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The Literature of Reduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
“I conspired to convince the McGraw-Hill Book Company that I was in communication with Howard Hughes, and in fact I was not.” With that it was over. Looking back, a brief fling for Clifford Irving: the whopping advance for an “autobiography” of Hughes, certain to become the book of the year; then the day-by-day disclosures on front pages and evening newscasts that it was all a hoax; the Time cover story (“Con Man of the Year”) with color portrait by Elmyr de Hory, the art-forger subject of living's prophetic book Fake!; the slide from media sight in favor of Nixon in China and politicians on the primary stump; finally the terse confession in Manhattan District Court. A very brief fling—though at the time, the late winter of 1972, the Hughes-Irving story seemed to run on endlessly, and of course isn't over yet. The legal tangle goes on and rumor is that Irving is coming out with a book about the other book—which, we now guess, might have been the point all along.
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References
1 As far as representative works go, an even better example might be Irving's rumored The Book About the Book, unfortunately (for Irving) already scooped by Hoax: The Inside Story of the Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving Affair, published by Viking and advertised as “This is The Book About That Book.” Note the narrowed distance between the hack style of book selling and the involuted aestheticism of some of the new criticism.
2 Barth, John, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in Klein, Marcus, ed., The American Novel Since World War II (New York: Fawcett, 1969), pp. 267–279Google Scholar.
3 From Robbe-Grillet's, AlainFor a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1965)Google Scholar, a basic manifesto of the new criticism.
4 The terms are Fowles', John, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” in McCormack, Thomas, ed., Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 160–175Google Scholar.
5 Gass, William H., Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Vintage, 1972)Google Scholar.
6 Tallman, Warren, “The Writing Life,” in Allen, Donald M. and Creeley, Robert, eds., New American Story (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 1–12Google Scholar.
7 Kostelanetz, Richard, “The American Short Story Today,” 12 from the Sixties (New York: Dell, 1967), pp. 9–21Google Scholar.
8 The writers who appear in the collection with Tallman's essay illustrate Roth's view as much as the notion that in new fiction writing is considered an end in itself. In a biographical notes and statements section one of them says that “Novels are about people, for people.” Another says he writes because of an “obsession for ‘framing’ life” and adds: “Art slows life down, injects meaning into it, orders the horrible, brutal chaos.” Very old-fashioned stuff.
9 Poirier, Richard, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.
10 The passage is quoted by Poirier as illustration of the constant antagonism between acts of performance and the thing performed—which is just my point. Poirier knows that the recognition of such tension is needed for a full under-standing of any literary work, but in emphasizing literary “doing” as an escape from the problems and pretensions of literary “meaning” he seems to me to frequently lose sight of it.
11 Although Mailer is a favorite of the new criticism he is hardly a persuasive example of many of its deepest concerns. As a novelist he is generally conventional both in technique and style and seemingly unconcerned with the exhaustion of old forms or the creation of a special language. His literary roots are directly and dramatically in life, as evidenced by his recent journalism, and he has none of the inventive and abstract aestheticism that usually attracts the new criticism. For Mailer's relation to an old and central tradition in American literature see Thomas Werge's essay in this collection.
12 Barth: “… for Beckett, at this point in his career, to cease to create altogether would be fairly meaningful: his crowning work, his ‘last word.’ ”
13 Podhoretz, Norman, “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision,” Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Noonday, 1964), pp. 179–204Google Scholar.
14 Gilman, Richard, The Confusion of Realms (New York: Random House, 1969)Google Scholar.
15 Trilling, Lionel, “Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious,” Commentary, 09, 1971, pp. 39–50Google Scholar.
16 Bellow, Saul, “The Sealed Treasure,” in Solotaroff, Theodore, ed., Writers and Issues (New York: Signet, 1969), pp. 214–219Google Scholar; O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners (New York: Noonday, 1969)Google Scholar.
17 Bellow, Saul, “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs,” Modern Occasions, I (Winter, 1971), 162–178Google Scholar; Murdoch, Iris, The New York Review of Books, 06 15, 1972, pp. 3–6Google Scholar; Epstein's, Leslie remarks appear in a symposium on the writer's situation, New American Review 10 (New York: Signet, 1970), pp. 204–208Google Scholar.
18 For an elaboration of this view and a general rejection of the new criticism see Rahv's, Philip caustic review of The Confusion of Realms, The New York Review of Books, 06 4, 1970, pp. 57–59Google Scholar. For views generally similar to this and to those of mine sketched above see, in the same publication, reviews of current fiction by John Weightman, June 1, 1972, pp. 6–10, and Roger Sale, May 4, 1972, pp. 3–6.
19 Bell, Daniel, “Sensibility in the 60's,” Commentary, 06, 1971, pp. 63–73Google Scholar.