"ALIEN ENCOUNTER: THOMAS BERGER’S NEIGHBORS AS A CRITIQUE OF EXISTENTIAL HUMANISM"

Those encounters which counteract themselves because they are organized, those encounters to which good will, busy-body behavior and canny desire for power tirelessly exhort us, are simply covers for spontaneous actions that have become impossible.

—Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)

The few scholarly critics to have written about Thomas Berger have placed him in various post-World War II literary movements or schools. Berger’s distinctive mode from Crazy in Berlin (1958) to his most recent novel, The Feud (1983), has been to parody well-established literary forms, including the western legend, Arthurian romance, detective-thriller, the war novel, local-color regionalism, sentimental romance, even the serial novel. Such formal variety and stylistic virtuosity as Berger’s are very difficult to categorize in terms of a unified, coherent oeuvre, even though such literary metamorphoses do seem to belong generally to the formal experimentation in the novel that characterized the surfiction of the 1970s. Max Schulz discusses Berger’s Little Big Man in relation to such experimental fabulists as Borges, Pynchon, and Coover; Alfred Kazin, Stanley Trachtenberg, and others compare Berger with John Barth.¹ Yet, Berger’s works seem especially resistant to such identifications with the literary avant-garde, if only because Berger’s own values seem to be traditional, often politically conservative, and philosophically pragmatic. In a review of Neighbors in the New Republic, Isa Kapp tags Berger "a magic realist," identifying him with the Latin American fictional mode of Borges and other early twentieth-century moderns such as Carpentier.² Indeed, Berger’s ironic mode, dependent as it often is on the discrepancy between his own mannered prose and the banalities of his characters, seems to fit well the category of Latin American Magic Realism, in which "the world and reality have a dream-like quality captured by the presentation of improbable juxtapositions in a style that is highly objective, precise, and deceptively simple."³

There are good reasons for not applying the term "Magic Realism" in any hasty manner to contemporary North American fiction— reasons based largely on the significant differences between Latin and North American social realities as well as their different literary

evolutions. On the other hand, it is fair to say that the philosophical assumptions of Magic Realism are essentially existentialist, much in the manner of the existential fiction produced in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Roth, Bellow, Heller, Malamud, Ellison, Mailer all wrote works in this period that stressed the discrepancy between public and private worlds, the alienation of the sensitive and self-conscious protagonist, and the absurdity of contemporary social and political reality. In many respects, it was this existential no-exit in post-War literary realism that prompted the literary experimentation of the late 1960s and decade of the 1970s. From among the existentialists, writers like Roth and Mailer radically retooled their fiction and tried out what appeared to be drastically new and avant-garde forms. Writers like John Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Hawkes, and other fabulists created their own self-referential worlds and repudiated the traditional claims of the novelist to represent reality. As different and conflicting as these two basic directions in post-War American fiction may then have appeared to be, both share the fundamentally outmoded values of what we might term "existential humanism." The imaginative "freedom" of the fabulist or surfictionist was claimed as a consequence of a "reality" constructed principally in the mind from the arbitrariness and contingency of the empirical world. Confronted with the "lie" of another man’s truth, the avant-garde writer romantically bid for his own palace of thought and art. Where the existential realist found contemporary man alienated, impotent, subordinate to powers he rarely understood, and thus condemned to an identity and life that were de facto inauthentic, the fabulist transformed such failure into self-conscious knowledge, dependence into playful rebellion, and alienation into the bravura of the isolato, the iconoclasm of the avant-garde genius. Both literary modes inclined to similar moral homilies, often repeating the popular saws that they had hoped to condemn or at least transform; art, love, care, communication self-awareness were various and yet strangely equivalent "cures" for the contemporary malaise. Such solutions all had one common feature: the honest confrontation of man’s essential predicament as an alienated, mortal, conscious creature driven by his elementary desire for being. Whether self-consciously playful or ruthlessly "realistic," such existentialist art claimed the visionary ability to see such truths even as the rest of the culture labored to bury this terrifying knowledge beneath the facades of order, respectability, and stable meaning.⁴

It is easy and even a bit unfair to treat the dominant existentialism

of the post-War period in such a cavalier, even flippant, manner, but my purpose is to demonstrate that such philosophical assumptions, remnants of early twentieth-century modernism, haunt the contemporary American writer just in proportion as they are recognized as shopworn, clichés, but still not overcome. Such, I think, is Berger’s relation to this existentialist heritage. At once contemptuous of all philosophical generalities and universals, Berger is also forced to recognize that such contempt belongs to the existentialist’s valorization of particularity over generality and that, before one knows it, his readers are muttering: "Existence precedes essence." The variety of Berger’s formal experiments belongs with the sort of imaginative and metamorphic powers that the existentialist identifies with authenticity or what Mailer’s Rojack considers sanity: "the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one’s mind."⁵ In this regard, the Reinhart series of novels is a good measure of the problem confronting Berger, because it consists of four novels written over nearly a quarter of a century—that quarter of a century from the mid-1950s to the 1980s in which the existential literary mode I have been describing was transformed from a rebellious rejection of bourgeois America to part of the middle-class’s very equipment for living in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Carlo Reinhart is at once a schlemiel and a survivor; his ability to survive has much to do with his gradual recognition of his anti-heroic humanity—a recognition that assumes positive value by the time he achieves the relatively confident and stable maturity of Reinhart’s Women (1981). The young Reinhart of Crazy in Berlin barely survives the psychic warfare governing human (and political) relations in a world where the sheer banality of existence seems defined by its unpredictability.⁶ The mature Reinhart may not be able to transcend the contingency of existence, but he has seen enough of an arbitrary world to have acquired a certain hard-won stoicism and pragmatic orderliness. Taken together, the four novels in the Reinhart series educate Carl out of the naïveté of his youth through the disillusionment and cynicism of his early manhood and the repeated failures of his early middle age (in both Reinhart in Love and Vital Parts) to the wise, even charitable, skepticism of his role in Reinhart’s Women. The culmination of such an existential education is Carlo’s discovery that the cultivation of a "genuine skill," such as cooking, provides the sort of tangible defense against the arbitrariness of existence that he had missed in his previous ventures in such abstractions as "real estate" and cryogenics. Cooking,

like writing, requires a certain stylization of the material (food or words), and it is that "stylization" that provides the cook and author with some validation of their existence in an otherwise utterly arbitrary and contingent world.

This attitude toward artistic representation as a defense against existential contingency is one that Berger makes quite explicit in discussions of his work. In his interview with Richard Schickel, on the occasion of the publication of Neighbors, Berger wrote: "I need some rest between novels, but I never take much, because real life is unbearable to me unless I can escape from it into fiction. An exception might be made if I could experience something remarkable in actuality, but I find that the older I get the less fecund becomes my non-literary fancy: I’ve either done it or I don’t want to."⁷ Russel Wren, Berger’s literate version of the Hammett-Chandler detective, employs deliberately mixed or florid metaphors "as a willed ruse to lure me away from panic—the fundamental purpose of most caprices of language, hence the American wisecrack."⁸ Like other existential humanists, Berger imagines his fictions to be defenses against those deceptions and distortions in our experience that are effected either by the sheer perversity of nature or the willful act of some other, more powerful "author": convention, culture, commerce. In his apparent deathbed letter to his son, Blame, in Vital Parts, Carlo writes: "The whole of life, as we know it, is a construct of mind, perhaps of language."⁹ In context, Carlo’s little dictum sounds treacherously like Harry’s banal philosophizing in Neighbors or Bob Sweet’s glib counsel in Vital Parts. Carlo’s appositive clause, "as we know it," makes his equation of life with "mind" or "language" a virtual tautology. Staring into the void that he has himself chosen, the existential hero, Carlo, counsels his alienated son. The comedy of Berger’s parody requires only that we recall Carlo’s "living-in-the-face-of-death" is his "choice" to have himself frozen by Bob Sweet and Dr. Streckfuss to publicize their Cryon Foundation. Despite the brilliance of such parodies, Berger’s novels do seem to lead us relentlessly to the very existential platitudes for which so many of the characters are mercilessly condemned. The artist’s understanding of the essential ideality of the world—its fabrication from minds and words—seems best used in Berger’s terms to construct an interpersonal space, in which a particular self and a concrete other may confront each other in terms of need as basic and human as the hunger or desire served by an exquisite meal or a delectable metaphor. Like Ford Maddox Ford, Berger imagines the satisfaction of hunger or of the desire for be-

ing to be measured more in terms of pleasure than use. Indeed, for his own philosophical purposes Berger deliberately confuses or conflates the Kantian distinction between appetitive and artistic desires, if only to argue that in modern consumer societies most biological functions have been subordinated to psychic needs.

The defense that art provides against the intrusions of a world of chance is an existential recourse that relies on the means of literary formalism. What Murray Krieger has termed the "existential basis of contextual criticism" helps explain this relationship, in which the apparent anti-formalism of existential philosophy indirectly approaches the aesthetic values of the New Criticism.¹⁰ For the New Critic, literary form achieves the resolution, balance, or synthesis of life’s contradictions that serves author and informed reader as a substitute for the coherent and stable being unavailable in ordinary experience. Describing his own writing as a form of creative dreaming, Berger writes: "I write each novel in a trance that is peculiar to each book alone. Hence when I am forced to awaken from it I am thrown into a horror of actuality from which I find no relief until I can enter another fantasy. Has not recent research into sleep established that if a mortal is inhibited from dreaming he will go mad? Perhaps written fiction has some similar efficacy in broad daylight. But I am much more interested in the treat than the treatment."¹¹ "Forced to awaken," "thrown into a horror of actuality," "no relief": these descriptions are characteristic of the modernist’s and existential humanist’s response to an unsatisfying reality, prompting that defensive gesture toward the fabrication of some simulated, artistic control.

Berger’s literary order and coherence are not explained simply by observing that his diction, grammar, and narrative tone contrast sharply with the clichés and idle chatter of his characters. Berger is not merely protecting his own narrative order, he is also purging those forces of disorder by the customary means of the satirist: parody, bombast, bathos, hyperbole, caricature. Satire achieves its end by estranging familiar and thus often unrecognized ills. Such estrangement is rarely, however, the dispassionate work of the cultural anatomist; more often, it betrays a certain fundamental fear on the part of the writer that he is particularly prone to the sins he would reform or exile. Like Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Joyce in Portrait, and Eliot in The Waste Land, Berger remains within a venerable modernist tradition when he attempts to define his own artistic order and function in terms of his denial or even refusal of all that so persistently and absurdly is. This sort

of denial—often associated with the discipline, even asceticism, of the modern artist—is an active sort of negation, a will to obliterate the actual and replace it with one’s own fiction, even as the artist recognizes the impossibility of sustaining such a beautiful illusion in the face of so many competing lies. It is worth adding that this sort of artistic will assumes its most explicitly vainglorious forms in the nearly literal efforts of Proust, Faulkner, and Joyce to substitute their multi-volume worlds (Combray, Yoknapatawpha, Dublin) for the ruins of the West. Such a will-to-power, of course, re-enacts the willful, narcissistic world that Berger so accurately satirizes in his fiction. What art would escape it all too often mimics in its own form and for its own ends.

In short, Berger often seems to be struggling to deny the hip psychology and popular existentialisms that by the 1960s sounded uncannily like his own, harder won understanding of the world. In Crazy in Berlin, Carlo begins to take control of his existence again when he recognizes his elementary relation to another human being, the Jewish double-agent, Nathan Schild; it is a recognition that Carlo makes only after Schild has been killed and after Carlo has killed in the vain effort to save Schild. Carlo’s knowledge lends itself all too easily to the jargon of the "existential psychoanalysis" popularized in the 1960s: "Existential thinking . . . finds its validation when, across the gulf of our idioms and styles, our mistakes, errings and perversities, we find in the other’s communication an experience of relationship established, lost, destroyed, or regained. We hope to share the experience of a relationship, but the only honest beginning, or even end, may be to share the experience of its absence."¹² This passage from R. D. Laing’s Politics of Experience might serve as an adequate commentary on the "wisdom" of Crazy in Berlin, even as it would do injustice to the complexity of Berger’s vision in that work, to say nothing of his technical virtuosity. Nevertheless, by the late 1960s, it is fair to say that such jargon threatened the basic philosophical and aesthetic values of many writers like Berger, whose work had first appeared with the bravura of the artistic rebel.

In its own way, Neighbors (1980) addresses this very problem and attempts to demonstrate how the internal logic of existentialism encourages such popularization. Stanley Trachtenberg has argued that one of the consequences of Berger’s comedy is that "the loss of coherence between various aspects of self comically fragments the notion of identity and thus fictionalizes the existential concept of authenticity as a shaping condition of it."¹³ If the self is multiple,

if existence precedes and informs essence, if "I" am nothing more than the sum of my actions and choices, then the very ideal of existential authenticity is already a function of the inauthentic. The customary existential response to this charge is that the "recognition" or "self-consciousness" of such inauthenticity is the highest form of authenticity or honesty. Yet, the Marxist critique of modernism generally indicts this claim for existential self-consciousness as just one more way in which the dominant ideology rationalizes its contradictions.¹⁴ By transforming the inauthenticity of a specific historical moment into a metaphysical condition, the existentialist claims a transcendent knowledge that unwittingly serves to conserve and perpetuate the existing order. Such an indictment of the existential notion of authenticity is, of course, indebted to such works in the critical Marxist tradition as Lukács’ "The Ideology of Modernism" and Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity. As Trent Schroyer summarizes Adorno’s argument: "His basic thesis is that after World War II [existentialism] became an ideological mystification of human domination—while pretending to be a critique of alienation."¹⁵ Indeed, the methodological procedures of phenomenology are transformed in the work of Jaspers and Heidegger into reified abstractions. Rather than making possible new and transvaluing approaches to existing cultural problems, phenomenology became a "philosophy" with its own stable concepts. The ‘jargon" of this philosophy achieves the same end as advertising slogans, popular clichés, and other degradations of language in contemporary life: "Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task and devaluates thought."¹⁶

In Neighbors, such jargon is embodied in Harry and Ramona, who change personalities with the same ease that they slip into different sets of verbal conventions. Nothing but surfaces, shaped only of the clichés and verbal chicanery of "high-tech" media culture, Harry and Ramona simulate the spontaneity, vitality, and metamorphic qualities often associated with the existential anti-hero. "Harry apparently never did the expected," Berger tells us in a narrative aside.¹⁷ This inconsistency, even contradictoriness, is finally what lures Earl Keese into the apparent adventure of the open road together with Harry and Ramona. Earl’s "fatal stroke" cuts this journey short and seems to mark symbolically the difference between the Keeses’ middle-class respectability and the shape-shifting lives—the pure "becoming"—of Harry and Ramona. Yet, the interest

of Berger’s narrative derives not from the tired scenario of the suburbanite waking to the nightmare of existential truth; rather, Neighbors holds the reader by means of the uncanny relationship between bourgeois stability and the contrived unpredictability of Harry and Ramona. In my judgment, this uncanny relation is analogous to the relation Berger finds between his own aesthetic values and the existential "jargon" so popular in the past two decades.¹⁸

Harry’s and Ramona’s relationship with the Keeses is properly "uncanny," in the technical Freudian sense of the term. The translation of "das Unheimliche" as "the uncanny" allows us to forget how intimately Freud associates the notion with home and hearth:

"Among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. . . . In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight."¹⁹ Freud explains this apparent paradox in terms that are basic to his understanding of the psychic (and literary) Double; the "uncanny" is, in fact, "nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression."²⁰ Throughout Neighbors, Harry and Ramona evoke a certain familiarity from the Keeses that seems to suggest their strangeness may be a consequence of the Keeses’ repression as much as it is a function of Harry’s and Ramona’s "alternative" lifestyle.

Up to a certain point, an existentialist reading of Neighbors accounts quite nicely for the "uncanny" relation Harry and Ramona have with the Keeses. Earl and Enid have taken "control" (one of Earl’s favorite words) of their lives only by disguising their essential alienation and the sheer contingency of their human situation. At home neither in the suburbs nor the city, the Keeses share the "homelessness" of Harry and Ramona. Like Twain’s middle class, the Keeses labor principally to disguise from themselves the fact of their own impotence and insignificance. In the midst of the farce that dominates the drama of Neighbors, there is a familiar narrative development: the progressive exposure of all the Keeses’ values as elaborate fictions with intricate genealogies disguising their imaginary origins. Halfway through the novel, Earl suddenly realizes that: "He had no idea of what [Enid] did all day" (N, p. 118); early in the novel, Berger notes: "For a number of years now Keese had observed his wife only by means of what she did . . . he saw the

actor only through the action" (N, p. 3). Earl’s memories of his daughter’s, Elaine’s, childhood rarely agree with her own; in general, his relation with Elaine is more a product of his imagination than of any recognizable historical evolution. Even before she has met Harry and Ramona, Elaine mimics their curious blend of affection and domination: "‘I just wanted to be cruel to you for a moment. . . . Just because you’re my very own dad. You’re mine, you belong to me, you’re my property’" (N, p. 108). Given the ease with which Harry and Ramona expose the hollowness of the Keeses’ values, the reader expects Berger to reveal the metaphysical truths of alienation, will-to-power as the law of human relations, and a world of unpredictable changes. Earl tries to conclude at one point, in an infamous echo: "Timing was all. A minute passes and the world is changed in every respect. The landscape out the window looks the same, but every atom of it is different" (N, p. 170).

In such an existentialist reading, however, the provocateur who exposes such inauthenticity is generally representative of the philosophical truth that characters like the Keeses initially refuse to acknowledge. Harry and Ramona are hardly exemplars of such authenticity; they themselves are constructed from the fragments of the Keeses’ world. Harry and Ramona represent the very contradictoriness of this particular suburban and Capitalist world; that contradictoriness has been rendered strange and "other" by means of the Keeses’ strategic repression. It returns in the form of the glib and changeable jargon of these two latter-day hipsters. Harry and Ramona are "really unreal," to echo a popular oxymoron of teenagers; their "reality" is precisely a function of the studied, designed unreality by which they appear to others. Berger has assessed Earl’s problem as his inability to "believe in his own reality."²¹ Earl is introduced in the novel in terms of his "strange malady or gift":

"Were Keese to accept the literal witness of his eyes, his life would have been of quite another character, perhaps catastrophic, for outlandish illusions were, if not habitual with him, then at least none too rare. . ." (N, pp. 1–2). Keese’s tendency to confuse perceptual and imaginary objects is one of the sources of Berger’s comedy in this novel, and this inclination helps relate that comedy to Berger’s serious themes (never far removed from the wit). Berger seems to be arguing that contemporary culture discourages the exercise of the imaginative faculty and encourages the sort of literalness ("seeing is believing") in thought and language that is the human equivalent of automation. Berger turns this somewhat familiar criticism of modern times in a new way, suggesting that the

repression of our imaginative capabilities allows the imagination to escape our control. Working with the logic of nightmare, the imagination produces strange epiphenomena that are, in fact, expressions of our own cultural schizophrenia. Berger takes a certain perverse pleasure in enumerating the curious twists of imagination that are everywhere evident in the advertising slogans, teen argot, and media clichés of contemporary life.

One of the functions of the imagination is the mediation of inner and outer worlds, and it is the sharp distinction maintained by Earl between public and private that provokes many of the absurd events in this novel.²² Earl is outraged to learn that Harry is cooking spaghetti in his kitchen after he has conned Earl out of $32.00 to pay for take-out food. In existential terms, Earl gets what he deserves: his distrust of Harry is a form of bad faith that is simply repaid in kind. In another sense, Earl is not so much "paid back" as responsible for having established their relationship in terms of basic economic exchanges. Earl is shocked at the idea of paying his "neighbor" to cook dinner, but he fails to recognize that all relations in this society are based on such payments. When Earl accuses Ramona of blackmailing him to keep quiet about what he has done to Harry’s car, she asks: "‘Wouldn’t you, if you had somebody cold?’" (N, p. 42). Even before he has met Harry and Ramona, Earl tells Enid: "‘We could probably get away with giving them no formal welcome whatever. It’s scarcely a true obligation’" (N, p. 1). What constitutes a "true obligation" in this society remains ambiguous, precisely because the "true" basis already involves a contradiction: a relation is determined by its exchange-value, which in "human" relations is already a denial of the "human" element. When Earl meets Harry on the latter’s lawn, Earl says ingratiatingly, even subserviently: "‘We’re on your property now. Now you’re the boss. You can make short work of me if I get out of line . . . you have the moral advantage and . . . I’m in a subordinate position . . . that gives you a tremendous edge’" (N, p. 144). It’s fair to say, even though we should be suspicious of all "origins" in such a novel, that Earl conceives of life and human relations in terms of basic master-servant relations and economic obligations long before Harry and Ramona arrive in the neighborhood. As early as the first page of the narrative, Earl and Enid agree that a "true obligation" would be "‘like giving food to a starving person,’" which is still part of the economic give-and-take on which the Keeses base their lives.

Critics of James’s The Turn of the Screw have often observed

how the Governess re-enacts each appearance of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel; this formal consistency in James’s narrative has strengthened the arguments in favor of the ghosts as objectifications of the Governess’ psychic anxieties. In an analogous way, most of the surprising acts of Harry and Ramona are foreshadowed by words, dreams, or acts of the Keeses, especially Earl. Ramona accuses Earl of "attempted rape," a charge later withdrawn as an apparent joke. Earl is thrilled by the brush of Ramona’s breasts as she first enters the house; only minutes after her arrival, Earl is attracted by the possibility of tricking his wife into staying home while he and Ramona dine at a fancy French restaurant. Ramona certainly exaggerates Earl’s idle fantasies when she accuses him of attempted rape, but her exaggeration works in the manner of every good nightmare or irrational fear. Earl is titillated by Ramona’s boldness and vulgarity throughout the narrative. She may seem to be leading him on, but the sites of their near-trysts are always uncannily familiar to Earl: the bedrooms in his house, his game room, his front porch, his kitchen. When he does visit Harry and Ramona’s house, Ramona is curiously absent—at Earl’s house with Enid and Elaine, we learn later.

Earl’s relations with Harry demonstrate a similar structure of prolepsis (the rhetorical trope of anticipation). When Earl finally sees Harry’s car in the morning light, he considers how he might restore peace: ‘Were his car retrieved . . . and not only restored in appearance but improved—e.g., a completely new coat of paint!—he would not come away empty-handed" (N, p. 159). After Harry has looked at his car, he says: "‘Earl, that car needs a paint job. There’s no two ways about it. Now, if you want to renege, O.K., I won’t sue you. I’ll make it a matter of honor. I’m saying what’s right’" (N, p. 188). Once again, Harry calls attention to the contradictions between moral and economic values in this culture, and what he says is merely an echo of Earl’s own idea of "settling up fairly" (in the current argot). Earl responds to Harry as if Harry were a cheap confidence-man, trying to beat Earl out of the money for the paint job. Earl is not just guilty of hypocrisy or of applying a double-standard in moral judgments; his behavior provokes, even "produces," the sort of exaggerated opportunism that Harry represents in this instance. In this regard, Earl and Harry are proper "neighbors," insofar as they share this uncanny relation. When Harry says to Earl, "‘Has it occurred to you that we are inevitably drawn back to a kitchen table whenever we have tried to talk all evening? Maybe that does suggest we’re in some basic sympathy, like members of

the same family?’" (N, p. 146), he may be making an observation shared by Berger.

Just what causes "Harry & Ramona" (Berger represents them this way to stress their "corporate" qualities) to materialize in the first place takes us beyond their associations with the hidden contradictions of the Keeses’ safe, middle-class existence. Their uncanniness reminds us that the bourgeoisie produces its own marginal "other," its own rebellious alternatives, in part to constrain, by means of a strategic anticipation, those forces that threaten revolution. In Marxist terms, one might argue that the petty master-servant contests of these suburbanites are means by which the dominant ideology displaces (and thus defuses) the political necessity of the class struggle. Berger is no Marxist, of course, so his own reaction to this cultural "artistry," this manipulation of self and other, is to use his own imaginative powers to transgress the existing order’s proper boundaries between order and chaos, coherence and contradiction. In Neighbors, Berger’s own artistic values seem to undergo some sort of revaluation; rather than offering the protective space of controlled language, art seems more closely identified with the provocations and harassments of such minor criminals as Harry and Ramona. Yet, Harry and Ramona are themselves part of the problem; they are merely the uncanny expressions of the incoherence, superficiality, and contradictoriness the culture has produced in its specific and historical will for truth. Berger’s art differs from the derivative and reactive "arts" of Harry and Ramona, insofar as Berger’s narrative represents the entire dialectic of such banality as Harry, Ramona, Earl, Enid, and Elaine collectively express. This dialectic has a particularly interesting consequence for the reader’s relation to the artistic act. In other novels by Berger, the text seems to direct the reader toward some agreement with the general skepticism of tone and formalism of method. In Neighbors, Berger seems more interested in constructing a dramatic situation involving apparent "choices," so that each reader will find his choices to be not only judgments of his values but also subversive of the formal ending of the novel.

Berger’s method in this novel is similar to Melville’s in The Confidence-Man, a work that has also attracted much in the way of an "existentialist" reputation and yet remained always beyond such readings. Melville’s work is a labyrinth of different stories, all of which repeat the same semiotic law: character, reader, writer (all one) unwittingly reveal their vanities and sins in the course of telling stories they intend will shore up their identities and reputations

Writing shares with culture the tendency to hide much for the sake of what it would express. Berger and Melville develop complex means of turning the intentions of their characters and their readers against themselves—that is, of turning those intentions "uncanny." The logic of such an aesthetic requires the artist to turn its method upon his own identity as "author." In Neighbors, Berger uses Earl and Harry to parody the idea of art as a defense against a threatening world and to relate that aesthetic to a glib existentialist jargon. In a sort of echo of Jay Gatsby, Earl cries desperately: "‘Everything can be put back where it belongs’" (N, p. 160). In the neighborhood of uncanny resemblances and uncontrolled acts, the very concept of ownership, as Earl understands it, has vanished. This very bourgeois cry for "order" is also a curious double for the modernist’s claim that the form of art might redeem the waste land of the age, might give "things" those proper "places —the neighborhood of being—where they "belong." Earl insists in the best tradition of the novel: "‘Sequences are all-important, too, .

and timing, in general’ "(N, p. 240). Yet, the disturbing loss of time for Earl during his hectic weekend ("a thrill a minute") reflects how Earl’s ordered time and proper sequences are only simulacra of any significant history.

In his interview with Richard Schickel, Berger notes: "Harry and Ramona would certainly seem to be outlaws in Keese’s scheme of things, but perhaps, taking the wider view, it is they who protect and conserve and perpetuate. Though a larger, younger and seemingly more ruthless man, Harry can usually, when the dust settles, be identified as Keese’s victim; and not even with the help of Eros can Ramona prevail for more than the odd moment."²³ On a certain level, these claims seem unproblematic; Earl himself makes the same observation more economically when he claims: "‘I’ve given more than I’ve got. I don’t mind admitting I’m proud of myself’" (N, p. 162). Only Berger’s claim that Harry and Ramona "protect and conserve and perpetuate" seems troubling, given their contempt for the middle-class world of the novel. There are, I propose, two senses in which such outlaws serve such conservational ends, both of which express the transformation of Berger’s aesthetic values in Neighbors. In one sense, their iconoclasm is borrowed from the sham spontaneity and directness of video-culture, which would have us believe the sheer immediacy of all that "is" and forget the complex weave of imagination, memory, and repression operating in every "event." Harry’s and Ramona’s existential spontaneity is a kind of family-room hipsterism that transforms the contradictions

of middle-class America into the "real and honest" spiritualism of some popular guru. As Adorno points out, the ‘jargon" of existentialism "ends in a miserable consolation: after all, one still remains what one is."²⁴ Culture’s "other," its eccentric margin, is often little more than the means by which it confirms its ideology and establishes its borders. In this sense, the artist may lead us to "metaphysical" visions that would blind us to the contradictions of our historical and social situations.

In another sense, Harry and Ramona may be turned ultimately to the task of artistic provocation, thus conserving those powers (of the imagination: subversion, skepticism, satire) that regenerate cultural vitality. As characters in Berger’s novel, Harry and Ramona hardly can be made to carry such responsibility; as "figures" for the uncanny, that method whereby each will to authority reveals its own unconscious, Harry and Ramona signal the power of art to question cultural values. Berger has acknowledged his debt to Kafka as the master "who taught me that at any moment banality might turn sinister."²⁵ Neighbors demonstrates the evil of banality as much as the banality of evil in its exposure of the contradictions governing the lives of the Keeses. Neighbors also shows how art can share, even justify, such banality and secret contradiction when it strives to preserve itself from the corruptions of the actual and the contradictions of the historical and political situation that gave rise to it. In a playful autobiographical aside, Berger notes:

"Incidentally, this narrative may have been a bit of wish-fulfillment. I wrote the book while living in Maine, where I had no next-door neighbors of any sort. Only in such a fashion is my work ever autobiographical."²⁶ One is tempted by such a disclosure to guess what sort of wish-fulfillment was involved: the desire to harass the neighbors or the need to be harassed? It is, of course, the dialectical—more properly, differential—relation of these two "alternatives" that constitutes the interest and novelty of Berger’s Neighbors. The reviewers in the popular press quickly chose sides:

Harry & Ramona or Earl Keese. In this case, to choose is to abuse. The uncanny doubles of this novel have their precedents in Berger’s earlier fiction, but in Neighbors these doubles serve to question the very values governing Berger’s art.

I shall not speculate concerning Berger’s intentions in all of this, aware as I am of his contempt for those who would second-guess him. On the evidence of Reinhart’s Women (1981), which appeared the year after Neighbors, I would have to conclude that Berger’s existentialist and formalist inclinations are still powerful. I might

qualify that judgment, however, by adding that Reinhart’s Women works with the momentum of the three previous Reinhart novels, which may have something to do with the easy or nonchalant existentialism of Carlo in this final volume. On the evidence of The Feud (1983) and its return to the doubles of Neighbors in the larger social context of the twin towns of Hornbeck and Millville, I would conclude that Berger has worked consciously and carefully in the past several years to cast aside his existential humanism for the sake of an art concerned with a new understanding of the interrelation of psychology, language, and the development of American social values.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

NOTES

    ¹Max Schulz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973), pp. 72–77; Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life (Boston: Little, Brown and co., 1973), p. 281; Stanley Trachtenberg, "Berger and Barth: The comedy of Decomposition," in Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 45–69.
    ²Isa Kapp, "Neighbors," New Republic, 26 April 1980, p. 34.
    ³Seymour Menton, "Jorge Luis Borges, Magic Realist," Hispanic Review, 50 (1982), 412.
    ⁴Richard Lehan’s A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973) studies the affinities between Continental existentialism and American fiction from such moderns as Hemingway and Faulkner to experimentalists like Pynchon and Barth.
    ⁵Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965), p. 150.
    ⁶"How strange could be the most banal of life’s sequences," Reinhart reflects in Reinhart’s Women (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1981), p. 58. Brooks Landon, "The Radical Americanist," Nation, 225 (1977), 153, argues that Berger "characteristically turns familiar means to strange ends." This is a distinctive feature of Berger’s style, but the passage above from Reinhart’s Women suggests that such "stylization" is for Berger a form of realism, much in the manner of those upsurges of the absurd one finds in classic works of existentialism by Sartre and Camus.
    ⁷Richard Schickel, "Interviewing Thomas Berger," The New York Times Book Review, 6 April 1980, p. 1. Further references in the Notes as "Schickel Interview."
    ⁸Who Is Teddy Villanova? (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1977), p. 21.
    ⁹Vital Parts (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 351.
   ¹⁰Krieger expands and develops his original observation (in The Tragic Vision) that existential philosophy and the New Criticism share fundamental affinities in "The Existential Basis of Contextual Criticism" (1966), reprinted in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971). It is important to note, however, that Krieger’s argument in this essay attempts to subordinate existentialism to the higher aims of that literature defined by the New Criticism. In historical terms, Krieger considers the relation between existentialism and the New Criticism to be principally a consequence

of their shared sources in Romantic Idealism; Krieger sees the contemporaneous development of existentialism and the New Criticism to show how those sources "persist . . . among very different temperaments that have made use of them" (p. 1230). My argument is that the two movements are inextricably related in their historical development and the purposes they served in conserving certain values of the dominant ideology.
    ¹¹Schickel Interview, p. 22.
    ¹²R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), p. 56.
    ¹³Trachtenberg, p. 60.
    ¹⁴5ee Georg Lukács, "The Ideology of Modernism," in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 21: "Man, thus conceived, is an ahistorical being. . . . There is not for him—and apparently not for his creator—any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon him or being acted upon by him . . . the hero is without personal history. He is ‘thrown-into-the-world’: meaninglessly, unfathomably. . . . The only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and always will be. The narrator, the examining subject, is in motion; the examined reality is static."
    ¹⁵Trent Schroyer, Foreword, to Theodor Adomo, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. xiii.
    ¹⁶Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 9.
    ¹⁷Neighbors (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1980), p. 24. Further references in the text as N.
   ¹⁸1n their haste to make some sort of "decision" about the "meaning" of Neighbors, reviewers of the novel often ended up mimicking the sort of jargon used by Harry and Ramona. Thomas Edwards, "Domestic Guerillas," New York Times Book Review, 6 April 1980, p. 23, claims that Earl is headed for "a new sense of self that can survive the loss of the people and things and styles his old self had seemed to require." Isa Kapp, op. cit., p. 36, insists: "we are being warned, in this . . . sparest of Berger’s fictions, that we cannot count on the better side of man." In several cases, reviewers quote Harry’s own exercises in banal philosophizing to make their serious points about the novel.
    ¹⁹Freud, "The ‘Uncanny,’" in On Creativity and the Unconscious, ed. Benjamin Nelson, trans. under the supervision of Joan Riviere (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1958), p. 129.
    ²⁰Ibid., p. 148.
    ²¹Schickel Interview, p. 21.
    ²²For Kant, the imagination makes possible the schematism of sensory data and the a priori categories of mind. For existentialists like Sartre and Camus, the imagination is a distinct mental faculty that facilitates our relation to the Other, whether such otherness be another person, the past, or the sensory world itself.
    ²³Schickel Interview, p. 21.
    ²⁴Adorno, pp. 115–116.
    ²⁵Schickel Interview, p. 21.
    ²⁶Ibid.