Novels That Mock
BITTNER, WILLIAM
Novels That Mock By William Bittner Contributor, "Saturday Review," N. Y. "Post" The work that parodies itself, or literary hoax, has a long tradition in American literature, but dour people are...
...The passages in The Anchor Review suggest a more sexy novel than the complete work actually is...
...In calling The Confidence Man a satire, I do not mean to suggest that it is the same kind of writing as Gulliver's Travels—even though that classic of satires made some pretty sharp fun of the popular and moralizing literature of its day...
...Our mores are shocked while our morals are mocked...
...The central character, as F. W. Dupee says, is "a thorough creep," with a taste for little girls...
...This question is not the puritanical cliche it seems at first to be...
...Novels That Mock By William Bittner Contributor, "Saturday Review," N. Y. "Post" The work that parodies itself, or literary hoax, has a long tradition in American literature, but dour people are still being fooled by it...
...Lolita is a book that is profound and serious in its intent, while it is at the same time a parody of a pornographic novel...
...Published in Paris after having been rejected by a slew of American publishers, it was printed in condensed form in the second issue of The Anchor Review...
...Lolita, his chief victim, is not innocent but seduces him as much as he does her, and leaves him after careful planning for another satyr...
...Some years ago Kenneth S. Lynn demonstrated, in a book called The Dream of Success, that the Horatio Alger stories molded the meaning of "success" for the generation that grew up reading them...
...He saves the girl he loves from a "fate worse than death," only to have her turn up in a peculiarly perverted house of prostitution...
...Science-fiction is beginning to seek meaning in our technological progress...
...but humor, satire, parody have always been effective in restoring perspective to our own eyes...
...It is a book of great power, and has been recognized as such...
...His first book, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is a comedy of delusions, but it is concerned only with pretension in art and love...
...His Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was questioned only for its veracity, even though it is obviously a symbolic novel and not a true story...
...Nor did Herman Melville consider fictional forms sacrosanct...
...The reader does not identify with him, but probes personality with him, and this, not the subject matter, produces the shock...
...We see ourselves through the character and not as the character...
...West was concerned with the effect: its shams have on the nation, while Mailer limited himself to the horrible effect being America's royalty has on the people of Hollywood...
...The most conservative of "businessman" novels is ambivalent about the effect material success has on a human being...
...The liberties he took with the form of the novel led to the high seriousness of Moby Dick, but his most delightful piece of satire, The Confidence Man, brought on a critical scolding that discouraged him from publishing another work until he was an old man...
...but in symbolizing America through Hollywood, its illusion factory...
...and it is obvious that much of the confusion even hardheaded businessmen experience in observing the postwar generation results from an unconscious identification, on the part of older people, with the Alger tradition...
...Although I doubt that comic books are responsible for juvenile delinquency, and I have no doubt that Sunday School papers inspire utterly no virtue in the young, popular entertainment has a decided, although subtle, effect on all of us...
...Even in fragmentary form, its unique characteristics show through...
...Gradually the influence of this and similar books is being felt in our popular culture...
...thus, instead of "willingly suspending disbelief" as in a conventional piece of fiction, we arrive at emotional impact through the use of the intellect...
...In A Cool Million he pointed out that a competitive society, fanatic to the point of calling successful rascality virtue and uncalculated honesty sin, is a perfect breeding ground for totalitarianism...
...Miss Lonelyhearts mocks the mythology of courtly love in its most sordid aspects at the same time that it plays the hardboiled newspaperman theme out of key...
...but his masterpiece is The Day of the Locust...
...Mailer has commented that the literary novel is taking on many of the details of pornography, while the sexy books that are turned out in Paris for the tourist trade are becoming more literary...
...Unfortunately, West did not live to produce his equivalent of The Confidence Man...
...They say, as it were: If this is what people choose to flex their minds on when their time is their own, what sort of nonsense must go through their heads the rest of the time...
...It contains every Alger mannerism, from stuffy diction to the hero's stopping the runaway carrying a rich girl to sure destruction...
...Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, may not be that novel, but it is the nearest thing to it we have yet...
...Both books have been grossly misunderstood by critics who believe, in spite of the entire history of American literature, that a novel should be judged on how faithfully it reflects actual life...
...Lolita is disturbing not because of sex details —there are very few—but because it analyzes...
...All the themes are present in the shorter version, but the cut passages play exquisite variations to mock and reveal the psychological quirks of the central character along with the oddities of society...
...but every episode turns out disastrously for the poor but honest boy...
...The worth of novels that treat the form of the novel frivolously is surely made evident in any comparison of this book with Norman Mailer's The Deer Park, a work written seriously on the same theme...
...Humbert Humbert, the main character, is an intelligent man aware that he is at the mercy of his perversity and astonishingly sensitive to the weaknesses of others...
...The best joshing the Horatio Alger-type fable ever got was A Cool Million, by Nathanael West...
...Edgar Allan Poe's first tales, intended as parodies, were praised for the qualities he intended to mock...
...The real genius of West, however, was his ability to make fun of more than one thing at a time...
...We are concerned here with literary satires, books that poke fun at the follies of men as expressed in the books they write and read for entertainment...
...Much detective fiction is concerned with the meaning of crime and the narrow line of distinction between the pursuer and the pursued, rather than making the Tory assumption that we are all "ins" at war with the "outs...
...and this is precisely what kept his work from being understood when it first appeared...
...Comparison of the freely-circulated cut version with the under-the-counter original edition demonstrates that Lolita is more parody than pornography...
...They feel that success and virtue are somehow related to each other, while the young see no connection between the two...
...Art as a mirror held up to life has little meaning today, for science provides much better mirrors...
...Rather than creating art for art's sake, these writers do it for our sake...
...Some day soon, he speculated, those two electrodes will come close enough together so that a spark will jump across —and the outcome will be a vitally new kind of novel...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 50
