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by Vincent D. Balitas?
Some series are intended to be more than facile literary guides which, although subject to the problems brevity often gives rise to, seek to examine literary texts critically and to offer readers textual possibilities for further consideration. We get short books that are minimally formula writing, part-personal essay. In such a series as Methuen's Contemporary Writers we have concise studies containing bio- and bibliographical data, but also opportunities for a serious critic to shorten, summarize, and paraphrase as a means of discovering and/or inventing critical issues and ways to discuss them. Indeed, if a particular contributor is good—and general editors Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby have, for the most part, chosen wisely—an informed reader will learn much not only about, say Seamus Heaney's poems, but also about Blake Morrison's understanding of poetical and critical acts.
Fourteen titles in Methuen's series are in print, with four titles scheduled for 1984. In addition to those titles listed above, books on Roth, Larkin, Pinter, Roobbe-Grillet, Barthelm, and Greene are available, with Murdoch, Hughes, Doctorow, and Soyinka to follow. These names suggest the editors are establishing a canon of post-modernists. Indeed, each of the titles considered here suggests a definition for that slippery label, but the diversity of literary texts and critical perspectives defies anything more than a general agreement to disagree. This same diversity, however, enables readers to shape a workable approach to the complexities of Pynchon as well as to the more accessible Bellow.
The editors tell us they sought contributors "engaged with their subjects" and able to "provide a thorough acount of the author's work so far, a solid bibliography, a personal judgement . . . " Consider Jerome Klinkowitz's Kurt Vonnegut. Klinkowitz has previously written at length on Vonnegut, yet even though his analyses sound too pat, too familiar and comfortable with his subject, there is no one better on Vonnegut, or on innovative fiction.
The same cannot be said of Marc Chénetier's Richard Brautigan. Of the writers treated in this series, it is hard to think of one other than Brautigan whose claim to a major reputation could create dissenters. Chénetier must do all he can to reclaim Brautigan from those who consider him nothing more than a pop-culture phenomenon. However, even Chénetier, who reveals his enthusiasm for Brautigan, fails to advance his status. Whereas Klinkowitz asumes Vonnegut's secure reputation, Chénetier strains to prove, for example, that Brautigan's recent fictions represent advances in art and craft rather than, as others contend, their failure.
Then there is Malcom Bradbury's Bellow, who is seen as a modernist at odds with modernism. "Bellows works," Bradbury states, "are intensely contemporary and are firmly placed amid the directions, tendencies, and epistomologies that have shaped and then been amended in the novel of today." Bradbury's case is well-constructed, his reading of Bellow intelligent and careful. Unlike Lorna Sage, who seems quite uneasy with Doris Lessing, a writer whose work elicits everything from cult adoration to intense dislike and dismissal, Bradbury convinces us of Bellow's importance as a writer, and as an influence on post-modernist writing. Sage's readings are forced as she attempts to see Lessing as, among other things, a prophetess. While Saul Bellow is one of the series strongest offerings, Doris Lessing is one of the weakest. The fault is Sage's, not Lessing's.
Joe Orton's inclusion in Methuen's series, unlike Lessing's, might have raised some eybrows were it not for C. W. B. Bigsby's thoughtful discussion. Bigsby performs several critical operations to reveal Orton as an iconclastic, Dionysiac writer who created post-modern psychodramas, full of self-reflexiveness. In addition, Bigsby carefully interweaves biography and art to show that Orton was a master craftsman as well as what Richard Poirier calls a "performing self."
Peter Conradi's John Fowles and Tony Tanner's Thomas Pynchon are major statements on two very important writers. Fowles and Pynchon have never been known to feel bound by the traditionally defined limits of genre, never known to shy from expanding and exploiting those boundaries. The shifting, often hectic, erratic, hesitant texts the prolific Fowles and the vanished Pynchon produce are given challenging readings by Conradi and Tanner. In a sense, Conradi and Tanner let us eavesdrop on their challenges. We should take advantage of their efforts. Indeed, if one had time to read only two books in the series, these would be the wisest choices.
Finally, there is Blake Morrison's Seamus Heaney. Morrison attempts, somewhat successfully, to place Heaney's poems in a political context. Many poems become, on one level, statements concerned not only with "the Troubles," but also with the poet's own conflicting responses, personal and aesthetic, to them. In Heaney's work, there is indeed an argument with the self that contains the political sphere. As a Catholic born in the protestant North, and as an exile (self-imposed) now living in the Irish Republic, Heaney could not avoid Irish history knowing full well that politics is only one of Heaney's concerns, takes us through the poet's development from a Wordsworthian neo-Romantic through a period of Hughesian animistic poems to post-modern involvement with language and silence. We are shown how Heaney never made a sharp break from his early concerns, but rather amended and adapted what he felt important. Morrison is reserved in his consideration of Heaney's work; however, this volume is well worth reading.
Generally, then, Methuen's Contemporary Writers series is steps above similar publishing ventures.
College Literature? 11(3)
1984: 301-303
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