The Power of the Guest: Stanley Elkin's Fiction

The Power ofthe Guest: Stanley Elkin's Fiction by Francine O. Hardaway* When I was a schoolgirl, my parents always used to ask me what I was reading. When, like most college students of my generation, I answered The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises, or Tender is the Night, my mjother used to say, "don't they ever give you anything happy to read?" Her attitude extended itself to movies. "I wouldn't go to see that," she would say of "The Bicycle Thief," or "The Seventh Seal," "It's too depressing. I've got enough problems at home." Secretly, I always thought mother was a Philistine and unique. But, teaching contemporary literature, I meet her attitude constantly. "Do we have to read all these depressing novels? Aren't there any optimistic writers?" And I know what my students are talking about. There isn't much conventional optimism in contemporary fiction. And why should there be? At the end of World War I, American writers began to see the world as a wasteland. Then came the great Depression, another war, Hiroshima, Cold War, Viet Nam War, and the omnipresent threat of universal destruction. In the rapid flow of great historical events, the power of the individual became progressively more uncertain. Any vestigial optimism about individual possibilities perished with the existentialists. What is left for an individual in an absurd universe? Before, when man was thought to have free will, he had many opportunities for heroism. After World War II, the alienated individual in his random universe had no meaningful alternatives. All choices were equally fruitless, rendering the entire notion of choice ironic. In an absurd universe, characterized by a vast discrepancy between what is humanly desired and what is humanly possible, choice comes to possess a certain absurdity of its own: because of the overall nature ofthe process in which they appear, all choices are futile choices and yet, at the same •Francine Hardaway got her Ph.D. from Syracuse University. She works in program development for Rio Salado Community College and teaches on the adjunct faculty at Arizona State University. Shealsoco-edits the Doublespeak Newsletter and writes for New Times Weekly. 234VOL. 32. NO. 4, 1978 Hardaway time, choice itself is necessary. Because man can neither accept nor resist the destructive nightmare to which he has wakened —to accept is inhuman, to resist impossible —whatever choices he makes are ironical.1 The vision of the existentialist produced the now-familiar literature of the 1950's and 1960's: the saga of the victim-hero, a man like Bellow's Asa Leventhal; the continuation ofthe wasteland motif in followers of Hemingway and Faulkner; the introduction of black humor into the work of younger novelists like Pynchon and Heller; the abandonment of the novel's social consciousness by formalists like Barth. But, most important, the existentialist vision separated the sheep from the goats. Writers who could not incorporate the notion of absurdity into their fiction died creatively, while those who survived were increasingly forced to squeeze a little happiness from the dry bones of post-wasteland man. Whatever substitute for optimism now prevails in contemporary fiction is built on the premise of an absurd universe. It isn't common eighteenth-century Enlightenment good cheer. It's an attitude like Camus': if we don't commit suicide, what else can we do to give life meaning? Thus, optimism must be redefined for readers ofthe contemporary novel as the triumph of hope over experience. No longer can we expect faith in the major philosophical systems ofthe West, with their built-in celebration of man's possibilities. Rather, we must make students aware of other grounds for hope within the narrower ranges of possibilities left to us by the existentialist vision. A whole new generation of novelists have grown up with the despair of our century, have assimilated it, and have transcended it through their own talent. As Ellison says in Invisible Man, it is as if "humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat." One of the novelists who redefines man's possibilities in the modern light is surely Stanley Elkin. Few writers are more...