Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction Since James Joyce by Craig Hansen Werner (review)

Studies in American Fiction243 Werner, Craig Hansen. Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction Since James Joyce. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1982. 237 pp. Cloth: $18.95. The paradox to which this somewhat diffuse study points rests in the uneasy separation in American fiction between social reality and the individual psyche. Beginning with Joyce's own contemporaries—William Faulkner and Richard Wright—and extending to such recent figures as Toni Morrison and Ronald Sukenick, Craig Werner finds a Joycean tradition in the wide range of American writers who have successfully combined a concern for the particularity of environment with the speculative nature of man's place within it. Influence, like motive, however, is hard to establish. To see in recent fiction the controlling impulse of the past is to deny history. Werner, accordingly, acknowledges that adaptations of Joyce's style are often at variance with the thematic balance in Joyce's own fiction. William Gass, for example, who, along with William Melvin Kelley, Werner finds most directly conscious of Joyce and who responds to a modernist ideal of artistic achievement , nonetheless looks to experience for an overriding spiritual meaning and questions the ability of art to embody it. Similarly, the novels of education and of the growth of the artist by Sylvia Plath or Jack Kerouac are critical of Joycean self-absorption as are the performative fictions of Norman Mailer and John Barth. In contrast to the impersonal God-like authorial figure Joyce envisioned, neither Mailer nor Barth hesitate to enter their work. Both, however, reflect doubt about the ability to impose encyclopedic fictions on reality let alone engage it other than through symbolic confrontation. In reaching for linkages between current writers and a Joycean model, Werner concentrates so singlemindedly on the synthesis of symbolic fiction and realistic detail that he finds it where it remains unrealized or overlooks it where it exists. The absence of this dialectic in Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father leads Werner to the judgment that Barthelme trivializes his subject matter into a simplistic allegory. In contrast, Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, both of whom are seen to follow Joyce in maintaining an ironic distance from their protagonists, struggle to defend the integrity of the individual perception. Where Ellison employed folk motifs in a shared desire with Joyce to help redeem their people, Bellow, Werner argues, searches for a moral position in the circumstances of everyday life. That is, of course, one possibility Bellow raises. Alternatively, however, he attempts to attain an inspired condition. In addressing these contradictions, Werner often contents himself with superficial resemblances, with allusions to Joyce, and with metaphors in place of analysis to establish correspondences. "If-then" constructions are frequently used more as a rhetorical device than to illustrate premise and logical consequence. As a result, there is little sense either of the development of Joyce's influence on a given writer or of the importance to that writer of Joyce's achievement. Concentrating on individual texts, which he matches against corresponding novels in the Joyce canon, Werner for the most part ignores the cultural context out of which they emerge. Perhaps as a consequence, he is least persuasive in tracing the Joycean tradition in such recent experimentalists as Thomas Pynchon, Barthelme, or Gilbert Sorrentino, who attempt to alter the reader's attitude toward the nature of fiction. In dealing with Pynchon, Werner notes the author's style and, in particular, his use of the second person to deny the possibility of arriving at any authoritative text. Pynchon invites the reader to complete the fictional meaning. In like manner, Sorrentino demonstrates the need to make it up as we go along. Improvisation, however, is a technique more apposite to Ellison than Joyce. The development of a fluid, shifting text, subject to digressive narration and focusing on the process of composition, flatly rejects rather than evolves from the Modernist 244Reviews emphasis on the autonomy of art, the deliberate craftsmanship of the author, and the attempt to arrive through fiction at a formal ordering of experience. Contemporary texts do not ironically juxtapose myth against setting; they parody such juxtaposition. They do not compete with or even attempt to displace reality; they absorb it. Rather than...