FANTASY, HISTORY AND THE NEW FICTION

...Besides the principals-an established WASP family, a widowed Jewish immigrant and his daughter, a Black piano player and his sweetheart- the Ragtime cast also includes e.g...

...Nevertheless the books show key similarities: dispensing with existential subtleties of character, both delineate a broadly inclusive social-epochal panorama...

...Now history is being rediscovered by the fantasists-an irony certainly...

...Whereas Mailer plunged into the thick of battle, Malamud stayed at a distance from events...

...and Oedipa's vindicated paranoia is a presage of the chills many of us were to feel when finding out about the ITT-CIA-Chile links, GM's and nos Nazi connections, Time's now forgotten pro-fascist sympathies, Nixon's near-police state...

...Marines...

...His interpolated 4000-year history of the Atonist-Jes Grew conflict takes up 30 pages, at the moment of highest suspense...

...The usual implication is that this is somehow bad, that Doctorow has done wrong, but there is really nothing new here- George Eliot and Tolstoy wrote about the 1820s some fifty years afterwards...

...Of the 1950s novelists, only Mailer showed a grasp of social history-as in The Naked and the Dead, with its overview of the major components (patrician, technician, plebian) of war politics, or in Barbary Shore, that artful evocation of frustrated Leftism...

...The Cold War author's pure subjectivity inevitably blinded him to those large historical factors- the rise of industrialism, feudal-liberal conflicts, the events of 1848-which Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and George Eliot had brought to bear on individual character...

...Vonnegut's is a nightmare-history for adolescents just discovering about hypocrisy, who like mocking village bigots, crackbrained militarists, and other easy targets, who stand unmoved by Thomas Mann or Les Carabiniers but are easily taken by Herman Hesse or Slaughterhouse Five...

...The domestic peace, the easily-won foreign wars, and the largely accidental prosperity reinforced the illusion that all social problems had been solved-that history was past...

...Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and E.L...

...Updike, despite his shortcomings, depicted quite vividly, in Rabbit Redux, the damage done to smalltown patriotism...

...Brain Damage intones the mental confusion widespread across the land, A Nation of Wheels tells an hilarious history of auto production, and The Rise of Capitalism poetically lampoons the historical contours as well as the daily tensions of monopoly-capitalist life...

...his famed one-liners-"So it goes," "Forget the bad times and remember the good ones"-are in the American cracker-barrel tradition...

...Not that these authors' works fall short simply because of "content...

...And where Pynchon's secret sects allude obliquely to real societies, Vonnegut's Tralfamadore and Bokononism serve as Disney-style escape worlds rather than as imaginative approaches to this one...

...Mother Night looks to be a perception of Nazis guided by Hannah Arendt, Cat's Cradle a satire on then-current topics such as mad scientists, Foreign Aid, Caribbean dictators and the Bomb...

...For just as empirical researchers studied microscopic problems of voting behavior, government procedure, or small-town sex-universalizing these phenomena, seldom noting the long-range historical determinants that allow for them-similarly the Cold War novelists dwelt on the finer-grained aspects of individual selfhood, seldom relating the Self to larger historical structures...

...Beginning with 1914 that secular faith loses credibility...

...This historical blind spot dominated 1950s thinking...

...The pattern for much 1950s fiction is set by Bellow's first book, Dangling Man (1942), in which a college graduate dawdles about, at odds with family and friends, indifferent to politics, oblivious to a world war of which we hear little but whose draft-call he awaits...

...The revival, however, was only partial, since the outer scaffold of the classic novels, at one time rich with social insights, was now taken up solely with a fashionable metaphysics of personal alienation, with correspondingly scant attention paid to links between Self and society...

...Trapped by their personality problems, Bellow's characters-even when married or attached-live mostly within themselves, indulging their private loneliness...

...faraway military skirmishes unexpectedly disturb middle-class rituals...

...Though Bellow-Updike decidedly lack the international status of Faulkner, Dos Passos or Hemingway (who were widely read and imitated abroad), they remain skilled if not great Uttirateurs...

...On the other band younger authors not tied to old orthodoxies have conjured up a nightmarish perception of history...

...In 1936, Allen Tate took issue with "the historical imagination," a mode of thought he adjudged restrictive and incomplete...

...Vonnegut is the counter-culture's writer, with all the good intentions and barren intellect that that rubric implies...

...Here in rough form are the moody subjectivism, the wispy apoliti-cism eventually to characterize the Malamuds, the Up-dikes-and the latter-day dangling men named Herzog, Tommy Wilhelm, Charlie Citrine...

...But then, perhaps only those minds with a taste for the shocking, the bizarre, the seemingly improbable, can fully encompass and recreate modern history in all its weird absurdity, only an hallucinatory imagination, capable of dreaming up mysterious forces or secret societies, as Pynchon and Reed do, can evoke the sinister capacity of contemporary life, the terrible news left out by the textbooks, the powers covertly in control...

...As everyone ritually remarks, Ragtime is history reconstructed through 1960s optics...

...for Doctorow brings back immigrant poverty, anti-labor violence and white Negrophobia with an unsettling clarity, a lofty assuredness that puts in doubt the bland textbook myths of a smooth and just national history, the received view of America as an intrinsically free and peaceable land, selflessly defending world freedoms...

...Henderson's Africans are merely quaint, and indeed Bellow's Africa, Mexico, Europe and Chicago are curiously lifeless, stage props devoid of sensory interest...

...save for an occasional anti-Communist aside, politics and society are notably absent, while few characters, outside of the alienated hero and his associates, radiate much presence...

...Mailer's case' sadly exemplifies the difficulty of transcending the subjec-tivist syndrome in the 1950s, when-Beat counter-cults aside-the personal-alienation mystique was the sole respectable subject matter for prose narrative...

...why, save for the Left-wing papers, the entire British press ganged up on Ragtime...

...This, no doubt, is why the New York Times Book Review staff sharply divided about listing Ragtime among the year's 10 best...

...Despite his up-to-date existentialism, the 1950s author believed too much in Cold War America, whereas existential nihilism and despair was an authentic, shared mood of protest in mid-century Europe...

...Ethnicity aside, however, the books share a basic likeness: both depict, via traditional Realism, the gradual isolation and, eventually, total alienation of a middle-class intellectual from everybody else...

...The novel's central conceit-World War II as the brainchild of a gigantic British-German-American technological combine-is perversely neat and partly factual, but the author's dense prose and pop jingles lack the long-range strength to carry so much material through to the chaotic finale...

...And when Updike (whose virtuoso prose gives a sheen to his intellectually impoverished world outlook) attempts in Couples, to take on an entire town, the subject is quite literally who's sleeping with whom...

...Inconceivable in periods of consensus, Ragtime is equally unthinkable in the 1930s, when the shared belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism was too strong...

...Doubtless the aerial destruction of Indochina helped Vonnegut externalize, in Slaughterhouse Five, his own terrifying experience amid the rubble of Dresden, and thereby suggest the horror and uselessness of strategic bombing-a notion which, before the Vietnam disaster, had seldom been granted a hearing...

...Whether these authors will continue to nourish a reawakened sense of history, or turn instead to "safer" subjects (as Barthelme appears to have done in his latest novel The Dead Father) for the apolitical 1970s, only the future can tell...

...American oppositionists have, in Ragtime, a brilliant, humane, historically sophisticated novel they can call their own, for it furnishes an imaginative model of the deeper conflicts as well as the subtler stratagems of our civilization...

...Foreign authors often express perplexity at the American 1950s' revival of old-fashioned Realism...

...Some ISO years ago, when history looked to be a steady socio-economic march forward ("progress"), novelists could assume and depict a comprehensible, if not always tolerable, development process-the then-acknowledged framework of liberal history...

...suburb named San Narciso, where Tristero operatives communicate in code...

...numerous authors have since sought alternatives in snob estheticism, crank feudalism or pop existentialism...

...With its lucid prose and spacious social vision Ragtime recalls that incomparably greater exemplar of fantastic history, One Hundred Years of Solitude...

...With Southern formalism triumphant on campuses, historical ignorance and amnesia became respectable mainstream attitudes...

...Mumbo Jumbo-intellectually energetic and visionary, touching in its details of character, and also weirdly funny-just misses being perfect because of Reed's occasional bouts of solemn overstatement...

...Unfortunately Pynchon's imagination went completely out of control in Gravity's Rainbow, with its 800 pages of outrageous fantasy and esoterica...

...Although in The Tenants he evokes the tensions dividing New York Blacks and Jews, the conflict-limited to two writers in an abandoned tenement-remains purely psychological, interpersonal, with scarce hints as to social forces...

...Fantasy dominates much of their work- perhaps suggesting that, in order to grasp 20th century issues, a sense of unreality is requisite...

...Even those on-the-road yarns dealing with individual flight- Rabbit, Run for example-are essentially the obverse side of cultish claustrophobia, alienation taken out of doors...

...In Barthelme's best fictions-produced at the height of Vietnam and the student Left-obscure social strife lingers menacingly in the background, upsetting the psyche...

...Pynchon's single fancy, albeit striking, never develops or resolves itself, and so fails to hold together such disparate strands-though each episode is in itself fascinating...

...Houdini, Dreiser, Emma Goldman, Stanford White, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington...

...The Indian Uprising and Report deals with fancied wars, though the conflicts seem bewildering (as Vietnam was to most Americans) rather than simply brutal...

...To orthodox intellectuals, history simply appeared to have come to an end...

...Even so, should the tide pull back after Ragtime, enough remarkable writing has come out to mark 1965-75 as a decade of special creative ferment...

...its studies in alienation are no match for those of Beckett, whose barebones artifacts, vivid and terrifyingly funny, are stripped of all narrative convention, their sad heroes adrift in a world of shifting names and shadows...

...But The Crying of Lot 49-Pynchon's best novel, brief, lucid and hallucinatory-does its job masterfully...

...Reed's feverish story-line-imaginatively reinforced with photos, posters, news dispatches, type-face changes and a bibliography -weaves in and about a large panorama that takes in the old cotton economy, anti-labor politics, the Tribune articles of Marx and Engels, the 1921 Boston police strike, and the 1929 debacle-plus (a kind of running subplot, and a fact largely ignored by history textbooks) the invasion and 20-year occupation of Haiti by the U.S...

...On the other hand 1960s radicalism successfully fuses fantasy with history in two major works: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime...

...the novels read like jokebooks or TV routines...

...History-real-life history, with riots, radicalism, and war-came back in the 1960s, taking ahistorical intellectuals by surprise, and eliciting varied responses from 1950s novelists...

...it reads like a far-fetched sermon, or worse, like a lifeless John Barth parody of one...

...Moreover, only in recent times could Doctorow's narrative have been dreamt up and realized...

...Via the sleuthing efforts of his heroine, Oedipa Mass, Pynchon unfolds a vast historical conspiracy named Tristero, an underground postal network that, through the Dutch wars, a gory Jacobean play, the French and Mexican revolutions, Bismarck's Germany, and the American Westward push, has defied numerous authorities, wending its way to an L.A...

...one can only hope that a still-not-dead Reaganism, an expanding Southern Rim, and a growingly vocal libertarian Right will not issue forth yet another Restoration of the social and literary values of the 19th century...

...and why conservatives like John Lukacs or Robert Alter pretty much dismissed the book...

...Malamud may in fact be our one consistently satisfying verbal artist...

...Contrasted with Barth-elme's coruscating, surprise-filled prose, Vbnnegut's rows of single-idea paragraphs and quickie chapters topped by a punch-line, are wit most facile...

...Updike's A Month of Sundays and Bellows' Hum-boldt's Gift may differ in subject matter-a WASP pastor's erotic escapades in one, a Jewish writer's old-age misadventures in the other...

...And Cold War novelists shared in the dominant ahistorical ethos, concentrating-in a prose equivalent to poetic explication-on the microscopic problems of Self, or at best on isolated inter-personal relations, with social context rendered as surface decor, the mere trappings of traditional fiction...

...Semi-serious social commentary, Marxist in flavor, bobs up here and there in City Life and Sadness, its standing slyly undercut by the consumer bric-a-brac (J & B Whisky, Chock Full o' Nuts, Chevrolets), as well as by the allusions to LeFebvre, Mann or Truffaut that flitter about in Barthelme's prose...

...Pynchon's novelette is a luminous parable of invisible social powers, a prose harbinger to Polanski's Chinatown...

...Thomas Pyncbon, by temperament an historical fantasist, conjured up in his first novel, V., a world nightmare stretching from 1900 and comprising North African intrigues, colonial atrocities, both World Wars, Maltese politics and Manhattan lumpen life-all darkly connected with an ubiquitous V., she (he, it) taking on countless V-shapes (Von Trotha, Victoria, Venezuela) across the globe...

...On the whole, however, Mumbo Jumbo, with its elaborate fantastic-historical machinery, is among the most impressive American novels to have appeared in some time...

...The famous and the obscure are thus rendered formally equal in Doctorow's narrative, their socio-economic differences nullified, the suggestion being that everyone-robber-baron or sex-goddess, writer, radical, or housemaid!-ultimately takes part in the major issues of his or her time...

...Malamud's settings-the claustrophobic rooming houses in The Magic Barrel, the decayed shop in The Assistant-have more sensorial immediacy than do Bel* low's urban slums, but they sum up all the more his the-matics of the isolated Self...

...Doctorow's turn-of-the-century social landscape is similarly vast...

...These novels, ultimately animated by 1960s radicalism, exemplify the American novel's rediscovery of the large arena, the supra-individual role of history...

...Reed's book is a rollickingly fanciful account of "Jes Grew," a generalized label referring to the Harding-Era rise of the Black Arts (music, dance, letters, thought) and their unmistakable imprint on White American life...

...Doctorow's Ragtime likewise manifest differences-Reed evokes the 1920s rise of the Afro-American arts and their clash with White elitism, while Doctorow portrays immigrants labor struggles, upward mobility, and lowbrow racism under Teddy Roosevelt...

...Significantly, the book stops at about 1918, the beginnings of that period, now ending, when our military interventions in Europe boosted the national economy, expanded our markets, and gave over to America not only world hegemony, but also that potent, persuasive image, here and abroad, of messianic liberator...

...The Nixon years seasoned many opposition intellectuals, reminded them that American society, though periodically shaken, remains and will long remain an awesome and powerful force-that, as Doctorow's final page shows, there are always patriots and parades...

...Still, something seems missing, incomplete in American 1950s fiction...

...Solipsism carries the day...

...unlike M&rquez and other authors, however, Doctorow remakes history without recourse to pure fantasy-though the fancied accounts of public figures and of Houdini's exploits could be interpreted as a kind of partial magic...

...regardless of social status, they become co-participants, knowingly or not, in such large dramas as the Peary expedition, the rise of assembly* line production, labor struggles, Black-White tensions, sex scandals, media exploitation, the growth of entertainment industries, upward and downward mobility, the co-optation of talented radicals and the domestic results of the Great War...

...Tate was then pleading for the antebellum South, but his distaste for history anticipates the 1950s, when the New Critics-those neo-feudal nostal-gists, hostile to social change-achieved virtual orthodoxy in literary thinking...

...The 1950s novelist saw Julien Sorel but not the Empire and Restoration, perceived not the forest but an isolated tree...

...A threat to vested cultural interests, Jes Grew is combated by (of all things) a modern incarnation of the Knights Templars as well as by the Aton-ist Path, a hard-line, humorless sect symbolizing the repressive, anti-sensual, Christian West...

...The separate lives of these divers characters intersect and intermingle, acting upon and affecting one another in unexpected ways...

...few literary critics, when venturing beyond the abstractions of pure poesy, were equipped to deal in specific cultural and historical terms about human experience...

...Impelled by the ferment of the 1960s, Vonnegut has ridden high on the fantastic-history wave...

...This grab-bag of commodities tossed in without apparent logic or discrimination, mirrors the over-ripe, anomic purposeless-ness of urban America, the sense that, despite gadgetry and "culture" in abundance, things aren't fitting together, people don't understand what's happening...

...Thanks to LBJ and Nixon, who brought to the surface those aspects of American history obscured by Cold War rhetoric, American fiction has effected a break from the subjectivist modes of thought and old-realist esthetics revived by the Cold War authors -and in the process has broadened its materials and recast its formal molds...

...When the latter novel took a critical drubbing, however, Mailer too pulled back from history, subsequently trying to fuse his dislocated radicalism with hipster existentialism and macho sexuality-irreconcilable entities that couldn't jell together, the result being those oddly skewed later fictions, flabby with coincidence...

...Bellow, by contrast, laid bare his conservatism in the crotchety Sammlefs Planet, wherein radicals are portrayed as rude barbarians, while the prime cause of 1960s turmoil-Vietnam-is, incredibly, not once mentioned...

...1970s sexuality notwithstanding, these novels' techniques and concerns stem ultimately from the climate of 1950s existentialism...

...Pynchon's erudition is breathtaking-how many American authors are familiar with Argentine poetry or medieval Dutch?- but undigested encyclopedism alone does not make good history, be it the academic or the fantastical kind...

...Barthelme's stories give shape to a radical sensibility peculiar to upper-middle-class American intellectuals, who accurately perceive the current crisis but lack the means of applying their insights-and whose cold comforts are learned wit, mock-cliche and tireless irony ("But I love my irony," says a voice in City Life...

...Bellow's and Malamud's formal Realism was, paradoxically, never real enough-its 19th century procedures ill-suited for conveying a modern sensibility, its manifest worlds too detailed, too recognizably "American" and not "alien" in nature...

...1950s novelists formed the poetic contingent in the Cold War, swam with the current of "end-of-ideology" academics who construed America's then-successes not as an historically conditioned-and thereby provisional-moment, but as a norm for all times...

...Or so it seems for the present...

...Vonnegut's novels are at times amusing, but their thin texture of regularly-spaced wisecracks wears poorly...

...But it is no accident that Cold War culture-essentially a Restoration of pre-New Deal, 19th century Liberalism- should also have brought back the 19th century novel...