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in their "speaking honestly of things that had heretofore been
suppressed."
But to establish the historical credit of naturalism is not to
refute the charges that have been brought against it in recent years.
For whatever its past accomplishments, it cannot be denied that
its present condition is one of utter debility. What was once a
means of treating material truthfully has been turned, through a
long process of depreciation, into a mere convention of truthful–
ness, devoid of any significant or even clearly definable literary
purpose or design. The spirit of discovery has withdrawn from
naturalism; it has now become the common denominator of
realism, available in like measure to the producers of literature
and to the producers of kitsch. One might sum up the objections
to it simply by saying that it is no longer possible to use this
method
without taking reality for granted.
This means that it
has lost the power to cope with the ever-growing element of
the problematical in modern life, which is precisely the element
that is magnetizing the imagination of the true artists of our epoch.
Such artists are no longer content merely to question particular
habits or situations or even institutions; it is reality itself which
they bring into question. Reality to them is like that "open
wound" of which Kierkegaard speaks in his
Journals:
"A healthy
open wound; sometimes it is healthier to keep a wound open;
sometimes it is worse when it closes."
There are also certain long-range factors that make for the
decline of naturalism. One such factor is the growth of psycho·
logical science and, particularly, of psychoanalysis. Through the
influence of psychology literature recovers its inwardness, devis·
ing such f otms .as the interior monologue, which combines the
naturalistic in its mmute description of the mental process with
the anti-naturalistic in its disclosure of the subjective and the
irrational. Still another factor is the tendency of naturalism, as
Thomas Mann observes in his remarks on Zola, to turn into the
mythic through sheer immersion in the typical. This dialectical
negation of the typical is apparent in a work like
Ulysses,
where
"the myth of the
Odyssey,"
to quote from Harry Levin's study
of Joyce, "is superimposed upon the map of Dublin" because
