The Fabulators

0/5 ( ratings)

The post-realist, post-romantic novel, a far remove from the ordered fiction of the nineteenth century, has become by now a recognized part of the contemporary literary scene. Evocative and subjective, intricately structured rather than plotted, modern "fabulations"—a word reintroduced to the language by Professor Scholes—are often baffling to read, for they take flight from accepted "realistic" fictional concepts, dislocating time and space and purposely blurring lines between the actual and the artificial.

What should we expect of this new writing, whose practitioners include Nabokov, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, and a host of younger authors? What rewards await the reader within its seeming labyrinthine disorder? As he considers some of the novels that most completely display the vigor, range, and achievement of the "fabulators," Professor Scholes distinguishes the special attributes of their work and presents a strong case for the values of contemporary non-realistic fiction.

The works and authors he treats most extensively are the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; The Lime Twig. by John Hawkes; The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch; and Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth. In them Professor Scholes finds interwoven three strands of fictional development, reworked and transmuted into new literary modes. First, a revival of romance and rhetoric which, as in Durrell's tetralogy, is beginning once again to return narrative to the realm of art. Second, a form of violent satire rooted in the picaresque tradition but which, lacking moral precepts or certainty, emerges as "black humor," or the comedy of extremity. The novels of Hawkes, Southern, and Vonnegut typify this. Third, a strand of modern allegory which draws the reader into the world of the mind and poses as many questions as it answers—a chapter by chapter exegesis of Miss Murdoch's The Unicorn clarifies this witty and difficult tale.

Professor Scholes does not judge or evaluate but tries to give the reader the "literary equipment" needed to understand this new writing and to broaden and deepen its audience. The "full-scale fabulation," he avers, springs from the collision of myth and philosophy, and at its most ambitious offers a universal vision at once epic and comic. His analysis of Giles Goat-Boy explores the archetypal dimensions of such a vision, and brings to the fore correspondences between Barth and Joyce.