the "scientific" explanation ofthe world. Both, in other words, eschew the facile and conventional ways of ignoring the problem and the tension: continuing to tell individual stories and destinies (boy meets girl, etc.) in a world of billions of living beings for whom those individual stories are surely no longer very significant ; or illustratively and "sociologically" offering this or that individual destiny as though it could still "represent" or be "typical" or "characteristic" of social laws in general. reviews 117 Yurick's "epistemological" bent would seem to have derived from his fascination with collective actions and conspiracies. But for the author of The Bag and The Warriors...