Jocoserious or Without Qualities? : The (Hi)story of Recent American Literature

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 12, No. 3, Winter 1981 Jocoserious or WithoutQualities? The (Hi)storyof Recent American Literature Jennifer Bailey. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. London: The MacMillan Press Ltd.. 1979. 157 + ix pp. Warner Berthoff. A Literature Without Qualities American Writing Since IIJ45.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 204 + xii pp. James Lundquist. 1. D. Salinge,: New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979. 194+ ix pp. David Thorburn and Howard Eiland, eds. John Updike: A Collection of Critical Ess£~rs. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Inc .. 1979.222 + ix pp. Ga,y F. Waller Tel/us tel/as allabouter ... Notes and queries, tipbids and answers, the laugh, and the shout, the ards and downs. 1 Thus the blind seer, jocoserious Joyce, mocking our anxious searchings for significance in the writings of what, in his new book, Warner Berthoff calls an era ''when all personal being and the natural universe as well are felt to be threatened by vast conspiracies of degradation" (p. 86). The great modernists (Joyce, Beckett or, in Berthoffs narrative of our forefathers' deeds, Miller and Stevens) seem to stand in judgment not only on our world but upon our literature which, he argues, is·'without qualities." He is, of course, not alone in his puzzlement: even so enthusiastic a celebrant of postMODERNISM as Ihab Hassan or Jerome Klinkowitz would agree with Berthoff's remark that both ·'critical partisans and antagonists alike ... have felt compelled to raise the question" of whether what passes today for ''literature" "really belongs in the category ... as commonly understood" (p. 27). But as Hamlet replied, Ay, Madam it is common. American literature in the past thirty years or so has been-and to this extent Berthoffs argument is also unexceptional- the expression of a culture in common crisis, a crisis of understanding tumultuous ideas, events and (most important) the collec~ tive and individual feelings that cling inextricably to, motivate, distort and direct those ideas and events. And this literature is, inevitably, the articulation 414 Gwy F. Waller of that crisis. Even (perhaps especially) the most self-reflexive and would-be hermetic literary structures (Gass's heart of the heart of the country and even further inside) are creations of a responsiveness to an intensely and commonly felt sense of apocalypse. The structures of our discourse seem, perhaps necessarily, more than usually contradictory, disruptive and incomplete , and yet they are seemingly always surpassed by the disruptiveness of our lived experience. Philip Roth wrote in 1961that "the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."2 Nonetheless, fulfilling Joyce's mocking prophecy, we peer anxiously at epic and epode, fiction and fantasy, compositio.n and collage: Tellus tel/as allabouter... And so we ask: where do we look to discover the significant new relations in society? Who will tellas allabout what we may apprehend and yet not be able fully to articulate? What are the significant changes of our time that, while felt by members of our society, are not yet expressedperhaps not yet expressible, since we simply may not yet possess the means to express them, or, (more frustratingly) because of the difficulties of distribution , acceptance, even comprehension of their expression'? In the work of-random examples-Suckenick, Sapora, Oates, Olitsky, Bukowski, Baumbach, do we find, as Berthoff would maintain, at best ··a literature without qualities"? Or do we, on the contrary, find signs that such writers are articulating (perhaps unawares) something central to our culture's selfunderstanding which we, or many of us, are already living through or anticipating without, as yet, verbalizing? King Lew; The Tempest, MobyDick , Tropic of Cancer (its "combination of outrage and unconcern at the catastrophes of modern history ... symptomatic of a deepening crisis" in our civilization as Berthoff puts it [p. 169]) all provide paradigms of both the...