Danse Macabre

Oh dear God, we're off on another tangent. Well, never mind; I believe that what I started to say was simply that I think Fi

There are critics who take the strongest possible exception to this view of fiction, and I really believe that they are the critics who would feel vastly more comfortable if Moby-Dick were a doctoral thesis on cetology rather than an account of what happened on the Pequod 's final voyage. A doctoral thesis is what a million student papers have reduced this tale to, but the story still remains-"This is what happened to Ishmael." As story still remains in Macbeth, The Faerie Queen, Pride and Prejudice, Jude the Obscure, The Great Gatsby . . . and Jack Fi

All very fine. And yet I don't think Fi

Still, what we have here is a Jack Fi

The Body Snatchers is the only Fi

Perhaps one horror novel is all that Fi

There are no Plains of Leng here; no Cyclopean ruins under the earth; no shambling monsters in the subway tu

I have mentioned that Fi

Fi

We have spoken briefly of paranoia in Rosemary's Baby ; in The Body Snatchers , the paranoia becomes full, rounded, and complete. If we are all incipient paranoids-if we all take a quick glance down at ourselves when laughter erupts at the cocktail party, just to make sure we're zipped up and it isn't us they're laughing at-then I'd suggest that Fi

*At the same time Fi

Wilma, for instance, can present no proof that her Uncle Ira is no longer her Uncle Ira, but she impresses us with her strong conviction and with a deep, free-floating anxiety as pervasive as a migraine headache. Here is a kind of paranoid dream, as seamless and as perfect as anything out of a Paul Bowies novel or a Joyce Carol Oates tale of the unca

"Waiting till he'd get a haircut, and he finally did." Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. "There's a little scar on the back of Ira's neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can't see the scar," she whispered, "when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today-I've been waiting for this!-today he got a haircut-” I sat forward, suddenly excited. "And the scar's gone ? You mean-” "No!" she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. "It's there -the scar-exactly like Uncle Ira's!” So Fi

By putting us on Wilma's side from the start, Fi

Earlier on, I mentioned the idea that perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. To that we could add that paranoia may be the last defense of the overstrained mind. Much of the literature of the twentieth century, from such diverse sources as Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Albee, Thomas Hardy, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, has suggested that we live in an existential sort of world, a planless insane asylum where things just happen. IS GOD DEAD? asks the Time magazine cover in the waiting room of Rosemary Woodhouse's Satanic obstetrician. In such a world it is perfectly credible that a mental defective should sit on the upper floor of a little-used building, wearing a Hanes t-shirt, eating take-out chicken, and waiting to use his mail-order rifle to blow out the brains of an American president; perfectly possible that another mental defective should be able to stand around in a hotel kitchen a few years later waiting to do exactly the same thing to that defunct president's younger brother; perfectly understandable that nice American boys from Iowa and California and Delaware should have spent their tours in Vietnam collecting ears, many of them extremely tiny; that the world should begin to move once more toward the brink of an apocalyptic war because of the preachings of an eighty-year-old Moslem holy man who is probably foggy on what he had for breakfast by the time sunset rolls around.