Response Paper on Mary McCarthy's The Oasis

Nickolas Herman

New York Intellectuals

October 27, 1995

In his essay "Art and Fortune," Lionel Trilling offers a plan intended to "help toward establishing the state of the soul in which the novel becomes possible" (Trilling 243). The view of mind and expressive subjectivity which he argues will re-enable the novel is a highly Freudian one, which involves the application of the creative will to the material of ideology and manners in order to create truly "living" art.

An extremely interesting test case for this view of what enables the novel is Mary McCarthy's The Oasis. Trilling sees in artistic production the self-constituting exercise of the will, and the creation of psychic identity. In his view, it is precisely the culture we create that establishes our selfhood. To bring this approach to bear on The Oasis results in a range of extremely problematic observations, only a few of which I will note here, that serve to undermine both the novel form and Trilling's proposal of the method that might salvage it.

McCarthy notes early on in her novella that the "Realist" faction centered around Will Taub would only enter the Utopian project if they could do so without fearing "the loss of that ideological supremacy which had become essential to their existence" (McCarthy 15). Clearly the process of self-construction was already set in certain patterns for the Realists, which definitely involved a particular sense of their role as intellectuals in society. Their capacity for self-definition was thus already extremely limited, and McCarthy makes clear that this limitation derives from personal and emotional factors and not only a philosophical "conviction."

Similarly, the "Purists" could hardly be thought of as possessing a tremendously effective creative will as they attempt to set the commune in motion as a beacon to the world. The petty squabbling of Preston and Katy Norell and the ineffectual musing MacDermott lapses into after the incident with the berry-pickers illustrate how the emotional imperfections of individuals always bring their abstract speculations into a crisis of competence when faced with actual social challenges.

What McCarthy seems to be saying is this: We don't march out into the world and create a mighty new world by exercising our restored creative will, thus constructing new selves and new subjectivity. Rather, for every self-described intellectual she portrays, it is the self--personal, idiosyncratic, stuck in relationships, carrying the baggage of inconsistencies--that always obtrudes upon our schemes to re-create the world according to some transcendent artificing principle. McCarthy mocks the seriousness and stultifying self-consciousness of the Utopians, almost pushing her device of suffocating and interminable narration beyond the point of strong effect into the realm of mannerism. The Utopians wish, much in line with Trilling's view of the creative soul, to re-make the world; but when they end up--as McCarthy implies they always must--re-making it only in their own image, what they end up with is only a deflating look in the mirror, and a profound sense of their own incapacity to create anything at all from which they could derive a sense of self-respect.

This curse of culture-creation as showing us our real selves intransigent of rationalization, rather than offering us a chance to make real an idealized self-image, is the retribution that dysfunctional and suppressed relationships exact upon every solipsistic concept of the self. The Realists argue that Joe the businessman doesn't belong in "an environment of neurosis" (McCarthy 55), implying that the utopians' maladjustment must paradoxically become the organizing principle of their community. This conveniently abstract word--"neurosis"--made Will Taub able to think that his questionable and conflicted personality was merely proof of his own modern sensibility. Resorting to "neurosis" was the only way to avoid the obvious fact that interacting with the awkward Joe presented Taub with a picture of himself so unpalatable that he had to try to kick Joe out.

McCarthy is not merely suggesting in a narrowly Freudian sense that individual neurosis must be eliminated before artists can practice the kind of culture-renewal that Trilling outlines. (Her novella is not schematically or systematically Freudian.) She is saying, on the contrary, that what "neurosis" as used in Utopia means is that the real obstacle to social adjustment--an inability to relate directly and healthily with people in actual situations--is camoflaged by an attenuated and abstract picturesque of the modern psyche. It is exactly this enfeebling, narcissistic, and self-deceiving abstraction that makes the Utopians so hypocritical and so incompetent in their actual relations with each other. McCarthy offers us, in contrast to the literary and social theory of the men of her mileu, the direct realities of human relationships; in the process she profoundly questions the validity of her male contemporaries' theory.

These questions apply not only to Trilling's optimistic concept of the novel, (which we must radically modify by adding the principle of the relational self as a limiting factor in the creative capacity of will), but the genre itself. The "oasis"--or Utopia--is a desert in fact, plagued by the same crisis of creativity and psyche that Eliot traced in "The Waste Land." What McCarthy does in The Oasis--the novella--is question all transcendental (or, one could say, "instrumental") techniques of human self-artifice, of which both the novel-as-genre and the Freudian creative will must in many ways be considered examples.

Though McCarthy can hardly be accused of plunging the dagger of spite (though that of Brutus is another matter) into Trilling's reconstituted hero, her work is nevertheless--if framed within a communicative literary paradigm--more a post-mortem of Modernism than an emergency surgery. She offers, much like those Moderns whose apparent irreconcilability with social goals the New York Intellectuals were trying so determinedly to overcome, not a clear plan of what will work but a primary, unique perspective on what an honest mind must conclude will not.