Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

MATTER of interest for literary historians: have any recent American books made a stronger impression on the consciousness of people who read literature than The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published posthumously in 1965, and The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's chronicle of the Pentagon march published in 1968? Characteristically both books seem part and parcel of the civil turbulence of the past decade in American life. To offer speculations at this point in time about their ultimate place in literary history may seem the least bit precious. Yet to speak of them merely as books having a considerable civil and topical importance, or even as documents whose testimony has already imposed itself on our understanding of our time's singular history, is to do less than full justice to the literary achievement they embody. Calling them classics is not just pitchman's slang. I am simply persuaded that these two books do in fact have a central place in the continuing major history of American writing; that they are works of formed imaginative argument as powerfully developed and sustained as any we have had during the past quarter century; works organized and deepened by imaginative conceptions of the story to be told which have in the end not only a tough interior truthfulness but also, emerging as determining themes, a visionary force, a transforming authority. And what precisely do we mean by high literature if not work of this imaginative character? Both books are aggressively personal in focus and, like much current poetry, confessional in their tactics of statement. At the same time they are books which quite obviously first won a hearing, and are fixtures now in the paperback market, by reason of their topicality. The two authors in their different ways have been public men with a vengeance; and what they write about in these books are matters as central to the public life of our time as any we can think of-the black revolt, the fight against the Vietnam War, and all that each signifies in the moral