Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about ten years ago one of the major bores of American criticism. From the early 50’s well into the 60’s it was scarcely possible to get through a month without reading—as a rule in the Sunday book-review supplements or the editorial pages of Life—that the novel in this country was dying, was dead, was coming back from the dead, was being reincarnated in the mutant forms of a new journalism or a fictional nonfiction. Then, quite suddenly, the autopsical discussions stopped. And even though at the present time in the criticism of the other arts such problems as the desperate plight of the theater, the scarcity of talented new playwrights, the vacuity or vulgarity of current films, the faddishness of modern painting continue to be dissected with undiminished vigor, we very seldom hear anything more about the state of the novel, sick or well—presumably because we no longer care very much whether it lives or dies.
For those of us who have worked closely with contemporary fiction and may even be numbered among its more obsessive diagnosticians, an explanation for this rather curious development comes easily to mind, although a convincing explanation of the explanation may be enormously difficult to discover. Clearly, if public and critical interest in the novel has declined, it has done so in large part because the novel over the past decade has dramatically lost authority both as an art form and as an instrument for reflecting and educating public consciousness. We have long taken it for granted that the great innovative authority of the classic modern novel is now an entombed, even ossified, authority represented by a body of sacred writings worshipped for their ancient wisdom and their ability to evoke the spirit of a dead historical past. But what still seems surprising, no matter how long we have lived with the fact, is that novelists we continue to think of as very much alive and functioning contemporaries have been similarly institutionalized, as if they were already considered as passé as their great predecessors, and have come to be admired more for their artistry than for their power to excite our imaginations or deepen our understanding of the meaning of present-day experience. However gifted Bellow, Barth, Pynchon, Mailer, Roth, Heller, Updike, Hawkes, Gaddis, and our other important novelists may be, we somehow do not look to them for intellectual and imaginative leadership as at one time we looked to the major novelists of the 20’s and 30’s.
Nor, for that matter, do we regard them as beings who, because of the originality of their work, have fascination as personalities or are leading lives that might in various ways instruct us in the possibilities of freedom, adventure, or individual integrity. Except for the two or three mostly third-rate novelists whose talent for self-caricature and bitchery has endeared them to talk-show audiences that know nothing of their books, the best of our writers today are ignored by the popular media unless and until they are arrested for disturbing the peace or manage to win the Nobel Prize. It is inconceivable that there is a novelist among us at this time who would be met by reporters at Kennedy airport as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and even writers like Louis Bromfield and Pearl Buck, used regularly to be met when their ships arrived in New York from Europe.
It is also significant that the members of the current establishment of novelists are now all past forty-five and have produced very few highly talented descendants, even though they themselves had begun to appear with promising work in most cases by the time they were thirty. This would seem to suggest that the novel has not only lost authority but is failing, perhaps for just that reason, to attract the kind of new talent that might ultimately reconstitute its authority.
We may pass over the more obvious and clichéd reasons why these things are so: how artists of all kinds have lost celebrity status in a time when only regular media appearance can, however temporarily, confer such status; how the novel has declined in influence with the decline in the habit of serious reading and with the rise of the dictatorship now exercised by television over the limited powers of mass public attention. These are factors we may cite without engaging the more complex realities of the problem. It is much more to the point to suggest that the authority of the novel never has been, and probably never can be, viewed as separable from the nature and quality of the human experience which, at any historical moment, may form its central subject matter. It is even possible that the novel will be most deeply influential at those moments when it is able to explore areas of experience that are not yet completely familiar to the reading public, thus functioning in its classic role as literally a bringer of the news, a discoverer of what is indeed novel.
These moments will usually coincide with periods of profound social dislocation, such as the rise of the mercantile middle class out of the collapsing order of feudalism—a process in which the novel as we know it in fact began—or they may be typified by radical changes in manners and morals of the kind that tend to follow major wars. They may also occur during the emergence of ethnic, racial, regional, and sexual subcultures in which the initial struggle out of feudalism of the middle class is recapitulated in the struggle for freedom, acceptance, and personal autonomy of Jews, blacks, provincial Southerners or Midwesterners, women, or homosexuals—groups, in short, that have become newly conscious of themselves and the special nature of their minority or regional experiences.
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Such central social transformations have over the past century provided the American novel with a continuously replenishing supply of vital materials, and always their vitality has depended in very large measure on the factor of novelty, the opportunity afforded novelists by historical accident to express for the first time hitherto unknown or unexplored modes of feeling and being, new experiences that in some ultimate way were working to reshape the character of our national life and in the process were introducing fresh perspectives from which to envision the individual in some significantly altered relation to that life. These experiences will of course have been shared by some perhaps substantial part of the reading public. But they will not have been made understandable or imaginatively available to the public until recreated and evaluated in the work of an important novelist.
The history of the 20th-century novel in this country may in fact be described as an evolutionary development in which each successive generation of novelists has discovered and appropriated to its particular creative use one, or more, of the emerging social situations of its age, then has gradually—or in some cases very quickly—depleted it of its potential as imaginative material, in time, as a rule, with its absorption into the homogenizing system of the established national community. There seems always to be a moment when a nascent subculture, whether racial, ethnic, regional, or sexual, is, because of its newness or its bizarre character, a particularly fertile ground for the novel, just as there comes a moment when its materials will have grown familiar to the point of becoming unusable clichés and will lose authority to a more recently emerged subculture possessing newer and as yet unfamiliar materials.
This is a major reason why it is possible to speak of the stages in the growth of the American novel in terms of geographical locale and minority-group interest—and the process has repeatedly involved the conquest, consolidation, and finally the depletion and abandonment of new territories of social and imaginative experience. Beginning early in the 19th century and continuing through the years following World War II, we have had the New England novel of Hawthorne and Melville; the novel of the developing Western frontier of James Fenimore Cooper; the more deeply Western novel of Mark Twain; the international and New York novel of James and Wharton; the many works appearing after the turn of this century which dramatized the plight of the Midwestern and Southern adolescent struggling to escape the suffocations of the small town; other works which explored the usually destructive consequences of the adolescent’s escape—to New York, Long Island, Paris, and the south of France. Later, during the 30’s, there were the large numbers of novels having to do with the new Depression-created subculture of the economically dispossessed.
After the war the racial and ethnic novel, including especially the Jewish novel, came into authority as the Anglo-Saxon Midwestern experience ceased to be the typifying experience of most American writers. During that same period the Southern renaissance initiated by Faulkner reached maturity in the work of several writers who were among the last to derive their primary materials from geographical locale, materials which in their case were ultimately devitalized as a result of the proliferation of novels composed of self-parodistic Southernesque formulations. At the present time the best of our novelists seem, for reasons later to be discussed, to have turned away from the direct presentation of regional and subcultural experience, leaving the field largely to the newer women writers who, now that the homosexuals have had their day, are speaking for what may well be the sole remaining American subculture still capable of providing relatively fresh materials for the novel.
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An obsessive hunger for new experience and a disposition to seek it in the actualities of the social world rather than produce it imaginatively—these have been highly visible characteristics of our writers for as long as we have had a distinctively national literature. But what is perhaps less evident is how often their pursuit of novelty in material is joined with a preoccupation with the pursuit and exploration of novelty as a literary theme. If in the traditional European novel characters tend to move in an environment already discovered and subdued by law, class hierarchy, and established custom, experience for Americans is an entity actively sought as destination and quarry, a dynamic and elusive state of both being and perpetual becoming which needs to be tracked down, grappled with, and brought under the control of the will and imagination. By the same token, dramatic conflict in the European novel has classically been generated within the givens of the established culture. Hell is indeed other people and the institutions they have created to force individual needs into harmony with communal interests, while the resolution of conflict is most often attained through the achievement of some more or less satisfactory mediation between individual and community. So the European novel again and again comes to rest in serenity and reconciliation, reminding us that salvation may perhaps be found only in an enlightened and usually chastened realignment of personal desire with public necessity.
The American novel tends by contrast to remain in a state of uncompromised adversary motion. Its characters move on or walk out at the end rather than regain admission to the social fold. The thrust of our imagination is resolutely kinetic, and the driving impulse is to seek salvation in escape from community and the confrontation of unknown possibility. It is not surprising that we have come to endow the search for new experience with mystical and sacramental meaning. To leave behind the known and, because known, commonplace reality is to invest in the promise of finding an “elsewhere” that will provide a second chance for being and consciousness, a regeneration of sensibility in the discovery of the authentic sources of the self. Cooper’s intrepid and simple-minded frontiersmen, Melville’s seagoing pioneers, Hemingway’s seekers after the holy communion of precise language and true emotion, Fitzgerald’s oddly ascetic sentimentalists of wealth and glamor—all are fantasy projections of an essentially religious view of experience, a belief in the possibility of some form of beatific transcendence to be achieved through submersion in elemental nature, the exploration of instinctual truth, or the discovery of an earthly paradise of infinite richness and perfect beauty. It would seem that the experience of the frontier, along with its attendant myths founded on such ideas as that the corruptions of civilization can be left behind, that there exist inexhaustible territories of fresh challenge and adventure to be conquered, that the meaningful life is a continuous romantic pilgrimage into the virgin unknown, and that man is most noble as a pilgrim in the wilderness and closest to God when he is closest to nature—these have all obviously done much to program our psychic expectations just as they have helped to form a central thematic preoccupation of our novels.
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But there has also been a contrary impulse at work behind the American novelistic imagination, and it may well derive from what remains of the original function of the novel as a form, which was to provide critical and satirical commentary on the excesses of the medieval romance. For even as our novels have expressed, and often seemed to celebrate, our romantic fantasies and aspirations to transcendence, they have also served—as a rule through the indirection of irony, metaphor, and ambiguity—as stern moral monitors of them. If there was a strong mythic and mythologizing dimension to the frontier experience, there was also an even stronger dimension of practical reality, physical hardship, privation, and danger—the inescapable limitations imposed by the environment upon the flights of the pioneer imagination. The conquest of the wilderness may have depended upon the existence of the dream of an earthly paradise, but survival in the wilderness depended upon the development of a hardy and altogether disenchanted pragmatism. Americans, we know, have never been at ease with the schizophrenia thus induced in them, and many of our most important novels have recorded with powerful intensity the anguish and frustration it has caused.
From the first genuinely American fiction of Cooper through the fables of Vonnegut, the pattern has repeatedly been one in which romantic aspiration or a certain idealistic vision of reality is subjected to the test of experience and shown to be empty pretense or illusion, founded on false values or meretricious hopes rather than on premises which take into account the practical necessities and the frailties of the human condition. The Ur-figures are Cooper’s Leatherstocking and Melville’s Ahab, both of whom are men obsessed with an idea of godliness and personal purity and who pursue it in the conquest of, or escape into, the sanctity of nature. Leatherstocking is overtaken and finally destroyed by the evils of the civilization he was presumptuous and innocent enough to try to flee, while Ahab presumes beyond the limits of human power and is defeated by a force that is both natural and cosmic.
Twain and James were both champions of the natural moral sense, that innate power of knowing right from wrong which Thomas Jefferson believed to be part of the common property of all mankind. But both writers also knew that such a sense is a fragile weapon for survival in a world in which the universal possession of this sense is, in actual fact, proven again and again to be itself an illusion. In Twain’s case it is the adult world into which one day Huck and Tom, like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, will have to grow up. For James, the continuing metaphor is the society of Europe in which Isabel Archer’s and Lambert Strether’s trusting American ingenuousness is educated into a sullied comprehension of the nature of evil and the necessity for personal responsibility.
The emphasis in Fitzgerald is not dissimilar. Gatsby’s virginity of heart, oddly augmented by the illegality of his business enterprises, is despoiled by the greater, because morally lawless, power of the Buchanans’ carelessness and cynicism, their better understanding of the expedient ways of the world. In Faulkner, a society basing its vision of itself on certain assumptions about a half-mythic, half-actual heritage of honor and nobility is overcome by the barbarous, wholly pragmatic Snopeses and their ilk, even as it is eaten away from within by false pride, blood guilt, and decades of duplicity perpetrated in the name of honor.
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The list could be extended, but significantly enough, appropriate examples become scarcer as we approach closer to the present time. While it is true that the 20th century has been remarkable for the accelerating vengeance with which novelists throughout the world have carried on the process of demythifying experience and eviscerating illusions, it seems also to be true that at some point the dialectical balance radically shifted. For we now suffer from a surfeit of negation and an apparent failure to understand just which values have been negated, what were the illusions we once mistook for truth, and what, if any, remain to be exposed. In a time when there is much evidence to indicate that fresh areas of social experience for the novel’s exploration have sharply diminished in number, we must also confront the fact that the great demythifying function of the novel seems to have come to an end in a cultural situation in which there seems to be little of importance left to demythify and which has actually been engaged for years in a self-destructive process of demythifying itself. In almost every sector of human experience and endeavor—in politics, education, business, sexuality, marriage, the having and rearing of children—contemporary American society is itself performing the job once performed by our novelists, stripping away layers of idealistic assumption, hypocrisy, illusions of purpose, meaning, integrity, principle, and responsibility, and exposing the emptiness or the corruption or the insanity beneath.
This has of course profoundly affected the nature of life in America at the present time, hence, inevitably, the nature of the contemporary novel and our response to it. For if we once found pleasure, instruction, even perhaps a form of Aristotelian purgation of the emotions of pity and fear through seeing, in so many novels of the past, our idealistic aspirations subjected to the test of actuality and exposed as mistaken or illusory, we did so in part because aspiration in its conflict with actuality was endowed with virtue, even when affirmed in the face of hopeless odds. The urge for self-transcendence in the struggle to defend some abstract ideal of dignity, moral principle, or social responsibility was revealed as a response to some deep necessity within the human spirit, a hubristic challenge to the power of the gods in which defeat was finally the measure of the significance, even the tragic heroism, of that necessity.
Today, in most of the novels that, for artistic reasons, should be able to make a serious claim upon our attention, we find reflected a complex of conditions and responses of a radically different order. To the extent that they contain any realistic portrait of the actualities of the present time, they tend to dramatize not our hopes but the feelings of generalized frustration and disappointment so epidemic in present-day liberal culture, not our need for transcendence but the paranoid fears of that culture that some obscure force, some metaphysical CIA has robbed us of the means and the possibility and is bent on manipulating us in directions and for reasons we cannot understand and that have nothing to do with us personally. In fact, it is a characteristic feature of some of our best and most serious fiction that in it both the ideal and the reality of individual self-discovery and transcendence as central thematic preoccupations have been replaced by a dark fantasy in which prophecy and paranoia join to project a horror of universal conspiracy and mass apocalypse. At the center of that fantasy one discovers once again the classic modernist representation of the human condition: the dislocated self no longer sustained by the social structures and idealistic assumptions of the past, trapped in a demythologized and therefore demoralized present, dying a little more each day as the forces of entropy deepen and accelerate throughout the world.
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This is not a vision capable of giving us very much further instruction. Its meaning has been canceled by the cliché it has become, and it has lost its former adversary function: it is no longer a heretical corrective of the pieties behind our illusions. But it is, nonetheless, a reflection, however oblique and metaphorical, of a state of mind and condition of life we recognize as common to the present time, even as we also recognize that one of the most frustrating features of the present time is precisely that the vision of apocalypse, a relic of another age and so thoroughly devitalized by excessive literary use, should still have such pertinence to the contemporary liberal concept of existence. Yet there can be no question but that the conditions of which that vision was initially the radical expression have become more visible and seemingly more malevolent in our own age. We have, in fact, institutionalized all the famous old disaster syndromes and so assimilated them into our way of life and patterns of thought that disaster has become not only our central preoccupying experience but our principal fantasy of salvation. If religions of the past offered promise of some form of transcendental redemption, disaster holds out the possibility of infinite and deliriously horrible forms of damnation, the ultimate titillation to orgasm of world holocaust, which in our ultimate boredom is one of the very few experiences left that is likely to bring us to feeling.
We now take it for granted—and the fact creates around us a subliminal envelope of rehabilitating drama—that we inhabit a world in which violence of any and every kind can erupt anywhere and everywhere at any time with or without provocation or meaning. This is a world that some few of us experience every day, but for the rest of us it exists as an abstraction projected and often seemingly created by the reality-manufacturing and reality-fantasizing media of television and film. Our direct experience is usually of another kind of abstraction, an urban or suburban non-community in which we are perhaps most conscious of floating in disconnection between business and home, passing and being passed by strangers in the void. Home is the place of brief refuge from the void, where family offers a substitute for community even as house functions as a frontier stockade erected against the disorienting ambiguities of existence in non-community. Business or profession provides an illusion of connection with people whose only connection with us and with one another is coterminous activity within the same “facility” or “structure.” At intervals which have grown less and less frequent with the passage of time, the separately orbiting entities of business and home may, for ceremonial reasons, be momentarily joined, and strangers from the one will be imported into the other, given food and enough to drink to insure that they will not be able to notice that they have nothing to say to one another.
Anesthesia is the only possible means of coping with a situation in which nothing can be communicated among people for whom the terms and materials of communication, the shared histories and common assumptions of purpose and value, have ceased to exist. Yet such a situation is only the microcosmic form of the abstraction projected by the media, the vast unstructured and dehistorified macrocosm composed of large and portentous or trivial and meaningless happenings occurring in some remote elsewhere and enacted upon strangers or stranger-celebrities made recognizable by the regular appearance of their faces on the screen but who are known to us only because, and only so long as, they are there.
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The physical dislocation of the individual from direct relation to his social and public experience has its correlative in an ideological dislocation that has grown increasingly visible over the last ten or fifteen years. There has been a deepening and ever more obsessive preoccupation during this period with the nature and problems not so much of the individual life as of society as a whole—or put another way, the individual life transvaluated into a projection of and a vexation laid upon society as a whole. It is from society seen as a corporate entity that people now try to derive what sense they can of communal relationship and identity, and the effort has most often been made through declarations of allegiance to various political, sexual, racial, or ethnic groups, membership in which is based scarcely at all upon concrete experiences and shared backgrounds (as was the case with minority and subculture membership in the past) but rather upon problems that are conceived of in theoretical and statistical terms as being peculiar to a particular group. Thus, even as personal connection is sought through identification with a group, the group becomes a collective abstraction to which relationship cannot be directly achieved and, therefore, in which further abstraction is the inevitable result. If the loss of the older forms of community has projected us into a formless sociological void, our need to replace community with group membership has projected us even further into the void. For it causes us to see ourselves not as ourselves but as increments of such subcultural categories as female, homosexual, Chicano, or black, with a further erosion of our sense of the integrity and uniqueness of the individual self.
It follows from this that the currently obsessive quest for a preformulated “role” in some collective has replaced to a large degree the personal quest for a purpose in life and, not incidentally, is depriving the novel of one of its most vital traditional themes. For the search, in all its agony and great potential for destructive risk, that once went on within the precincts of the individual’s concrete struggle with his environment tends now to be viewed as a problem belonging to a general social category, a problem with which the individual cannot be expected to cope and, therefore, which is to be projected upon an unjust and oppressive society or politicized into an “issue” which the technocratic powers of legislative reform operating somewhere out there in the void will be required to engage.
There inevitably emerges a state of mind having as its base the belief that life in general is not an experience to be lived but a problem to be solved. The having of experience, from which one may or may not eventually derive certain personal answers, becomes a procedure for which methods of analysis and resolution have been scientifically formulated. This has led to a shift in the individual consciousness from a sense of being the subject of experience to a sense of being its object, so that one examines the experience of other objects in order to ease one’s own feeling of unreality at being seen as an object, as another laboratory specimen being acted upon rather than living actively. The displacement of instinct by technological method, with all that it contributes to a further deepening of the passive, dreamlike quality of personal existence, is one of the most deranging phenomena of contemporary life, and it is perhaps the most morbid expression of our desire to die out of the hazards and mistakes of personal existence and enter the nirvana of risk-free problem-manipulation where all difficulties are resolvable in a state of serenity which only death can approximate.
It may be paradoxical that this displacement appears to have increased rather than lightened the burden of narcissism that has so heavied the atmosphere of the present time. The individual has not been freed by the view that life is a problem to be solved by the right application of technological method. Rather, he has been forced to become obsessed with the technology of all his personal processes, to see them, as he sees himself and other people, as objects to be analyzed and evaluated for their correctness according to various behavioral measurements and sociological surveys. Since instinct or simply intelligence can no longer be trusted as a guide to feeling and conduct, since the precedent of the past is considered an inhibition from which we are struggling to escape, only technique is left, and it is of course in the area of sexual technique that our narcissistic preoccupations have become concentrated.
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Our attitude toward sex is necessarily ambivalent in this age when the old taboos that once restricted opportunity and performance have been replaced by freedoms that not only widen opportunity but seem almost militantly to demand perfection in the quality and frequency of performance. Through the application of proven technology we have at last achieved the mechanization of ecstasy, and through the scientifically programmed orgasm we have converted into a machine the one function of our bodies which until now has offered us salvation from the machine. Yet, happily, the process is still not quite complete, and the ambivalence in our attitude remains. On the one hand, sex for us is the last of the ultimately personal experiences to carry with it an ever-renewing freshness of sensation in a nerve-deadening world. On the other hand, it is what we have left of a possibility for transcendence, the discovery of new adventure, the conquest of a continuously reconquer-able frontier. As we have grown increasingly abstracted from relationship with our instinctual selves and with others, sex has become the one dependable mode by which the instinctual circuits can be reconnected that join us intimately with people but that once were at least partly extra-sexual in origin.
It is undoubtedly true that sex obsesses us today to the extent that opportunities for extra-sexual levels of relationship have died out, to the extent that, locked as we are inside our narcissism, we are forced to make up through our sexuality for the depletion of other socially interactive resources. But the result is not a humanization of our sexual impulse but its further mechanization. For the importance we necessarily must give to it is so great that we cannot take the risk of human fallibility but must seek, in technology, methods guaranteed to intensify our sexual pleasure to the point where it will compensate us for the loss of so many other pleasures. Thus, we seek in sex as close an approach to divine rapture as science can afford us, sex having become our substitute for religion as scientized sex has replaced nearly every form of human experience including the sexual.
There can be little surprise in the idea that the same forces that have caused us to reduce sex to a problem of methodological strategy have also helped to create our obsession with violence in all the conceivable degrees of its gory magnificence. If so many of the former avenues into emotional intensity are now blocked for us, and we have placed upon sex the burden of functioning as the principal source of intensity still available, then we are requiring sex to become an ultimate form of violence. The apocalpytic orgasm we seek in the hope that it will reconnect us with the cosmic circuits of feeling is the sexual equivalent of the apocalyptic thrill we seek through witnessing murder, rape, carnage, and the atomic devastation of cities. Both orgasm and violence are symbols of the psychic journey we hunger to make back to the primal reality where the plastic seals of our narcissism will at last be broken and the tyrannies of repression, the conniving will, and the correct technique overthrown by rapturous frenzies of unlimited sex and monumental ecstasies of unpunishable murders. Both are of course states of fantasy-fulfillment, the kind attainable only in the imagination, and both are voyeuristic in the sense that the satisfaction we find in violence comes from watching it, while our relation to the dream of supernal sexual enjoyment is determined by our preoccupation with watching our own sexual responses and in studying those of other people.
The final result of this interest is pornography, where violence and other people’s sexuality cohabit in precisely the state familiar to most of us as the prevailing condition of contemporary life—unfeeling detachment among human beings who are envisioned as things and to whom we cannot and need not relate except to use them as objects for the discharge of our narcissistic aggressions. But to make the pornographic interest acceptable to the general public it must first be sanctified by marriage to the pieties of science and romantic love and redirected away from self-indulgence toward the universally venerated goal of self-improvement. This has been admirably accomplished by the sexual how-to-do-it publishing industry which puts sex back where we can most comfortably confront it—under the rubric of popular uplift mechanics as patented and perfected by Jesus Christ, Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale.
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On a somewhat less, but not very much less, mechanical level, there are the large numbers of best-selling quasi-fictive confessional novels which have made a more direct appeal to the public imagination because they have to do with characters with whom one may be able to identify and not with clinical tables of erotogenic techniques and statistics. These novels have instructed us over the past several years in the mysteries of other people’s sexuality, a knowledge of which we hope will help illuminate our own, and we have been enlightened about, among other things, what it is like to be a male heterosexual, a male homosexual, a male rapist, a male masturbator, and a middle-aged male lover of little girls. But we are still in the first wave of hearing from women about the secrets of female sexuality, that very last frontier within the very last frontier of human erotic exploration. Our current high fascination with the literature on this subject is the result not simply of the voyeurism of men who were brought up assuming that women had no independent sexual appetites and are titillated to learn otherwise, but of the very strong interest among women themselves in discovering, through the experience of other women, something more than they were brought up to know about the nature and meaning and direction of their own appetites.
But the rapid rise to prominence of the novel cast in the form of the female sexual picaresque has the further significance that the journey of the picara from childhood innocence through defloration, to orgasm or failure of orgasm, to marriage and happiness or frustration and divorce is so structured that it raises vital questions that may represent the last assaults on illusion and idealism possible in this demythologizing time. For the preoccupation of the anti-heroine of this kind of novel is with self-definition against the adversary force of a society which has too closely confined her within roles created by other people’s efforts to do her self-defining for her. Thus, her search is finally not for the apocalyptic orgasm but for an understanding of whether or not she needs it and wants it, whether she needs a man to help her attain it, whether she needs marriage, household, and motherhood—all the standard and crucial questions to which we have looked to sexuality alone for an answer, only to find that the arena of discourse lies beyond sexuality and encompasses the whole dilemma of human personality and individuality, whether male or female.
For most men in our culture, at least up to this moment, the problem of self-definition may or may not have been directly and consciously engaged. But for those who have sought to create a function and a being against the grain of the official view of what the masculine role should be, the struggle has been, as a rule, an intensely private one. And since the possibilities open to men have always been more numerous, and deviations from the norm subtler, less heretical, and less generally threatening, the struggle has usually been carried forward with no more than a bearable amount of anxiety. But women face the difficulty that the issue of individual autonomy has in our time been propagandized into a collective social concern and militant activist cause. It thus becomes not only a personal problem but one bound round and round by skeins of public moral imperatives, tissues of self-righteous shoulds and oughts by which women as a corporate minority group have made programmatic the nature and expectations of liberated female existence.
To become separated from socially prescribed modes of being either through atrophy of connection with them or through active rebellion against them is one thing and oftentimes very traumatic. But to become thus separated and to carry in addition the weight of imperatives imposed from the outside by one’s peers is to risk becoming paralyzed in a state of chronic obsessiveness with one’s efforts at self-definition, to be lost in the void of narcissism in which the questions repeat over and over again on the turntable of conscience until they annihilate all possibility of an answer: Am I freeing myself or becoming imprisoned in my search for freedom? Am I freeing myself in ways deemed to be correct according to the feminist minority ethos? What am I freeing myself for and from? Am I freeing myself from all those things which in the past limited my freedom but gave me limits in which to define my function, only to find myself without a means of defining a function in a freedom at least theoretically without limits?
The female writers who have lately been concerned with the plight of their sex and sexuality—and they range over the spectrum of talent from Erica Jong and Gael Greene to Francine du Plessix Gray—have each been obligated in one way or another to confront this eventuality, and it is not surprising that the picaresque journey their books depict so often ends in the discovery that the state of freedom has become as oppressive a tyranny as the tyrannies left behind. Once again we confront the case of the woman abstracted from the received roles of the past coming to that familiar dead-end in which she is also abstracted from herself. Having accepted the corporate conceptions as to which actions represent self-liberation—the choice of career over marriage or single blessedness over double damnation—she becomes aware (or we, in reading her story, become aware) that she is trying to will her life to move in certain supposedly liberating directions, while her emotions remain refractory and unsatisfied. Thus, finally, her struggle for freedom is balked not only by the fact that the struggle has become itself a bondage but by the more formidable fact that in trying to find herself she can find nothing to which she is willing to give herself and in the giving achieve the meaning of her freedom.
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The self-victimized Stephanie of Fran-cine du Plessix Gray’s quite finely written novel, Lovers and Tyrants, is in some ways an instructive case in point. Gray is far too sophisticated a writer to allow her heroine to become merely one more megalomaniacal martyr shrieking out of the dank pit of selfness about the injustices attendant upon Being a Woman. Stephanie, in fact, is even equipped with one or two flaws of character which help her to engage our sympathies and which nearly succeed in qualifying her for membership in humanity. Yet she does illustrate what can happen when the effort to live in the service of an abstract idea of oneself as a social problem effectively neutralizes the power to act in the service of what humanity one has.
In this respect she also illustrates that development in contemporary American society whereby we have been largely freed of struggle with material adversity, of having to make our compromises with an unjust and imperfect world, only to arrive at a point where no injustice or imperfection can be tolerated. All life must now be brought before the Supreme Court, there to be tried on the issue of whether or not it is acceptable or relevant to one’s idea of personal destiny, freedom, and the realization of one’s full creative potential. The Chief Justice here is of course the imperiously imperial self, the sole reality and arbiter in the void of cultural dissociation, and this self must continuously insist upon what is rightfully due it from life, even as it steadfastly refuses to submit to life—presumably out of fear that in so doing its moral rectitude might be sullied or it might perhaps become so caught up in living that it will risk losing all grasp upon what life is supposed to mean.
The form best suited to the dramatic development of this dilemma is reverse Pirandello: the author or authorial surrogate in search of his or her true character out of the far more than six characters potentially able to provide liberation into ultimate freedom and creativity. On the most tawdry level the problem finds expression in the spectacle of adults of middle age and presumed intelligence assiduously taking courses in themselves, in learning how to live, in achieving “optimal self-actualization,” in “Being a Separate Person,” in “Self-Understanding II,” in how to win “The Struggle To Be Me”—these last being actual or approximate titles of courses offered at certain quite reputable adult-education establishments.
However, it needs scarcely to be said that Gray’s Stephanie is anything but tawdry. She is highly sophisticated, civilized, very bright and attractive, and she is only genteelly aware of the narcissistic force of her motivation. For her the burden of guilt is squarely on the shoulders of life, whose manifold frustrations and tyrannies consistently subvert her best efforts to discover and liberate the real Stephanie. Curiously enough, the chief obstacle life imposes between her and her unspecified destiny is love, which in her view is always an invasion of selfness and a persecuting force since it demands a reciprocation she cannot bring herself to make. In the course of her development, Stephanie becomes involved with a series of lover-tyrants, all of whom are left to languish in various degrees of unrequitedness. First, there is the wretched, parasitical governess of her childhood years in Paris, a woman who smothers her in so much sticky emotion and demands—but of course does not get—so much in return that she becomes a primary figure of guilt haunting Stephanie well into her adult life. Then there are the many men with whom she has affairs, each of them unworthy of her, exploitative of her, and threatening to her freedom because they also try to impose upon her the unreasonable requirement that she have some feeling for them. Her marriage to Paul, the silent, conservative, house-proud architect, promises to relieve her of having to meet this requirement. Paul is obtuse enough to love her without seeming to be conscious of whether or not she loves him back. But his very obtuseness, his totally uncritical acceptance of himself and her, proves to be the worst tyranny of all because it represents a denial of her reality as a person.
Finally (and whether this occurs in actuality or fantasy, Gray does not make clear), Stephanie, now middle-aged, takes up with a thoroughly repulsive young man who uses her quite openly as a substitute mother and a provider of luxuries. At the end of the novel Stephanie seems on the verge of getting rid of him and announces her decision to “live alone, or with others, for myself.” “I’ve done it again, kiddo,” she says. “I’ve done it better than ever, this time I’ve exorcised myself of one hell of a bunch of oppressors. . . . Here, at last, is a beginning.”
Thus, she throws off the chains of her victimization by others and is free at last to become—what? Surely, Gray cannot really mean what she seems to be saying in answer to this, or perhaps she is unaware of what she seems to be saying. For beneath the surfaces of Stephanie’s story and challenging the authority of her point-of-view, the materials of another, perhaps unintended but extremely interesting interpretation become visible. It would now appear that Stephanie has all along, at the behest of whatever unconscious motives, quite carefully selected people who will love her and give her the emotional security she needs without deserving to be loved by her in return. Thus, in a position of freedom within dependency she is able to devote her full energies to keeping alive the idea she has of herself as a woman who could fulfill herself if only she could get rid of these people and their tyrannical possessiveness.
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However, the evidence is clear that she needs them not only to give her security but to afford her an excuse for not fulfilling herself—fulfillment, when it does not involve specific ambition or the exercise of a particular talent, being in her case only a self-flattering abstraction providing her with the illusion that she is a person who, if she were not tyrannized, would be capable of some important achievement. At the end she appears to have gained an understanding of her situation and evidently does free herself of her “oppressors.” But this does not lead her to discover her purpose in life in the sense of identifying a career or a possible outlet for her creativity. Rather, she has discovered that she no longer needs the oppression of others to prevent her from achieving what she now quite accurately perceives to be her true purpose in life. She can now enter happily into a love affair with the one person who is worthy of her love and whose love she can return without having the feeling that she is being tyrannized. The idea of freedom and fulfillment has given way to the emotional fact of narcissistic entrapment. Stephanie is free to love herself in the manner to which she has always been accustomed, but with the difference that she will do so henceforward quite openly and guiltlessly.
It is unlikely that Gray intended the conclusion of the novel to be read in this way, for there is no edge of irony in her treatment of it. But if there is validity in such a reading, as I believe there is, then the implications would seem to enforce some of the observations I made earlier: that individual fulfillment in much of the new fiction concerning women is more an unspecified idea than the product of a clearly perceived program of action, and that there often remains a considerable separation between a woman’s determination to find fulfillment and her need to give herself emotionally—or even to seek involvements which will obstruct her efforts to find fulfillment. In Stephanie’s case, of course, the solution is love of self, a radical solution but given her character and the evidence of her narrative, perhaps the only logical one there is. When all relationships prove to be inadequate or stifling, when there is a strong urge for freedom without the support of a concrete purpose, all that remains is the imperial self cultivating its admirable virtues for its own limitless delectation.
