Leopards in the Temple
Dear Tony,
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponYou're right about identity. Dickstein is a master of pithy summations, and one of his best is of Bellow's Herzog: "His whole life feels like a falling away from some authentic point of origin." Such a falling away is characteristic of this period as a whole; I was quite taken by Dickstein's comparison of the optimism of Depression-era culture to the paranoia (is that too strong a word?) of the Jetsons era. One of the virtues of this book that we haven't sung is its deep grounding in literature and the arts outside its period.
Viewed in this larger perspective, this book describes what used to be called the Death of the Novel. Dickstein puts matters euphemistically. He says that, facing competition from film, "fiction lost confidence in its power to encompass the world." He describes a "turn inward" among certain writers and a "shift to fable" among others. But he shows a major development of the time is a blurring of fiction and nonfiction—to the former's disadvantage. There had been romans à clef before, of course—but they were never (I can't think of any exceptions) a writer's masterworks, as the Zuckerman novels possibly are for Roth. And never before had the reading public had the sense that a man could devote his life to (and win the Nobel Prize for) basically riffing on his inner reflections, as Bellow did after Augie March and Henderson the Rain King.
I would have said before this "Book Club" that the shift from fiction to nonfiction was due to modernity's encroaching phoniness. The imagination is a natural function, and as the soul gets more and more entangled with busy-ness and technological gadgetry and other unnatural stuff, the imagination is bound to be less and less adequate to the job of soul maintenance. But I think you put it more smartly in saying, in effect, that the self is what's left over when social meaning vanishes. Either way, there's a paradox here—the "imagination" seems to flourish more in constriction (in one of Bernard Malamud's dank and cramped pickle shops, let us say) than in liberty (the "free" and "borderless" world of cyberspace, let us say). I'm not sure what I think about this. I'm not sure I want to think about this.
But I do wonder what it means psychologically. One of the shoes that doesn't drop in this book is the Freudian one. A striking aspect of the culture of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, of course, is its obsession with psychoanalysis—not just "the mind," or psychology, but real Freudian psychoanalysis—at every level of society. Any typist or truck driver was capable of boring passersby, or traumatizing offspring, with discussions of penis envy and castration anxiety and the like. Dickstein goes even further than that, describing his authors as "children of the Freudian century." [Ital mine.] He says Freud provided the secular equivalent of a sense of sin and evil.
But he never gets around to explaining why, and I rather wish he had. I've always thought the most lamentable development of the postwar authors' fascination with the "unconscious" was the way New Critics and the Literary Novel Industry colluded to create a warped idea of fiction. There was a kind of phony-unconscious theory of literature, in which reading the classics amounted to little more than decoding surface stories for the roiling Freudian imagery beneath. Most of my high-school English teachers subscribed to this method. Few were the classmates (unsurprisingly enough) whose novel-reading inclinations survived adolescence.
I'm glad yours did, though. It's a pleasure reading books with you. The Novel won't die on your watch.
Best,
Chris
News of the World Hush-Money Scandal: How Much Did Rupert Murdoch Know?
Obama's Nominee for NIH Chief Is an Evangelical Christian. And That's OK.
It's Way Too Soon To Call the Stimulus a Failure
I'm Having a Dinner To Celebrate My Divorce
Can the Kid Who Settled Child-Abuse Claims With Michael Jackson Finally Speak Out?
Fake News You Can Dance To
Reader Comments From The Fray:
These writers represent the last American generation to grow up in a common world; whether big city ethnic neighborhood or Eastern Shore small town, their childhoods were lived in human scale communities which for the most part shared a world of meaning. At the same time, for the most part, they also came of age in the new post-war America in which factors as diverse as the GI Bill, mass media and the growth of suburbia obliterated the social ground of these communities. Caldwell is right that the "alienation" of these authors is much more ambiguous than any simple 50s rebel-conformist dichotomy imagines.
--Mitch
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
I grew up on some (not all) of writers discussed in these essays. In my inexperience, I thought they were the last word in social and cultural criticism. When, some years later, I got around to reading Sinclair Lewis, I suffered the shock of realizing that he had written considerably more trenchant criticism, as well as generally better novels, in the 1920's. (I refer only to his major works, not the many mediocre ones which followed his Nobel Prize.) Many of the same themes are there--the dislocations occasioned by ethnic cultures yielding to national culture, the suspicion and cynicism of economically and culturally marginalized groups confronting bastions of privilege, consensus and conformity pretending to be moral superiority, the alienation of bold and creative individuals. In addition, Lewis conducted focused dissections of distinct social institutions--religion, medicine, business, small towns--in a way which no postwar novelist I can think of did (maybe Updike, in the Rabbit books). Perhaps because of this, Lewis has been less highly regarded, since he tends to be classed as a muckraker, or even worse, a didactic writer. That is not my evaluation. I find him, at his best, at least as skilled an expositor as any other of the frequently bitter relationship of individual and society in America.
--Yukon
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
(6/10)