Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
become, a way of preventing new decisions by reference to past decisions made under different conditions and for different purposes. The reference to precedent was revealing rather than obstructive, precisely because the conditions and purposes had remained constant. Again, these precedents were not the individualized events we meet when we go back to the records of 1929 to find out what the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Johns vs. Johns. They were mythical precedents: they were group products—they were “right” because they took their form as a collective enterprise. They were selective and interpretative, the results of long revision at the hands of many people through many years. They were the “key” situations of the tribe that had evolved them, after all that could be forgotten had been forgotten and all that could not be forgotten had been made salient. They were not “facts,” as legalistic precedents are, but communal works of art. And when the individual understood his own role by reference to them (saying, “I am like Jacob,” or “This situation is like Leah’s”) he was being himself and a member of his group simultaneously. It is in this sense that Mann sets about to write of “people who do not know precisely who they are,” and “the phenomenon of open identity which accompanies that of imitation and succession.”
At least, whether one agrees with the suggestion or not, it is the feeling that one takes away with him from the reading of Mann’s latest piously ironic novel. What one can do with it, I do not know. The author has simplified and idealized his point of view by eliminating attempts at modern parallels. He is not concerned with strict modern-ancient correspondences like Joyce, who would chart the new equivalents to the old wanderings of Odysseus. In the altered ways of life which technology has brought, perhaps the situations are so radically changed from those earlier pecuniary or stock-breeding days that we must abandon the attempt to understand ourselves by reference to the precedents of myth. Again, the myths are bewilderingly intermingled: they are not living art, but art in a museum. Yet even for this state of affairs, perhaps, there is a mythical parallel—for is there not everywhere the legend of the Tower of Babel that arose to confound primitive men when they were elated by such ambitions as have in recent centuries elated us, and the vast projects of building were confused by a multitude of tongues quite as our specialized vocabularies continually threaten to confuse us?
“Without passion and guilt nothing could proceed.” If I chose the word “thorough” as the label that might most briefly characterize this book, it is because Joseph and His Brothers profoundly pursues the ramifications of this thought. The strange intermingling of kindness and cruelty which animates it could all, I believe, be shown to flow from this statement. The pervasive imagery of the pit, the phenomena of indentured service which he considers with insistence, his constant concern with the psychology of waiting, his almost fierce emphasis upon the cult of fertility, his remarks on the “upper and lower half of the sphere,” his deliberate affronts to the mechanistic concepts of causality, his ironic sympathy with opportunism, his somewhat awestruck pondering on the subject of recurrence—all this, I believe, could be shown to follow, directly or indirectly, from his care as to the part which the “problem of evil” plays in the civic, or historic process. An author in search of metaphor, he makes us feel that life itself is metaphorical.
I have probably said enough to suggest that another word might replace my adjective “thorough.” Mann’s new book is “mystical.” It brings us to the edge of things, to that fearful dropping-off place which, before the feat of Columbus, could be geographically imagined but has since usually been relegated solely to a disposition of the mind under duress, though it is brought back once more in the physical sense perhaps by the contemporary physicist’s suggestion that electronic activity is like a radiation from a non-existent core (as were it to well up from some other region like water quietly moving the sand at the bottom of a spring). It is an eschatological book, dealing with the “science of last things.” As such, it is disturbing, and will perhaps be rightly repudiated by happier fellows who prefer to shape their acts by contingencies alone. To live by contingencies alone is unquestionably the most comforting way to live—and contented ages have probably been those in which the concepts of duty were wholly of this specific sort, harvesting when the crops were ripe, shearing when the sheep were heavy, and coupling when the body felt the need of its counter-body. But the world of contingencies is now wholly in disarray. In our despicable economic structure, to do the things thus immediately required of us is too often to do despicable things. It is at such times, I imagine, that the question of duty naturally becomes more generalized, and attempts at defining the “ultimate vocation” seem most apropos. Mann’s new book is written in this spirit.
While Waiting
Those Who Perish. by Edward Dahlberg. The John Day Company
The New Republic, November 1934, 53
In Those Who Perish, Edward Dahlberg has written a novel that is forceful and poignant. A writer who approaches the contemporary disorders with a sensitiveness bordering on hyperesthesia, he is especially well equipped to picture the disintegration of individuals that is implicit in the disintegration of our economic structure. Dahlberg is adept at taking grotesque, harried and abysmal characters, and prodding them to become more and more themselves. The persons of his books whom he has selected for particular dislike, he pursues with a corrosive brand of comment which constantly crashes through their own concepts of their lives, like a heckler who breaks a debater’s sequence at every point by shouting out unwieldly questions. Dahlberg’s style is highly mannered, with a distinctiveness that can readily alienate whenever it ceases to attract. It builds an elaborate “superstructure” about his figures, somewhat as Cummings does in The Enormous Room, where he quickly gets from the object to a gigantesque projection—but in Dahlberg’s case this device seldom shows Cummings’ tendency toward pure playfulness; rather, it is pained and even vengeful. Dahlberg has obviously been under great strain in this ailing society, and in his writing he is settling a score.
In fluent and natural dialogue, Dahlberg gives us an important aspect of the grim interregnum that is now upon us, when the collapsing capitalist order can provide neither moral nor material security, and no alternative has been established. We see the grave unsettlement of the Jews in America, as the Nazi movement gains power and threatens to extend its doctrines to this country. We see them, when they would turn to communism as a solution, frightened by the thought that a frank allegiance to Marxism would make them members of two minorities instead of one, and this at our present stage could but multiply their risks. Dahlberg is not a sympathetic man: he tends to excoriation rather than to pity—and even while building up this dilemma he rigorously pursues the business men and Zionists who would tend toward a fascist compromise of their own instead of electing the communistic solution and welcoming a present danger in the interests of ultimate betterment. In this respect it is questionable whether his machinery of propaganda extends so far and includes so much as the needs of strategy may demand.
Stanley Burnshaw, writing on Dahlberg’s book in The New Masses, has noted that the earlier negativistic attitude exemplified in From Flushing to Calvary has here found its positive counterpart: Those Who Perish, he says, does not contain merely the rejection of capitalism, it contains also the positive election of communism. I can only say that, so far as I was concerned, this turn from the negation of capitalism to the affirmation of communism seemed but sketchily embodied. Dahlberg’s heroine, Regina Gordon, dies in a state of complete loneliness. A suicide, she swept out her arms toward “those who have the heart for tomorrow,” whereupon she “smoldered into yesterday.” The affirmation thus remains in the stage of the ideal, the prophetic, a vague and bewildered reaching out of hands toward the future as one sinks into oblivion. She salutes communism as a doctrine, but no character in this book has been pictured in connection with communism as an organization. As an isolated individual, Dahlberg’s heroine has “seen the light,” in much the old religious fashion of conversion. But to my mind the negation has not been imaginatively embodied as an affirmation until the artist gives us a positive picture of group cooperation and adjustment, shows us on the positive side what actual concrete solace and encouragement the Comrades can provide for one another. Meanwhile, we can proclaim Dahlberg as the possessor of a strong stylistic death-ray—and those characters upon whom his partisanship prompts him to train this ray wither before our very eyes.
Change